Messiaen’s Exotic Birds and Ours

Grove Koger

Maggie and I recently spent two weeks in a rented house on Florida’s St. George Island, enjoying the luxury of doing nothing that we didn’t care to do.

Among St. George’s many attractions are its animals, particularly its birds. To some of you, the birds we enjoyed so much are common sights, species that you probably take for granted. But to us Idahoans, the cardinals and mockingbirds and red-bellied woodpeckers and white-breasted nuthatches that serenaded us every morning as we drank our coffee were a revelation—an exotic serenade that, despite its frequently cacophonous quality, was an invigorating and inspiring start to the day. (There were also the occasional cries and croaks of birds we were familiar with—crows and gulls and ospreys and great blue herons—as well as the enthusiastic guttural rasps of tree frogs when the weather was rainy.)

Again and again as I listened, I was reminded of the music of avant-garde French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), who was fascinated by birdsong. He notated and transcribed the songs of individual species as he traveled, and he ultimately incorporated such transcriptions into his compositions, including several cycles for piano—Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-56), La fauvette des jardins (1970), and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (1985). Among his orchestral works, the relatively short Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds, 1953-56) in particular stands out for its exciting use of avian cries and calls and whistles and chatter.

The work is scored for solo piano, piccolo, flute, oboe, E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, glockenspiel, 3 gongs (high, medium, and low), snare drum, tam-tam (very low), temple blocks, woodblock, and xylophone. So prominent is the piano that Messiaen characterized Oiseaux exotiques as “almost a piano concerto.” The 18 species depicted—if that’s the right word—are indigenous to the Americas, China, India, and Malaysia., and include the Indian minah bird (heard first), the prairie chicken, the bobolink, and the catbird.  

Messiaen also made use of rhythms from Greek and Hindu music, but such details are for experts. I’ll simply say that it’s a work that, to my ear at least, seems to lack the kind of development that I’m used to hearing in music. But the conclusion, which is made up of a series of harsh, repeated chords, is clearly a conclusion, and an exciting one.

You can listen to Messiaen’s one-time pupil Pierre Boulez, who also commissioned the piece, discuss and then conduct it here. But Boulez was an intensely cerebral interpreter, and I think that the performance he elicits is a little cold. More enjoyable is the version by the Ensemble Oktopus, which you can listen to here.  

Messiaen once remarked that “among the artistic hierarchy, the birds are probably the greatest musicians to inhabit the planet.” So I urge you to sit back, clear your mind of whatever preconceptions you have about the way music ought to sound, and listen to the masters!

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The Pearl of the Adriatic

Grove Koger

My initial experience of Dubrovnik came in 1972, when my first wife and I were heading down the Adriatic coast of what was then Yugoslavia on our way to the Greek island of Corfu. Approached from the sea during the afternoon, the city can be a stunning sight, its pale ochre walls and red tile roofs glowing in the sun. But to be perfectly honest, I’m pretty sure that our ferry put into the deepwater harbor at Gruž near the northern, less picturesque side of the city. In any case, we stayed several days with a family whose house lay outside the city proper, enjoying home-cooked Croatian food and giving our amicable hosts a bottle of cherry liqueur when we departed.

Since then I’ve been lucky enough to revisit the city with Maggie twice, staying for several blissful days in 2005 in an apartment in a renovated house dating from 1780, the Family House Fascination. Among other attractions, the building offered several arbors and terraces as well as the only real garden left within the city walls. We sat outside with our glasses of pivo (beer) every evening, and as the sky faded to violet, the city’s swallows gradually gave way to its equally large population of bats.

Ten years later, in 2015, we revisited the city to research an article on Croatian art for Art Patron Magazine. During that period, the Pearl of the Adriatic, as it’s long been known, had grown into a tourist mecca, choked during the day with tens of thousands of foreigners like ourselves. But recently the New York Times reported that the current pandemic and the resulting drop in tourism have turned the city into a “quiet, almost unrecognizable” place. We’ll be watching to see how it recovers.

Dubrovnik is said to have been founded in the seventh century by Greek refugees, but evidence suggests that there had been a settlement there long before. It passed through a period of Byzantine dominance, emerged as the Republic of Ragusa, fell under the control of Venice, then of Hungary, and so on—and on. Its complicated history defies easy summary, but suffice it to say that, over many centuries, it grew into a major seafaring state.

Besides offering a myriad architectural wonders, Dubrovnik has several good (but rocky) beaches. A few minutes away lies the attractive islet of Lokrum, where Maggie and I enjoyed an alfresco lunch under the watchful eyes of hungry peacocks and swam off the island’s rocky shoreline.

The image at the top of today’s post shows Dubrovnik from the sea; the second, an arbor at the Family House Fascination. Below it you see the old port as we departed for Lokrum, followed by a shot of the islet’s rocky coast. At the bottom you see one of Lokrum’s more colorful residents.