Le Courlis cendré from Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-58)

“Among the artistic hierarchy,” Messiaen once said, “the birds are probably the greatest musicians to inhabit our planet.” He had long been fascinated by birdsong and had actually started transcribing it in the field when he was 14 or 15. He first used birdsong in his own music in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps in 1941 and it was an ever more prominent feature of his scores throughout the 1940s - in the Visions de l’Amen, the Vingt Regards, the Turangalîla Symphony - until in the 1950s it became the principal if not the only source of material for such works as Le merle noir, Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques and, the culmination of this phase of his creativity the Catalogue des oiseaux, which was completed in 1958. Messiaen’s longest piano work, published in seven volumes and lasting not far short of three hours in performance, the Catalogue des oiseaux is an extraordinary and quite unparalleled achievement. Although it features only thirteen birds as what the composer calls “soloists,” it alludes to the song of others to be heard in the same place at the same time and includes in all as many as 77 varieties of birdsong associated with different parts of France in different seasons. Every bird is set in its natural habitat among sounds arising from its surroundings.

Of course, most birdsong cannot be literally transcribed into instrumental terms. It is too fast and too high and has no respect for the tempered scale. So in converting it to his own use Messiaen had to reduce its speed, transpose it downwards and rationalise its microtonal intervals - with the result that, as he frankly acknowledged, even the most expert of ornithologists are often unable to identify the bird in question. But recognition is not the point. Messiaen’s birds supplied him with new melodic material, new harmonies, new colours, new rhythms and new atmospheric inspiration. Le Courlis cendré, the last of the thirteen “soloists” represented in the Catalogue d’oiseaux, is a highly atmospheric piece reflecting what the composer described as “all the desolation of the landscape” of the most westerly part of France, Pern Point on the island of Ushant in Brittany. The fact that the bubbling song of the curlew and the upward glissando of its call cannot be adequately represented on the piano is of no importance. The opening section - which begins with an approximation of the curlew’s tremolandos and trills and ends with seventeen repetitions of its “tragic” call rising on a glissando over a major seventh - is piano music like no other.

No more is heard of the curlew until near the end of the piece. The longest intervening episode is the one that follows. Briefly introduced and punctuated at irregular intervals by brusque undulating and whipping figurations representing the sound of the waves, it echoes no fewer than nine other birds of the seashore - terns, three kinds of gulls, four kinds of waders, guillemots. The most distinctive of them, because of its shrill whistling at the very top of the keyboard, is the redshank, which is first heard just before the first recall of the waves and which reappears three times. The central episode, described simply as “the water,” is a vigorous toccata on a twelve-note theme which, as “the night and the fog come in little by little,” is transformed into a sustained and gradually quieter, pedal-confused succession of dissonances in even quaver rhythms. As the dynamic level sinks on a rallentando to pppp, there is a massive ffff eleven-note chord followed by a low thud in the left hand - the booming foghorn of the Créach’h lighthouse. Before the curlew is recalled, the foghorn sounds twice more through the song of some of the birds heard earlier. The curlew returns with seventeen more repetitions of its major-seventh upward glissando and the last sound to be heard, after a pause, is the dull rumble of the surf.