Le concert des oiseaux

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 Here we are on a Sunday and I had to go to work today in order to open and later close the building.

Hell. Especially when you go out the day before, which does not happen often these days but still...

Something helped me a lot this morning, le réveil des oiseaux. At 5 am there's no one out there, absolute silence in Walton Manor, North Oxford, not even a train to be heard and the cows and horses are not yet back on Port Medow, or perhaps they are, but the wind is not carrying their smell and their noises.

5.20 am and the first virtuoso comes to town, that is somewhere in the gardens behind the houses and starts the jam. Soon, other birds are participating. It's not quite a chorus, more like listen to me! me! me! I'm the best! Perhaps similar to The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, with my favourite track, maybe because it is completely bonkers, Salt peanuts. 

No, the morning birds are perhaps not playing the equivalent of Salt peanuts but still it's very vivacious. Then you think of Francois Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, it must be played in a vivacious way all this bird music. Then there's Olivier Messiaen who did write a piece called le réveil des oiseaux (here is the recording of it with Pierre Boulez conducting and Pierre Laurent Aimard with the Cleveland Orchestra) with the score so you can follow the music -if you can... I do admit I'm struggling!). 

He even went as far as writing a whole catalogue d'oiseaux I had a look at it once, at the music library when I still could access Bodleian Libraries, couldn't really read it and hear the music in my head, it's quite contemporary really, though I'm sure, not quite refined enough a system to truly reproduce the complexity of bird songs. There are stories of him, looking for a rare bird, walking into forests at night. So he was a walker too, right? It's not only writers who like to walk... we always think of Kierkegaard and Wittengstein, and Rousseau of course, before, and then Walter Benjamin till Michel de Certeau, but musicians also liked to walk. Everybody liked to walk in fact in nineteenth century England, or France, Germany or Austria, Beethoven, Mahler, the famous places where you had to walk, the promenade. Things were still pretty 'pastoral' still, and thank X£$% for that, otherwise, perhaps, we wouldn't have gotten masterpiece such as Beethoven symphony #6 the pastoral, where he also transcribes a few birds songs.

So lots and lots of beautiful music over the centuries. But you know what? 

Nothing beats the reality of birds singing. And it's a free concert on top of that. No need to buy a ticket, no need to use electricity, it's just there. Listen to it while you can... before perhaps these beautiful beings will be replaced by singing drones or something horrendous like that... maybe the hypergifted AI (or so people thing) will write a mini-symphony just for you, it will last 15 seconds of course, you should not waste your time iddling...

"Flock of Birds" by Picture Perfect Pose is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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