For the Birds

Over the years I have become increasingly aware of the beauty and allusive qualities of Australian bird song. We hear and read about European birds and their song or call; the European magpie (Pica pica) is not at all related to the Australian one (Gymnorhina tibicen) although it inspired at least one musical composition, Rossini’s Thieving Magpie Overture (1813). Yet the Aussie magpie, I am sure, has a much larger repertoire. It is also a much bigger bird, a walker rather than a hopper, with quite a long life-span averaging about eleven years.

We hear of the lark, celebrated in Haydn’s Lark Quartet, and most famously in Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending. I was horrified to hear of a keen BBC listener some time back threatening to boycott BBC broadcasts if he was ever forced to listen to this piece again. I couldn’t help wondering how many riveting pieces of music this particular listener had composed, and whether he wanted no one ever to hear this piece, even for the first time.

The nightingale often gets a mention in music, but the Aussie nightingale, the willy-wagtail, as far as I know, only gets a mention in a poem by Judith Wright: “Sweet pretty little creature.” It came by the name “nightingale” because this is what it is heard to utter during nights of the full moon.

Ottorino Respighi wrote his charming Gli Uccelli (The Birds) in 1927, harking back to compositions by the likes of Rameau and Pasquini a couple of centuries earlier, such as “La Poule” (La Gallina) and “II Cucu”.

Not only does so-called classical music celebrate birds and their song. In popular music, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, “Lullaby of Birdland” and the stirring Beatles song “Blackbird” are just some among many others. There are also folk songs in many languages which pay tribute to birds. In “Auprès de ma Blonde” there is the line: “la caille, la tourterelle, et la jolie perdrix, et ma jolie colombe qui chante jour et nuit”. Then there’s the lovely children’s song in German, “Alle Vögel sind schon da—, Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star—”. And let’s not forget “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, beloved of Australian children. I recall a song about the cuckoo, and it has had a popular history in classical music. Delius wrote On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring in 1912, but it is not quite as evocative as Respighi’s “Cucu”.

The composer who was truly enchanted by bird song from all around the world, and later in his life, in the 1980s, blown sideways by Australian bird song, was Olivier Messiaen. He went to the trouble of recording bird song and, over thirty years, composed Reveil des Oiseaux, Oiseaux Exotiques, Catalogue d’Oiseaux, Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux (1985) and Un Vitrail et des Oiseaux (1986). These works were expressions of this deeply religious man’s profound gratitude for the beauty of creation.

Butcher-birds (family Cracticinae) first attracted my attention about twenty years ago. The first song that got my amused response seemed to allude to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, in fact the first line: “Wild again, beguiled again …” I went outside and loudly sang and whistled the rest of the song. I soon came to see that this may have been a mistake. I was alienating a particular bird which came to hang around me, watching me inside the house, and even coming inside at least twice. At that time I thought it was a kind of magpie. My husband maintained it was a butcher-bird and pulled out our trusty old Readers’ Digest Book of Birds to show me. By the time he had turned to the right page, the actual bird flew quietly inside, perched on the corner of his desk and turned this way and that to show us what he looked like, then quietly flew out the open door again. We were slack-jawed with amazement.

His repertoire seems boundless, and I miss his music when he is not around. He goes to snatches of “The Overlander”, the Romance from Spartacus (Khachaturian), Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, the “Colonel Bogey March”, among others. But I still call him (or her) Wild Again.

Even magpies delight me with allusions to various pieces of music. Their delivery is much more relaxed and jazzier than that of the butcher-bird. They go to “Sally, Sally”, “Among the Leaves All Green-oh”, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, “I Get Ideas”, and even snatches of Beethoven’s Fifth. I am sure Beethoven could not have been averse to listening to birds while he was still able to hear them. The magpie, too, seems to have very keen hearing. I may talk to him, quietly, from inside the closed house while he struts his stuff out on the lawn up to twenty metres away, and he cocks his head curiously. He is usually walking studiously along, turning his head this way and that towards the ground, listening for any action in the soil that might promise him a feed, but he will listen to me talk to him.

My husband recalls his sheer delight when, while waiting for a train at Gloucester railway station, he heard the most beautiful vocal exchange between butcher-birds and magpies. Perhaps they were merely trying to establish if their fellow bird was “one of us”.

The lyre-bird seems to suggest music through his name, but it is his appearance, not the sounds he makes, that has given him that name. I am sure, given his skills in mimicry, he could give us a tune, but I remember him mainly for one crazy instance of imitating the sounds of an old-fashioned typewriter, complete with the ka-ching at the end of a line. My husband, who is still caught up in this antique technology, was away at the time, and the sound was coming from a nearby gully, so I quickly worked out what was producing it. I did speculate about what the bird might be typing.

I can relate to birds inasmuch as I have a continual soundtrack in my mind, but while there is a huge reservoir of sound, both good and bad, in there, I am avid for anything new. Composers like Philip Glass and Elena Kats-Chernin don’t do much for me. Like birds, they seem to revisit old territory. They delight and surprise me a lot less than the likes of J.S. Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, to name a few. Not that I’m not prey to mind-worms that hang around because I’ve heard a phrase or a tune that may bug me for hours. On the other hand I hate to lose, even temporarily, a favourite piece of music, be it by Sibelius or Saint-Saens or Sting or Billy Joel, or many, many others whose names I can’t even recall for the moment. There seems to be a strange dichotomy in my mind, where names, words, Köchel numbers, keys don’t immediately call forth the appropriate piece of music, and, conversely, I cannot sometimes immediately identify one of the myriad melodies my mind hums with. In the meantime, I’m waiting for the right cue. Sing to me, birds.