Bird song

Many composers have been inspired by bird song. In Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, he specifically names three individual birds and labels them in the score - the nightingale (flute), the quail (oboe), and the cuckoo (two clarinets).

The French composer Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by bird song and used it in many of his compositions. You can watch his process HERE and listen below.

More recently, composer Shiori Usui used bird song in her piece The Silent Forest composed in response to climate change. Here, in Dawn Chorus, the violin is asked to improvise using pitch and rhythm ideas:

David Hindley was a zoolologist and composer. He used technology - a 4-speed Revox tape-recorder (the best technology available in the early ‘70s!) to slow down bird song into range for the human ear – to experience the song as a bird might. He used these recordings to compose with.

You can find lots of examples of his music HERE.  

For a PRINTABLE VERSION of the resource CLICK HERE.

Your Turn!

In this activity we are going to start by using bird song to help us make a melody. Below is the song of a Tree Pipit.

This is how I drew it's song:

Which could sound like this:

Listen to some birds from HERE or from The British Library HERE or listen in your garden. Pick a bird song that you like. Listen carefully to the shape of the song. Does it go high or low? Listen to the rhythm. Are there any repeated notes? Is there silence or gaps? Some are very complex but others are much simpler repeating ideas. Most only contain two or three different ideas. 

Now try and draw the shape of the bird song or skip this bit to try and imitate it on your instrument. Try to show how the pitch and rhythm changes with your drawing. I was surprised how difficult this was and how many times I needed to listen. Don't worry about getting it exactly right - that is not important - you just want to find an interesting shape. Listen to a few before deciding which to use. 

Once you have drawn your shape, try to play it using your instrument. Try to show the ups and down and different rhythms. Again, it is not important to be exact but to use the bird song as a starting point. 

Once you have created your short melody, you can start to play with it by:

• Stretching (make longer) or squashing (make shorter) some or all of the notes
• Playing with the dynamics - how loud or soft it is
• Stretching or squashing the intervals (the distance between two consecutive notes)
• Faster and slower versions or getting faster/getting slower versions
• Repeating some of the pattern two or more times
• Making it more ‘red, green, azure, yellow, shiny’ etc. 

These changes are called variations. You could make a longer melody using  the different variations or by joining together different bird songs. You could also make a piece for more than one instrument by layering different bird songs and their variations, or by giving parts of the bird song to different instruments. You could also layer and sequence the bird songs using the free software audacity. 

In Shiori Usui's piece The Silent Forest, the bird song becomes lower in pitch as the piece progresses with more silence in between each idea. Shiori found out that when deforestation happens, not only are their fewer birds, but also the bird's songs have been found to be lower in pitch. You could use this idea in your music too.

PLEASE SEND YOUR MUSIC TO learning@bcmg.org.uk