Theme & Variations / Birdsong

Three melancholy moments of music that conjure expressions of longing, rebirth, and renewal from nature's original musicians.

Christina Rollo, Fantail Hummingbird. Photograph ⓒ Christina Rollo

Do birds dream?

I've been a tree-hugging lover of all things nature my entire life (well, except for snakes), but I don't think I had ever considered a bird's sleeping patterns. That is, until I read a fascinating article on The Marginalian, in which Maria Popova traces science's centuries-long road to determining whether birds dream and how.

It turns out humans only gained acute insights into the sleeping bird's mind about three decades ago, thanks to advancements in electroencephalogram (EEG) tests and imaging technologies. With these tools, scientists have studied the brain activity of birds during REM sleep — discovering in the process that these avian animals do, in fact, dream just as vividly as humans. (It also turns out humankind's ability to dream can be traced back to our evolutionary relationship with birds more than 300 million years ago.)

In these deep states of rest, a bird's dream can involve replicating wing actions made during flight, exploring emotions, and, in the case of certain songbirds like the zebra finch, perfecting their song repertoire through practice. That's right: Birds rehearse music in their sleep! 

These remarkable creatures — the original musicians of the natural world, long before humans carved the first flutes from bone and stretched animal hides to fashion drums — tap into their subconscious minds to diligently hone their craft, just like any human artist. And those songs have, for centuries, inspired many a composer to vividly translate a bird's trills, coos, and flutters into their work — from Antonio Vivaldi's Goldfinch Concerto to Ludwig van Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue of Birds. 

In tribute to these miraculous musicians of the skies, let's dive into the latest installment of our Theme & Variations series. Here are three moments of melancholy music that conjure the beauty of birdsong and its timeless expressions of longing, rebirth, and renewal.

Ottorino Respighi / "La colomba" (The Dove), from Gli uccelli (The Birds)

Birdsong as music of timeless longing

Italian composer Ottorino Respighi may have been one of Italy's most prominent composers in the early 20th century, but the musical foundations of his work can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Heavily inspired by Renaissance and Baroque dances, Respighi made it his mission to bring this music of a distant era into his contemporary world. But rather than imitating the antique sounds of instruments like the lute and harpsichord, he flexed his muscles as an orchestrator to paint vivid scenes with distinctly modern instrumental colors.

Respighi constructs a lavish aviary of his own design in his 1928 orchestral suite Gli uccelli (The Birds). In each movement, the composer pairs a bird with a Baroque dance tune, using its melody and rhythmic structure to evoke with cinematic precision the furious clucking of hens, the insistent call of the cuckoo, and the nightingale's rapturous aria.

In the suite's second movement, we're introduced to the music of la colomba — the dove — which immediately transports us to a place of sun-drenched beauty. Over a bed of quivering strings and rolled chords in the harp, the dove sings a solitary song of longing based on a sarabande for lute by the 17th-century French composer Jacques Gallot. As the dove enchants us with its melancholy tune, a raft of glistening orchestral textures floats through the air, conjuring gentle summer breezes and the buzzing of insects sizzling under the Italian sun. 

Listening to this movement, we feel a kinship with the dove's tender song — its desire to be one with a distant beloved mirrors our own hunger for companionship. Just as the words of Ovid and Shakespeare help us to channel our emotions through timeless stories of romance, comedy, and tragedy, so too does Respighi's lonely dove speak to us from a distant time, helping us recognize the eternal nature of longing for something — someone — hidden beyond the horizon.

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Hugh Wolff, conductor

Alban Berg / "Die Nachtigall" (The Nightingale), from Seven Early Songs

Birdsong as music of rebirth

At the dawn of the 20th century, music in Vienna was beginning to undergo a radical transformation. Arnold Schoenberg, the self-crowned king of "new music" in the Austrian capital, had opened Pandora's box with the publication of his Harmonielehre, a treatise that demanded music's release from the tyranny of tonality, the harmonic system of major and minor keys that composers had adhered to for four centuries.

Schoenberg called for a move toward serialism, a totally new logic for composition that treated each of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale as equal to each other. In Schoenberg's vision of atonal music, a composer isn't allowed to repeat a pitch until they've used the other 11. 

Eager to make his mark in Viennese musical circles, the young composer Alban Berg began studying with Schoenberg in 1904, absorbing his teacher's radical techniques as he continued to forge his own musical voice. Berg was never interested in throwing the baby out with the musical bath water — a love for the lush harmonies and emotionality of late 19th-century Romanticism, the dominant style Schoenberg was disrupting, still coursed through his veins. 

