Messiaen’s Greatest Teacher: Birds

Messiaen’s Greatest Teachers: Birds

“Listen to the birds; they are great masters.”

These words, spoken by Paul Dukas to the young Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), would shape the course of a young french composer’s life. Years later, Messiaen would famously describe birds as “the greatest musicians on our planet.”

From that point on, birds became far more than a source of inspiration. They grew into one of the central forces behind his musical imagination. Their songs permeate his works—from the early style oiseau, to the blackbird and nightingale in Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, Le Merle noir, Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, and ultimately Catalogue d’Oiseaux, his monumental cycle of thirteen piano pieces. Birds were never a decorative motif; they formed one of the pillars of Messiaen’s musical world.

Yet the important question is not how often birds appear in his music. The real question is this: why did Messiaen spend his entire life listening to birds, and why did he regard them as his greatest musical teachers?

For the deeply Catholic Messiaen, nature revealed the order of Creation in its purest form. He once remarked, “There is no bad taste in nature—not in colour, not in light, not in birdsong, not in rhythm, not in counterpoint.” To him, the beauty and order found in nature surpassed anything created by human beings. Birds therefore represented far more than animals. They embodied a purer form of music, leading him to call them the greatest musicians. His lifelong observation and documentation of birds was never an attempt to imitate nature. Rather, it was an effort to understand and express, through his own musical language, the order and beauty contained within birdsong.

Why Birds?

Messiaen’s view was not entirely unprecedented. Throughout history, birds have occupied a unique place in human imagination. Their ability to move freely between earth and sky made them symbols of a world beyond human reach. Across many cultures they appeared as divine messengers, guides of the soul, and emblems of freedom and transcendence. Ancient Egyptians represented the human soul (ba) in the form of a bird. In Greek mythology, the eagle and the owl symbolized divine authority and wisdom. The ravens Huginn and Muninn carried memory and knowledge throughout the Norse world, while East Asian traditions often portrayed birds as intermediaries between heaven and humanity.

Music history reflects a similar tradition. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, birds symbolized paradise and the harmony of nature. Baroque composers frequently imitated birdsong as a form of musical landscape painting. Beethoven famously depicted the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in his Pastoral Symphony, while Romantic composers associated birds with freedom, longing, and poetic imagination.

Messiaen, however, took a decisive step beyond this tradition. Earlier composers portrayed birds or used them symbolically; Messiaen treated their songs as the very beginning of musical thought. Birds ceased to be ornaments of nature and became teachers from whom humanity itself could learn. This is why he devoted his life to observing, identifying, and transcribing countless birds. To him, birds preserved a musical order of remarkable purity—one that modern humanity had largely forgotten.

Are Birds Really Musicians?

Do birds sing better when they have an audience? Or perhaps, like many of us, do they become a little nervous instead? We may never know.

Before a young blackbird sings with confidence in summer, there is a season of trial and error. Throughout early spring, he tests fragments of songs, abandons some, keeps others, and slowly builds a repertoire of his own. Some songs remain unfinished, almost like rehearsals before a concert. It is difficult not to recognize something familiar in that.

For a long time, ornithologists explained birdsong primarily as a biological signal used for mating and territorial defense. Indeed, singing plays an essential role in attracting mates and marking territory. Yet these functions alone cannot fully explain the richness of birdsong. Many songbirds possess species-specific song structures, while individuals of the same species often develop distinct regional dialects. Young birds learn by listening to adult birds around them, gradually building their own repertoire. Some species even incorporate the songs of other birds or sounds from their surroundings into their own vocalizations, creating entirely new melodic patterns. Birdsong is therefore far more than an instinctive call—it is a complex acoustic system shaped by learning, memory, variation, and choice.

The Eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula), one of Messiaen’s favorite birds, illustrates these characteristics particularly well. He wrote that its most beautiful song could be heard at daybreak, when the darkness of night begins to give way to the first light of dawn. This morning recital may last anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes, yet during that time the bird never mechanically repeats the same melody. Instead, it continually searches for, transforms, combines, and recombines short musical ideas, creating an ever-changing musical flow. In his Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie, Messiaen describes the blackbird as possessing an exceptionally rich individual repertoire and documents these processes in remarkable detail.

