Insert pretentious title *here*

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by TomMckinney on December 6, 2010 · 3 comments

in Birding Western Palearctic

Today’s post is called Le chant du rossignol. That’s French. It means “the song of the nightingale”. I could have spared the French title and just called today’s post the song of the nightingale, but putting a French title is very pretentious, especially if you don’t speak a word of French. I don’t speak a word of French, therefore it’s an incredibly pretentious title, which is suitable for the following incredibly pretentious blog post. Before we go any further, have a listen to this:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsOOQB0uA5Q

It’s Janine Jansen playing The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It’s nice, isn’t it. Lovely stuff. Written in 1914, it’s based on a poem by George Meredith of the same title, and it’s supposed to evoke the song, behaviour and environment of the Skylark. I hope you feel suitably cleansed after hearing it. Here’s some more YouTube videos about birds and music:

Stravinsky

In 1969 there was a music festival called Altamont Speedway Free Festival, it was supposed to be another Woodstock. Things didn’t go entirely to plan: Hell’s Angels overran the site and smashed it up, killed someone and stole everything that wasn’t tied down. The era of free love was over, and all the filthy layabout draft dodgers suddenly came down from the late 60s acid trip, and found themselves in a field full of blood and broken hippy bones. The moronic Hell’s Angels thought that smashing up a music event was an incredibly original and risque thing to do, but sadly they were fifty-six years too late, because in 1913 Igor Stravinsky, one of the greatest people to ever put ink to manuscript paper, composed a piece of music called the Rite of Spring. At its premiere the audience were so shocked by what they heard that they smashed the whole theatre up. Seriously, they all just lost their heads and destroyed the place. Music was never the same again: that single thirty minute piece of music totally altered the course of Western music and has directed music’s development right up to the present day. So you can blame Stravinsky for Justin Bieber. After the Rite of Spring Stravinsky decided that he couldn’t equal the controversy, so he invented neo-classicism and revolutionised music yet again. He was really good at revolutionising music. Just before his neo-classical works he wrote Le chant du rossignol (so now you get the title). It was originally conceived as a ballet, the plot being a bit too convoluted to explain here, but basically there are two Nightingales singing: a real bird and a mechanical toy, and the two contrasting songs are reflected in the two contrasting musical styles which ‘compete’ for attention. I’m sure that makes no sense whatsoever. This is an extract from Leonard Bernstein’s live recording:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7GWKLIsqGM

Messiaen

It’s impossible to talk about birds in music without devoting a significant amount of time to Olivier Messiaen. This is a good thing. Messiaen took Stravinsky’s music, put it in the blender with Debussy, added a massive spoonful of Roman Catholic mysticism, a side of order of Asian rhythms and sat it all on a deep fried bed of birdsong. Messiaen rocked, and I will happily murder anyone who dares to disagree with me (unless you’re a lot bigger than me, in which case say what you like). Messiaen’s sensory perceptions were so finely tuned that he actually heard sounds in colour, it’s called neuro-colour-synaesthesia, and that’s the biggest word you’ll ever read on this blog. I told you he rocked. Having such good ears, he was able to go into the field and write out birdsong as he heard it, all notated on conventional manuscript paper, though at times what he transcribed was extraordinarily complex. His belief in the reason that birds sang was all tied in with his religion, so the song of birds was total music in its purist form, it was the music of Heaven, and that’s the most pretentious thing you’ll ever read on this blog. These next two videos are of Messiaen himself in action, and yes, he is completely nuts. Or perhaps he’s just French? Is there any difference? We’ll never know now because he’s dead.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdgUJss9BU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkKrD9knBvU

In the late 1950s Messiaen devoted a huge amount of time to writing his monster piano work Catalogue de Oiseaux. A oiseau (pron: wazzo) is a bird, and a catalogue is a catalogue, therefore it’s translated Catalogue of Birds. Learning French is so easy. The piece goes on for about seven-hundred hours, or at least it seems like that. It’s best to listen to little bits at a time. This is Messiaen at his most birdy. Have a listen to the Black-eared Wheatear:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE4vSviuoSw

And this is a real Black-eared Wheatear. Sounds exactly the same! Maybe.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/sounds/uploaded/PNYKOPBQBQ/OHIS10h00m54s18jun2010%20%282%29.mp3

John Zorn

Some musicians are experimental, some musicians are mental: nobody has ever quite worked out which applies to John Zorn. He is the bad boy of jazz, so naughty and mischievous that he once dared to collaborate with everyone’s favourite grindcore anti-establishent Satanic death metal band, the lovable cuddly Napalm Death. Yes Napalm Death, the band that brought you Hit Parade classics such as the mesmerisingly tasteless Kick The Pregnant. Earlier this year he toured with Lou Reed performing Metal Machine Music. Zorn has calmed down a lot in recent years, and last year he wrote O’o, a whole album devoted to birds. It’s really nice actually, and I still can’t quite believe this is the same John Zorn. Here’s his take on the Little Bittern:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOaaolGBpg8

Iron Maiden

Oh yeah, so you honestly thought that I was going to write a whole post about music and embed loads of YouTube videos without mentioning Maiden? I don’t think so! In 1984 Iron Maiden wrote their fifth album Powerslave. Knowing that this would one day be my absolute favourite Maiden album, Steve Harris decided to write a bird-inspired song about an albatross especially for me. How kind of him. Be warned, if you’ve never heard the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, prepare to shit yourself inside-out with excitement. And I mean it. The song is based on Samuel Taylor-Coleridge’s poem about the fuckwit captain of a ship who decides to kill an albatross, ignoring the pleas from his crew. In short, everything goes arse end up, and they are cursed by one enormous twat of a shit-storm – I like to think of it as a metaphor for what will actually happen if we kill off all of our albatrosses with longline fishing. This video is from the Live After Death tour in 1985, and please, whatever you do, do not try and wear spandex like this at home, remember that these are professional spandex wearers, and I’ll not be held responsible for any testicular injuries associated with wearing spandex this tight. Jump to 2:40 and just brace yourselves. Wow. MAIDEN ROOL!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-W-cWcJuxk

 


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Tagged as: Black-eared Wheatear, composition, Little Bittern, maiden, messiaen, music, Nightingale, Skylark, stravinsky, tom mckinney, vaughan williams, zorn

Article by Tom Mckinney

Tom McKinney has been birding for over 20 years and has birded on every continent, other than the continents he's not yet been to. He is famed for having found Britain's first Gray's Grasshopper Warbler and then waking up and realising it had all been a beautiful, beautiful dream. When not birding he enjoys going to Ladbrokes and writing short biographical entries about himself in a 3rd person voice.

Tom has written 49 awesome articles for us.

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