So rather than embodying only Schoenberg's serialism in his new works, he merged those ideas with the style of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, two composers whose romantic sensibilities and monumental depictions of nature in music helped Berg to define his own aesthetic.

Among the works Berg penned while studying with Schoenberg was a collection of lieder (German art songs) he eventually published more than two decades later as the Seven Early Songs, each of which sets a text by a contemporary poet. In the cycle's third song, "Die Nachtigall," Berg turns to a text by Theodor Storm that, from the very first stanza, evokes a pastoral scene in which the nightingale's song cultivates notions of romance and regeneration:

It is because the nightingale
Sang throughout the entire night,
That from the sweet sound
Of her endlessly echoing song
The roses have sprung up.

Poet: Theodor Storm
English translation: Michael Cirigliano II

With an endlessly spinning melody, the solo soprano mirrors the birdsong that has given way to nature's annual rebirth. Just listen to the bold blossoming of sound Berg achieves on the words die Rosen aufgesprungen ("the roses have sprung up"), eliciting a moment of primal ecstasy as we imagine vast fields of jewel-toned flowers. Without the nightingale's potent song of creation, Storm and Berg show us, the world would be deprived of a divine, nurturing beauty. 

Barbara Bonney, soprano
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly, conductor
(Follow along with the German text and English translation.)

Béla Bartók / Andante religioso, from Piano Concerto No. 3

Birdsong as music of spiritual renewal

Béla Bartók wasn't just one of Hungary's most famous composers, he was also one of the world's first ethnomusicologists. For decades he traveled across Eastern Europe recording and transcribing thousands of folk songs from remote villages. So as fascism flooded the streets of Europe and the Third Reich worked to eradicate the Roma and other peasant communities, Bartók feared not only for the lives of his family, but also for these endangered peoples he had come to know so well.

In 1940 Bartók and his wife Ditta fled Europe for the safe harbor of New York City, where the composer became increasingly depressed and destitute. He composed nothing during his first years in the U.S., writing to his son Peter:

"I have been so upset by world events that my mind has been almost completely paralyzed."

But it wasn't just Bartók's mind that was suffering — his body was growing weaker with each passing year. In late 1943, a doctor diagnosed the composer's condition as tuberculosis and recommended he spend the winter taking in the therapeutic air of Asheville, North Carolina, America's equivalent to Switzerland's Magic Mountain. Bartók made the journey south by train and settled into his top-floor room at the Albemarle Inn, where he reveled in the majestic sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which reminded him so much of his beloved Carpathians back home.

Bartók's condition improved during his stay. He gained weight, his chronic fevers dissipated, and he even began composing again, working on a Sonata for Solo Violin and sketching his Third Piano Concerto, which he intended as a birthday present for Ditta, an accomplished pianist. As winter turned to spring, a new rush of inspiration washed over him, thanks to the music he heard every morning wafting through the misty mountain air, writing in late April:

"Spring has now indisputably arrived. Dogwood is in bloom, like acacias flowering at home. The birds have become entirely intoxicated and are putting on concerts the likes of which I've never heard."

So moved by the spirit of the songs of the eastern towhees, hermit thrushes, and wood thrushes he encountered, Bartók incorporated their music into the slow movement of his new piano concerto. After a meditative, almost prayer-like opening passage from hushed strings and solo piano, in which we can imagine the composer watching the morning fog rise above the Blue Ridge peaks, we hear a mysterious rustling in the orchestra. One by one, a series of chirps and trills and flutterings enter the scene, one of those "concerts of birds" that had lifted his spirits. 

Gradually overtaking the string chorale and inspiring the solo piano to mimic their music, the birdsong grows increasingly ecstatic, mirroring Bartók's own listening experience in Asheville: 

"In the early dawn there came from every single branch a faint piping sound of awakening birds, slowly swelling into such full volume as every green leaf became part of a chorus more invigorating and lively than I could ever have imagined before.

And this fluid sound did not penetrate the ears alone, but seeped into the body with the strength of a powerful healing potion."

With his spirits restored and music again flowing from his pen, Bartók returned to New York, only to receive devastating news: The tuberculosis his doctor had diagnosed was, in fact, leukemia. But even as his condition worsened until his death in September 1945, Bartók continued working on his final composition — sometimes referred to as his "Asheville Concerto" — completing all but the final 17 measures.

Zoltán Kocsis, piano 
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer, conductor

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What was your experience listening to these birdsong-inspired works? I want to know! Be sure to drop a comment below or simply reply to this email. And if you enjoyed your time here today, would you ever so kindly tap that little heart below? 👇🏼

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