Musicologists such as Matthew Head and
Suzannah Clark believe that
birdsong has had a large though admittedly unquantifiable influence on the development of music. Birdsong has influenced composers in several ways: they can be inspired by birdsong; Two especially popular birds are the
nightingale and the
cuckoo. In 1650,
Athanasius Kircher represented the calls of several birds in musical notation in his encyclopedic
Musurgia Universalis. , chicken, cuckoo, and
quail (and the speech of a parrot) in
Athanasius Kircher's 1650
Musurgia Universalis Heinrich Biber's c. 1669
Sonata Representiva is composed in sections labelled with the names of birds and other animals. It uses string scratching and detuned unisons to imitate the
nightingale,
cuckoo, cockerel and chicken. Several composers have written works that portray multiple birds.
Clément Janequin's 16th century
Le Chant des oiseaux has the singers mention birds by name, and then depicts the bird's songs with nonsense syllables. while John Walsh's c. 1715 ''Bird Fancyer's Delight'' is a collection of short phrases labelled with bird names, which was intended to teach cage birds to sing. Among the major composers to imitate birdsong are
Beethoven (
Pastoral Symphony, 2nd movement),
Delius (
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring),
Handel (
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale), Respighi (
The Birds),
Rimsky-Korsakov (
Snow Maidens),
Dvořák,
Saint-Saëns (
Carnival of the Animals),
Vivaldi (
Concerto in A, The Cuckoo), and
Gustav Mahler (
First Symphony, where the cuckoo sings
perfect fourths instead of the usual
major third or
minor third). Less commonly imitated are the
great tit (
Anton Bruckner's
Fourth Symphony), the
goldfinch (Vivaldi),
linnet (
Couperin,
Haydn and
Rachmaninov),
robin (
Peter Warlock),
swallow (Dvorak and
Tchaikovsky),
wagtail (
Benjamin Britten), and
magpie (in a
Mussorgsky song,). Dvorak celebrated many other kinds of bird, including the
stock dove,
skylark, and
house sparrow. Messiaen noted that it was "especially difficult" to transcribe the timbres of birdsong for his ''Catalogue d'oiseaux
, as birdsong includes a wide variety of harmonics; he found that he had to "resort to unusual combinations of notes", and that the piano "was the only instrument capable of speaking at the great speed and in the very high registers called for by some of the more virtuosic birds, such as the woodlark, the skylark, the garden warbler, the blackcap, the nightingale, the song thrush, the sedge warbler and the reed warbler". He added that only the piano could "imitate the raucous, grinding, percussive calls of the raven... the rattling of the corncrake, the screeches of the water rail, the barking of the herring gull, the dry, imperious sound, like tapping on a stone, of the black-eared wheatear, and the sunny charm of the rock thrush". Carl Nielsen used representations of bird calls in Song of the
Siskin, a rarely imitated bird, The First Lark
, and Springtime on Fyn'', though much of the effect of birds on his work appears in his orchestral colours and time-patterns.
Hanna Tuulikki's
Away with the Birds (2013) is composed of traditional Gaelic songs and poems which imitate birdsong; its five movements represent waders, seabirds, wildfowl, corvids, and the cuckoo. Other composers who have made extensive use of birdsong in their music include
Emily Doolittle and Hollis Taylor. The
zoomusicologist Hollis Taylor has charted the multiple techniques used by composers when appropriating the song of the Australian
pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis): Composer
Alexander Liebermann transcribes birdsong onto sheet music and incorporates bird calls into his compositions. Species he has transcribed include the
musician wren (uirapuru), the
common loon, the
thrush nightingale, the
white bellbird, the
Chinese hwamei, the
Japanese bush warbler (uguisu), the
common peafowl, the
oropendola, the
cuckoo, and the
Javan pied starling, among others.
In other musical traditions The imitation of bird song was popular in stage performances in the United States, particularly during the era when
vaudeville and
Chautauqua were popular. Gramophone recordings of whistling performances accompanied by instrumental music were also popular. Prominent performers in America included
Charles Crawford Gorst,
Charles Kellogg,
Joe Belmont, and
Edward Avis; those in Britain included Alec Shaw and
Percy Edwards. Among
jazz musicians who have chosen to use sounds like birdsong are
Paul Winter (
Flyway) and Jeff Silverbush (
Grandma Mickey). The
improvisatory saxophonist
Charlie Parker, known as "Bird", played fast, flowing melodic lines, with titles such as "
Yardbird Suite", "
Ornithology", "
Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise". The scholar of folklore Imani Sanga identifies three ways that bird song is classified and perceived in an African context: that birds sing, are musicians, and are materials for composition. He notes that Western musicians likewise use birds in compositions. Sanga mentions that a 1982 study by Feld explained that in
Kaluli music, birds are perceived as spirits that want to communicate with the living through their singing. He describes stories he grew up with in Africa, emphasizing that people made stories about birds to justify their presence around them. His perception of birds influenced his life daily, creating memories in which the common birds, ringed-neck doves and African ground hornbills, were important. The ethnographer Helena Simonett writes that the
Yoreme of northwestern Mexico play animal sounds including birdcalls on a "simple cane flute" in ritual performances with
singing, music, and dancing; their
sacred reality thus enacted involves transforming into the animals in their enchanted world.
Use of recorded birdsong singing with classical tunes
La Paloma and
Blue Danube Waltz The Italian composer
Ottorino Respighi, with his
Pines of Rome (1923–1924), may have been the first to compose a piece of music that calls for pre-recorded birdsong. A few years later, Respighi wrote
Gli Uccelli ("The Birds"), based on
Baroque pieces imitating four different birds, one to each movement of the work after its prelude: • "Prelude" (based on the music of
Bernardo Pasquini) In the 1960s and 1970s, several popular music bands started to use
sound effects including birdsong in their albums. For example, the English band
Pink Floyd included bird sound effects in songs from their 1969 albums
More and
Ummagumma (for example, "
Grantchester Meadows"). Similarly, the English singer
Kate Bush used bird calls on her 2005 album,
Aerial. The well-known 1968
song "Blackbird" by
the Beatles includes an actual
Eurasian blackbird singing in the background. The group
Sweet People reached the
UK Top 5 in 1980 with their track "Et Les Oiseaux Chantaient (And the Birds Were Singing)", which fused birdsong with
ambient music. Another track, consisting solely of a
collage of different birdsong, was released as the
charity single "
Let Nature Sing" in 2019 by the
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and reached number 18 on the UK chart. The French composer
François-Bernard Mâche has been credited with the creation of
zoomusicology, the study of the music of animals. His 1983 essay "Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion" includes a study of "ornitho-musicology", in which he speaks of "animal musics" and a longing to connect with nature. Other recent composers for whom recorded birdsong is a major influence include
R. Murray Schafer,
Michel Gonneville,
Rozalie Hirs, and
Stephen Preston. The Indian zoo-musicologist A. J. Mithra has composed music using natural bird, animal and frog sounds since 2008.
Jonathan Harvey's
Bird Concerto with Piano Song, premiered in 2003, makes use of the slowed-down song of American west coast birds including the
orchard oriole, the
indigo bunting and the
golden-crowned sparrow, so as to explore their complexity and ornamentation which are otherwise too rapid for the human ear to analyse. == Birdsong as music ==