Roussillon: looking for the blue rock thrush
Cap l'Abeille ©Laurence Rose Last week I passed along the French Mediterranean coast on the latest leg of my writing project The Long Spring. I crossed the border on foot from Portbou in Spain, walking over the Colls dels Belitres, into Roussillon. This is where Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) found the inspiration for two of the masterpieces in his collection of solo piano pieces Catalogue d’Oiseaux.
Messiaen’s introductory notes to Le Merle Bleu (Blue Rock Thrush) and Le Traquet Stapazin (Black-eared Wheatear) describe the landscape on the coast near Banyuls-sur-Mer in vivid detail, along with the birds he heard, and whose voices he transcribed, and the impressions he gained from the colours and sounds of the sea and the cliffs. I decided to devote a day of The Long Spring to finding the very places he describes, and listening out for the birds he found in June 1957.
Messiaen is specific in naming where on the coast he based himself: “Near Banyuls: Cap l’Abeille, Cap Rederis.” I set out on Tuesday morning and walked south from Banyuls. I was looking for a cliff face among the many minor capes and inlets that make up the main headlands he mentions. “In an echoing rock crevice, the blue rock thrush sings....his song blends with the sound of the waves.”
Messiaen’s introductory notes to Le Merle Bleu (Blue Rock Thrush) and Le Traquet Stapazin (Black-eared Wheatear) describe the landscape on the coast near Banyuls-sur-Mer in vivid detail, along with the birds he heard, and whose voices he transcribed, and the impressions he gained from the colours and sounds of the sea and the cliffs. I decided to devote a day of The Long Spring to finding the very places he describes, and listening out for the birds he found in June 1957.
Messiaen is specific in naming where on the coast he based himself: “Near Banyuls: Cap l’Abeille, Cap Rederis.” I set out on Tuesday morning and walked south from Banyuls. I was looking for a cliff face among the many minor capes and inlets that make up the main headlands he mentions. “In an echoing rock crevice, the blue rock thrush sings....his song blends with the sound of the waves.”
Blue Rock Thrush ©Laurence Rose I wasn’t at first even sure there would still be blue rock thrushes there, sixty years on, but I need not have worried about that. They were there, and singing away. Just inland from the cliff edge, in the heathy garrigue vegetation, a Thekla lark sang, just as it did in Messiaen’s day, playing the same accompanying role as it does in the piece. And the herring gulls he noted (today we would call them yellow-legged gulls) were there, too.
I was struck by the way distance, and the angle of the cliffs, and the way the sea masked certain pitches at times, made a big difference in the sounds that reached me. The blue rock thrush song in particular, varied in timbre from rich and bell-like, to thin and dry.
I was struck by the way distance, and the angle of the cliffs, and the way the sea masked certain pitches at times, made a big difference in the sounds that reached me. The blue rock thrush song in particular, varied in timbre from rich and bell-like, to thin and dry.
near Banyuls ©Laurence Rose Having travelled through Spain without seeing one, I suspected that black-eared wheatears were late this year, and I was certainly too early for the swifts that feature in both pieces. But I wanted to explore inland a little, where Messiaen worked among the terraced vines and cork oak woods, notating the wheatear’s song. I found the place he describes easily enough: “vineyards in terraces....the garrigue: a jumble of low, spiny shrubs, gorse, rosemary, cistus, kermes oak....cork-oak....” As well as the birds that had not yet arrived, I missed the spectacled warbler, which Messiaen features in Le Traquet Stapazin. It should have been there, and I wonder if its absence is the main change in the last sixty years, along with evident erosion due to visitor pressure; and the two are probably linked.
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