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 Birdsongs  Messiaen in field with birds  |
Birds - Messiaen on birds “It is in a spirit of mistrust of myself, because I belong to this species – I mean the human species – that I have taken bird songs as a model…for despite my profound admiration for the folklore of all countries, I do not believe one can find in any human music, however inspired, melodies and rhythms which have the sovereign liberty of birdsong.” 1 “In my hours of gloom, when I am suddenly aware of my own futility, when every musical idiom – classical, Oriental, ancient, modern, and ultra-modern – appears to me as no more than admirable, painstaking experimentation, without any ultimate justification, what is left for me but to seek out the true, lost face of music somewhere off in the forest, in the fields, in the mountains, or on the seashore, among the birds.” 1 On transcribing birdcall for instruments: “Birds sing in exceedingly fast tempos, which are absolutely impossible for our instruments, and so I have to transcribe the song in a slower tempo. Moreover, this speed is bound up with an extreme sharpness, birds being able to sing in exceedingly high registers that are inaccessible to our instruments, and so I notate them one, two, three, or four octaves lower. And that is not all: for the same reason I have to suppress very small intervals that our instruments cannot execute. I replace these intervals of the order of a comma or two by semitones, but I keep the same scale of values between different intervals, which is to say that if a few commas correspond to a semitone, a true semitone will correspond to a whole tone or a third. Everything is enlarged, but the relationships stay the same, so that my version is still exact. It is the transposition of what I have heard on to a more human scale.” 1 |
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