Birdsong in music
Composers and musicians have made use of birdsong in their music in different ways: they can be inspired by the sounds; they can intentionally imitate birdsong in a composition; they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works, as Ottorino Respighi first did; or, like the cellist Beatrice Harrison in 1924 and more recently the jazz musician David Rothenberg, they can duet with birds.
Authors including Rothenberg have claimed that birds such as the hermit thrush sing on traditional scales as used in human music, but at least one songbird, the nightingale wren, does not choose notes in this way.
[1] Musicologists such as Matthew Head and Suzannah Clark believe that birdsong has had a large though admittedly unquantifiable influence on the development of music.
[13] Less commonly imitated are the great tit (Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony), the goldfinch (Vivaldi), linnet (Couperin, Haydn and Rachmaninov), robin (Peter Warlock), swallow (Dvorak and Tchaikovsky), wagtail (Benjamin Britten), and magpie (in a Mussorgsky song).
[15] He added that only the piano could "imitate the raucous, grinding, percussive calls of the raven... the rattling of the corncrake, the screeches of the water rail, the barking of the herring gull, the dry, imperious sound, like tapping on a stone, of the black-eared wheatear, and the sunny charm of the rock thrush".
[4] The music critic Rebecca Franks, listing six of the best pieces inspired by birdsong, praises Ralph Vaughan Williams's 1914 The Lark Ascending, which begins with "A silvery solo violin line flutters and darts, reaching up ever higher above the orchestra's hushed, held chord.
[17] Hanna Tuulikki's Away with the Birds (2013) is composed of traditional Gaelic songs and poems which imitate birdsong; its five movements represent waders, seabirds, wildfowl, corvids, and the cuckoo.
[20] The zoomusicologist Hollis Taylor has charted the multiple techniques used by composers when appropriating the song of the Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis):[21] In compositional design, pied butcherbird vocalisations have been the source in the parameters of melody, harmony, rhythm, gesture, contour, dynamic envelope, formal structure, phrase length (and the balance of sound and silence), scales, repetition, acoustic image, programmatic intent, and poetic or psychic inspiration.
[23][24] Among jazz musicians who have chosen to use sounds like birdsong are Paul Winter (Flyway) and Jeff Silverbush (Grandma Mickey).
Sanga mentions that a 1982 study by Feld explained that in Kaluli music, birds are perceived as spirits that want to communicate with the living through their singing.
For example, the English band Pink Floyd included bird sound effects in songs from their 1969 albums More and Ummagumma (for example, "Grantchester Meadows").
[33] The group Sweet People reached the UK Top 5 in 1980 with their track "Et Les Oiseaux Chantaient (And the Birds Were Singing)", which fused birdsong with ambient music.
Another track, consisting solely of a collage of different birdsong, was released as the charity single "Let Nature Sing" in 2019 by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and reached number 18 on the UK chart.
[35] Other recent composers for whom recorded birdsong is a major influence include R. Murray Schafer, Michel Gonneville, Rozalie Hirs,[36] and Stephen Preston.
The composer recorded the songs and created the music during the early part of the coronavirus pandemic, all within a square mile of Virginia woodlands.
[41] The philosopher and jazz musician David Rothenberg similarly played an impromptu duet in March 2000 with a laughingthrush at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh.
[42] In the wild, male and female laughingthrushes sing complex duets, so "jamming" with a human clarinet player exploits the bird's natural behaviour.
[50] Adam Tierney and colleagues argued in a 2011 paper that the similar motor constraints on human and avian song drive these to have similar song structures, including "arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases", long notes at the ends of phrases, and typically small differences in pitch between adjacent notes.
[53][54] Laudan Nooshin uses Nettl's account of the nightingale to describe khalāqiat, musical improvisation, which however requires knowledge of radif, the traditional repertory.
