Olivier Messiaen brought a whole host of diverse talents, from theology to code breaking, to his composition. Perhaps the strangest of these inclusions was his love ornithology, the study of birds. Messiaen treated them as nature’s composers and he set himself the task of translating their music into ours. Long before “field recordings” and nature playlists Messiaen was up at dawn with notebook and pencil, listening as carefully as a scientist to the tones and melodies of different birds. What makes his studies so unique is that they appear not as decorative sound effects, but as the substance of the piece; the themes, the rhythms, the very logic of the music.

Birds don’t sing in tidy, symmetrical phrases; they burst, pause, repeat, accelerate, change direction. Messiaen didn’t smooth that into “polite” musical sentences. He wrote down what he heard and then built a classical language that could contain it. The resulting pieces are startlingly alive albeit challenging to an ear trained by conventional composition.

One of the cleanest early examples is Le Merle noir (“The Blackbird”), a compact piece for flute and piano. The flute becomes a proxy for the bird: agile, bright, suddenly flickering and swooping. It’s not programmatic music in the classical sense, there’s no pastoral haze, nor a generalized “natural” background. It’s a focused portrait, a musical study, like watching a creature at the edge of a garden as closely as you can and drawing it true-to-life.

Messiaen also expanded this idea outward until it became an ecosystem. Réveil des oiseaux (“Awakening of the Birds”) is essentially a dawn chorus stretched across a large canvas: piano and orchestra tracing the arc of a morning in the forest as different species take turns singing, overlapping, answering, interrupting. The piano chatters and flashes, winds and percussion scatter light and color through the air. If one listens with the expectation of a conventional melody that develops and returns, they will be delightfully disappointed. Messaien wrote these pieces to be approached as one approaches nature: allowing your ear to hop from one call to another. Do this and the pieces suddenly make perfect sense.

Then there’s the great deep-dive: Catalogue d’oiseaux (“Catalogue of Birds”), thirteen substantial piano pieces that are less like short sketches and more like extended walks through specific places at specific times of day. Each piece centers on a particular bird, but the surrounding world is always present: terrain, light, distance and atmosphere make these essays significantly closer to a true pastorale. The piano is used to breathtaking effect throughout, crystalline treble patterns for small, quick songbirds, heavy, resonant bass for shadow and ground, great chordal masses that feel like weather moving across a landscape.

Perhaps the most important way that Messiaen’s identity as an ornithologist impacted his composition was his discipline of attention. It trained him to hear detail without forcing it into a human schema. In his hands, birdsong wasn’t an ornament or even truly “bird” song, it was the spontaneous music of nature played on God’s living instruments. Once you’ve heard Messiaen’s birds, it becomes difficult to go outside, hear a blackbird or a thrush, and not think: “this is music, happening right now, free of charge, startlingly sophisticated and gloriously evocative for those who treat it seriously.”

-Matthew Young

Messiaen and his menagerie of birds are often featured on TheClassicalStation.org! Please take a look at our Winter 2025 Highlights to see when to tune in, or request a piece directly via one of our Request Programs!