The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, more than any other species:  Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.  Undoubtedly its familiarity and bright colouration are part of the reason, but it is also one of the most loved songsters in North America.  Both sexes sing clear, whistled song patterns, which are repeated several times, then varied.

According to Olivier Messiaen who has featured many times on these pages, it was his teacher Paul Dukas who told him, “Listen to the birds; they are great masters.”  He took the advice, and turned it into a life-long obsession, becoming an expert on bird song in the process.  Most of Messiaen's style oiseau music is the product of careful notation of the birdsong he encountered in the field.

However, Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56) cites no fewer than 40 different birdsongs from far-flung lands, all transcribed from recordings.  The work, in a single continuous movement, may be regarded as a sort of avian fantasy, but is really a sound fantasy—an exploration of timbres and rhythms where birdsong meets ancient Karnatic and Greek rhythms. The northern cardinal has a prominent role almost from the start.

Robert Fallon is a musicologist based at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.  He has made a study of Messiaen's transcriptions of birdsong and compared them with spectograms of the real thing.

In this superb performance of the first part of Oiseaux Exotiques, with Messiaen's one-time student Pierre Boulez conducting, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the piano, the first two fragments above are about 3 minutes in, and the third about twenty seconds later.

Finally, a chance to hear the bird for yourself:

I am grateful to Robert Fallon for permission to use the spectogram comparison diagram.  Rob's website contains a lot of interesting information and further examinations of other species.  Another comprehensive site for fans of Messiaen is run by Malcolm Ball at www.oliviermessiaen.org

The Blue Rock Thrush of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux inhabits crevices of the cliffs overhanging the Mediterranean near Banyuls in the Roussillon. Messiaen paints a vivid picture of waves crashing below and swifts screaming above before the blue rock thrush is heard.  Its song is vaguely pentatonic but with a riot of ornamentation and flourish, leading pianist and Messiaen scholar Peter Hill to describe it as “a Balinese gamelan gone mad.” Later, a fast and brilliant section introduces the song of the Thekla lark.  Serene, beautiful chords link the main "bird" sections.  Despite the uncompromising complexity and dissonance in much of his music, these moments of calm are nonetheless classic Messiaen.

Messiaen’s introduction speaks of the bird’s song blending with the sound of the waves.  The pedal marking creates some extraordinary resonances with the accompanying bass chords. Throughout the piece these bass sonorities represent the echo given off by rock faces overlooking the blue sea.   

The blue rock thrush is a bird that can appear anything from powder blue to black depending on the light, and Messiaen undoubtedly saw in this the many moods of the sea, including terrifying waves and rough cliffs. The many depictions of birdsong are often quite sharply set against four “mood” sections which are announced in the score in characteristically vivid ways: ‘the resonance of rock faces', 'luminous, iridescent, blue halo' and so on. These exquisitely harmonious episodes, according to the composer, complement the satin texture and purple-blue, slate and blue-black shades of the blue rock thrush's plumage.  In this most joyous and visual of the Catalogue pieces, Messiaen connects birdsong, landscape and his own sensory perception in a complex but eminently shareable real-world experience.

"Drumming" is the peculiar sound that snipe make when they display in diving flights across their marshland territories.  Hearing my first drumming snipe, when I was about thirteen, is one of the clearest of the many abiding memories of my early days as a birdwatcher.  So much so, that when I was asked to speak at Earth Music, a series of concerts broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in 2011, I chose to read from a collection of essays, one of which featured this formative experience.  Below is an extract, but first, hear for yourself what this drumming sounds like.

Sky (extracts)

“The air was very pure and the sky was a faded blue with shining white clouds arranged like flights of angels. Towards evening, when the sun began to set the clear turquoise of the sky was beyond all imagined beauty.”  Diary of Dr. Katherine Heanley, Sept. 27th 1914, Manea

In my father’s land the only landmark is the sky.  If there were but one sign to pilot by, it would be a small shape, a ship-shaped silhouette, cut from an edge of sky where it meets the horizon.  This Ship of the Fens, or The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Ely, has been the south pole of a hemisphere of cloud, water and soot-black soil these past fifty generations.

Here it is the sky that governs the mood of the ground beneath, and calibrates your sense of scale.  You might stand under a bright cumulus-laden sky, and it feels as though you are watching yourself from a great distance, standing at the horizon, The Ship of the Fens at your shoulder.  Under a slate sky, in a spotlight, ringed by the flat horizon, you are at the anonymous centre of all things.

Into this sky I watched a strange bird rise, only to plummet back into the field with a sound like a balsa-wood plane. 

Out of this sky, into this same field, a German plane fell one day.  It was May 1941.  My father heard about it as he was riding home from school, and by the time he’d pedalled to Welney anything removable had been taken by the local boys.  Almost thirty years later, all traces were long gone; but across a dull, smeared sky this strange balsa-bird arc’d over us both.  We had gone into the field to find lapwing nests; not, as my father would have done at my age, to harvest eggs, but just to look.

