Avian anthems

From Vivaldi to Messiaen, composers have often been inspired by birdsong. But accurately mimicking chirrups and tweets in music is far more difficult than it sounds, finds Tom Stewart

- Tom Stewart

Consider the song of the nightingale. Clangorous, bizarre and almost psychedelic in its complexity, this small brown bird’s voice is truly remarkable but really nothing like the sweet, mellifluous crooning you might imagine if you’d never heard one for yourself. But few people these days have: the UK nightingale population, which now stands at around 5,000 pairs, has declined by half in the past three decades alone. Without a real-life reference point, the cliché of the nightingale’s superlative melodiousness seems destined to persist.

Composer Alexander Liebermann first encountered a nightingale returning home from a night out in Berlin. It would be many years before he began to incorporate birdsong in his music, but the experience stayed with him. I came across Liebermann on Instagram, where he posted a video of a drummer performing a transcription he’d made of a nightingale’s song. Untuned percussion might seem a strange choice but, Liebermann explains, it allowed him to capture the essence of this strange-sounding creature. ‘I showed it to my pre-college students at Juilliard without telling them what the piece was about and they weren’t too impressed,’ he says. ‘That all changed after I played the recording of the bird. They were amazed – suddenly they thought the drummer was the best performer they’d ever heard!’

From Vivaldi’s ‘Goldfinch’ Flute Concerto to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, there is no shortage of music that alludes to birdsong.

The fact is, however, that most birds sing in ways that sound very abstract in the context of western classical music. But the 20th century brought a blurring of sound and music that liberated composers to take a more literal approach.