I was once oblivious to the beauty of birdsong – now I'm hooked

Telegraph

27-04-2025

If you want to be a composer, you should spend a bit less time in gigs and concert halls and more time in the woods learning from birds, since they are the greatest musicians. This advice, from French composer Paul Dukas, to his students at the Paris Conservatoire in the late 1920s, has passed into musical legend because of one student in particular – Olivier Messiaen. There's no evidence of a whole generation of French composers citing Parisian forests and parks as forcing houses for their work, but young Olivier certainly did.
Dukas' advice was credited by Messiaen as part of his own creative genesis, but in truth, his obsession with birds was always there. As a young child staying at his aunts' farm in the Aube, Olivier would go out with a notebook and try to capture the songs of birds nesting in the trees and fields around his house. His lifelong attempt to 'capture' their songs resulted in a vast body of published music based on birdsong, and a unique archive of more than 200 handwritten notebooks titled Cahiers de notation des chants d'oiseaux. The latter are the most remarkable artists' notebooks I've ever seen, but before I get into that, a confession is in order.
I've spent most of my life oblivious to birdsong. In so far as I listened to birdsong at all, I liked it. But it was just one component in the backing track to whatever was happening in the human world. The drama of human voices, our passion and compassion, a sense that being alive in the world meant being attentive to people, reduced birdsong to a generic soundscape at best, certainly not a choir of individual birds with distinctive voices.
As a poet, I was aware of its profound influence on poets like John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Hopkins, Keats. The English poetic tradition is impossible to imagine without the presence of birds and their songs. Its impact on musicians is even clearer, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to the Beatles (Blackbird, Across the Universe) and Kate Bush on her Aerial album. The composer Béla Bartók took notebooks into the field to inform his use of birdsong in his Piano Concerto no 3. The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, in his Cantus Arcticus, employed birds not just as teachers but performers, interweaving tape recordings of Arctic birds with the orchestra.
But the spark for me to listen, properly listen, to birds came in the last year, as I've been digging deeper in the work of birdsong-obsessed composer Olivier Messiaen. I've always loved his music, since I picked up a copy of his Quatuor pour la fin du temps by chance in a record shop as a student, knowing next to nothing about classical music at the time (much more into indie bands on the 4AD label, but that's another story) but the title had me at first sight. I mean, why would I not want to listen to a piece called Quartet for the End of Time? That piece has been in my life ever since, turning and deepening with the decades as only a great work of art can do.
The Quartet comes complete with its own genesis story. It was written in a German labour camp where Messiaen was imprisoned in 1940, premiered in a washroom barrack with the composer on piano and three fellow prisoner-musicians on violin, cello and clarinet, to an audience of prisoners-of-war from across Europe. This famous story has elements of myth to it, notably about the battered and makeshift quality of the instruments, but there's no doubt about the presence of birds in Quartet. This was the first time Messiaen directly incorporated transcribed birdsong into a composition, in this case a blackbird and a nightingale. From my first listen on the record deck in my student room, those avian voices were clear and strange and utterly entrancing.
From this early composition, Messiaen went on to become one of the 20th Century's most influential composers, a mystic modernist innovator with a particular – and peculiar – obsession with birdsong. He went on to place the birds centre stage in pieces like Catalogue d'oiseaux, written for his wife the pianist Yvonne Loriod, conjuring from the keyboard 13 birdscapes evoking different French locations. Later, as his fame grew and his music was performed across the world, Olivier and Yvonne would schedule their travels to allow time in forests or mountains or deserts to track down new birdsongs. This included a trek in New Caledonia to fulfil the composer's wish to include the song of a gerygone (a kind of warbler) in his opera on the life of St Francis of Assisi.
Of all the composers who drew on birdsong in their work, it's fair to say Messiaen stands out for his lifelong fascination with it, the efforts he made to incorporate and explore it in his music, and his diligence in making personal pilgrimages to capture birds' songs in the wild, however hard to reach. Last October, working on a book about my lifelong love of his Quatuor pour la fin du temps, I made a pilgrimage to the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to look at the famous cahiers.
These notebooks are a record of Messiaen's encounters with birdsong in situ. They are plain school-style exercise books with printed staves, but Messiaen set out to record far more than just the notes being sung. To understand these notebooks, it helps to know that Messiaen didn't just listen to birdsong. He saw it too. His synaesthesia meant that he saw sounds as colours. This makes some of his notes on his own music both enticing and (to this listener) baffling, as he talks about chords as 'yellow topaz, red stained with blue, mauve, amethyst…' In the cahiers, he captures not just the songs, but an entire sensory experience. He'll note down time of day, colour of rocks or leaves, quality of light, character of the weather.
As for capturing the song itself, this was a challenge, even for him. Birdsong is often rapid, complex, riffing across shifting microtones. Not only is it difficult to write down as a score, it would be close to unplayable if you did. Even if you could produce an accurate birdsong score, no human player could play it at full speed. He records the notes as accurately as possible, but his cahiers – with their beautiful mark-making in fine pencil – are a record of an encounter, with this particular bird performing this particular music at this particular time and place. In fact, I've come to see them as a record of epiphanies.
In poetry, the notion of an 'epiphany' denotes a moment of realisation or opening out, as in Edward Thomas' famous brief stop at Adlestrop's railway halt beginning with a blackbird's voice then 'Farther and farther, all the birds / of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' But Messiaen's bird epiphanies were not secular 'openings'. A lifelong Catholic ('Je suis né croyant', he said, 'I was born believing') he was both devout and radical in his personal theology, in which birdsong played a key role. Birds, he believed, were somehow spared the Fall, which left the rest of creation wounded and broken.
Only in birdsong can you hear the sound of that lost prelapsarian world. When you hear a bird sing in the tree on your street, you are listening to the music of the Garden of Eden, the sound of paradise. When I listen to his music, I can almost believe it. And for the last couple of years, under his influence, my life as a birdsong refusenik has changed. Birdsong has grown into bird songs, individual voices I can pick out and identify, calling me to stop and pay attention.