Neither my father nor I knew straight away what this bird was.  I had never seen such a disproportionate beak before, and the sound it made was the strangest I had encountered in all nature.  The Observer’s Book suggested woodcock, or maybe snipe, but S. Vere Benson’s descriptions of the calls seemed to rule them both out.  In the evening, in my room at The Crown at Outwell, I leafed diligently through the little book.  The various sandpipers and shanks didn’t look quite right, and no sound ascribed to them came close to that flat airborne bleat. I checked the snipe again, more thoroughly. This bleating, it turned out, was no cry from within, but a play of wind on tail-feather, a reed-instrument that rose from the reeds to deliver its vibrations across far meadows and wide open sky.


                                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a winter visit, the quiet would drop like a mallard as the sky itself fell drear, the better to reveal lonely lights in distant houses I barely noticed before.  Wigeon, siffling and back-biting only minutes earlier would repose themselves; flights of lapwing chose their spot and settled.  In the osiers below the bank blackbirds clucked and then didn’t.  For a while, a brief fermata, nothing stirred.  Then the nocturne, a delicate chorus of small sounds would start to sound from across vast acres.  First might be a gentle, nasal skirl from the midst of a small flock of lapwing.  From afar, a drake wigeon might siffle or his mate yap. A distant dog, or door-jamb, or other commonplace unnoticed in the light of day, would lend its voice and shorten the span of any silence.

In spring, walking back to Manea under a brighter darkness I would hear none of the wigeon of winter; the lapwings’ squealings would as often as not come from above, in a night-flight illuminated by faint pearl-shimmer on damp grass.  And higher still, and farther off, a dive-bombing snipe on a night raid would leave its tail-flaps open, and bleat like a child playing front-gunner, to land unseen while its feather-cry hangs in the clean air.  

My version of the carol would have to depart from that of 1780 as early as day two, St. Stephen’s Day.  Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr was said to have been betrayed by a loudly singing wren while hiding from his enemies.  Boxing Day was for centuries commemorated by Hunting the Wren, when boys set off to catch the bird and parade it around town, as described in the traditional "Wren Song". The Wren, the Wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's day was caught in the furze. Although he is little, his family's great, I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat. This almost certainly springs from a pre-Christian tradition, when wren feathers were given out before a voyage, to ward off disaster at sea.  In the Isle of Man Hunting the Wren persisted in some form into the 1930s, while in parts of France it continues today.

But perhaps the turtle dove should remain in the song for, whatever it may have symbolised in the past, it is now a symbol of something unattainable.  These days you’re hardly more likely to see this once common bird during the months it should be with us – April to August – than at Christmas.

It has been argued that the five gold rings once referred to pheasants, who bear a ring of white, not gold, feathers round their necks.  But the oldest known published version of 1780 illustrates the lyric with five rings and no pheasants.  The new BBC list goes for goldfinches at this point, and why not? From then on Radio 4 favours ornithological interest over any regard for a composer trying to set the lyrics: 

Six white-fronted geese a-laying
Seven mute swans a-swimming
Eight nightjars a-milking....

Come again?  Of course!  The old superstition that the night-flying, wide-gaped nightjar stole our goats’ milk from the very udder.  Clever.

Nine Andean cock-of-the-rock a-dancing
Ten manakin a-leaping
Eleven sandpipers piping....

Which just leaves my favourite – and I’ll explain why in a special Twelfth Night Re:Tweet – Twelve snipe a-drumming.

Two weeks ago Chris Packham presented the Indian cuckoo on Tweet of the Day.  To hear the programme again, click the button below.  Last week Somerset-based Alan Balmer sent NATURAL LIGHT a new piece of music composed, and performed, in response to Chris Packham's cuckoo Tweet.  Alan says:

"I was so impressed by the ‘riff’ like phrase of the common Indian cuckoo's song on Tweet of The Day, I was inspired to compose this short piece based on the song. Starting with the the bird’s ‘riff’, I layered up other sounds including violin, thumping of the arm of a sofa, mouth sounds and bass and acoustic guitars. I was also impressed by the bird’s perfect pitch - none of the instruments needed re-tuning from concert pitch. I thought the bird’s phrase quite cheery and uplifting and hope I have reflected this in the music."

And to hear Alan's musical Re:Tweet click on the SoundCloud link below

In 1894 the Australian Musical Album published "The Bell Bird, composed by Reene Lees who is not yet eleven years old". It is a piano exercise, and suggests she was doing well in her piano studies as well as showing promise as a future composer.

The National Library of Australia holds two other compositions by Reene Lees, but I have been unable to find any further reference to her, or to her music.

Andrew Dawes produces of Radio 4's Tweet of the Day - World Birds, the ninety seconds of pure pleasure that many of us wake up to each morning.  It is also the source material for NATURAL LIGHT's Re:Tweet of the Day, exploring the connections between birdsong and the artists it inspires.

Andrew is also a Trustee of the Richard Jefferies Museum Trust.