Even more fascinating is the fact that this repertoire is never completely fixed. Although the basic structure of the blackbird’s song is inherited, it continues to learn throughout its life, absorbing the songs of other birds and, at times, even artificial sounds such as bells or warning signals from the urban environment. Rather than repeating the same song endlessly, the blackbird creates new variations each day from a shared musical vocabulary. Perhaps musicians are not so different after all.

These observations help explain why Messiaen called birds “the greatest musicians on our planet.” To him, birds were not simply creatures with beautiful voices, but beings that possessed their own language, grammar, and remarkable musical imagination. Messiaen did not come to regard birds as his musical teachers by chance. Rather, in birds, a lifetime of experiences with light, time, colour, and nature gradually came together. Looking back, it almost seems as though each stage of his life taught him to listen in a different way.

Light, Time, Colors and Birds

Messiaen’s musical world grew gradually from an ever-deepening sensitivity to nature. During the First World War, his family took refuge in Grenoble in southeastern France, where he spent his childhood surrounded by the mountain landscapes of the Chartreuse, Belledonne, and Vercors ranges. The clear mountain air, the changing vegetation of the seasons, and the constantly shifting light across the mountains left a lasting impression on the young Messiaen. He would later recall these years as one of the formative experiences of his artistic life.

At the Paris Conservatoire, his fascination with nature developed into a broader search for musical order. He immersed himself in Ancient Greek metres, Indian rhythmic systems, medieval modes, new harmonic languages, and the intricate structures of counterpoint. His sensitivity to nature deepened through these musical studies, while his desire to understand the hidden order within sound continued to expand.

From 1931 onward, another place became equally important: the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he served as organist for more than sixty years. Throughout the day, sunlight passed through the church’s stained-glass windows, constantly transforming both colour and atmosphere. Messiaen experienced these changing colours as inseparable from harmony and timbre. Faith, nature, light, colour, and sound gradually merged into a single artistic perception.

Eventually, all these experiences led him into the forest. The songs of birds—constantly changing with the seasons, the time of day, and their surroundings—revealed the living order of nature more clearly than anything else. Messiaen devoted his life to understanding those songs. Carrying nothing more than manuscript paper and a pencil, he wandered through forests, mountains, marshes, and coastlines, transcribing birdsong directly in the field. At dawn, when birds were most active, he would remain in one place for hours, writing down fleeting melodies and rhythms before they disappeared. Since birds never sang exactly the same way twice and could vanish without warning, this work demanded exceptional aural acuity and remarkable speed of notation.

From the late 1940s onward, his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, became an essential partner in this research. Equipped with a portable tape recorder, she documented birdsong while Messiaen compared the recordings with his field transcriptions over many years of careful study. These observations eventually culminated in his monumental Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie, whose volumes devoted to European and non-European birds contain hundreds of pages of transcriptions, musical observations, personal impressions, and detailed explanations of how individual birds inspired specific compositions.

But how could such complex and constantly changing birdsong be transformed into music for the piano?

Translating Birds onto the Keys

Reproducing birdsong literally on the piano is almost impossible. Birds sing at extraordinary speeds, often in registers far higher than the piano, and employ microtonal inflections and constantly changing timbres that cannot be captured within the equal-tempered system. Messiaen understood these limitations better than anyone. He therefore transposed birdsong down by several octaves, adjusted passages that were too rapid to be performed, replaced microtones with the nearest pitches available on the keyboard, and, whenever necessary, expanded intervallic relationships in order to make the melodic contour more clearly perceptible.

Such transformations inevitably raise a question: How faithfully does Messiaen’s music reproduce actual birdsong?

Musicologist David Kraft(2000) argues that this question, though understandable, ultimately misses the point. For Messiaen, the goal was never to produce an exact acoustic copy of nature. What mattered was whether the distinctive musical character of each bird could be conveyed convincingly through the piano.

Kraft compares this process to painting a bird. A great painting does not need to reproduce every feather with photographic precision in order to capture the bird’s vitality, movement, and presence. Messiaen’s birds function in much the same way. They are not copies of nature but musical interpretations grounded in careful observation.

This leads to an even more fundamental question. If absolute accuracy was not his ultimate goal, what was he trying to preserve above all else?

What Birds Already Know

If not the notes themselves, then what was worth preserving? It was the way each bird inhabited time.

When does it breathe? How long does it hesitate? At what moment does it suddenly accelerate? Where does silence appear? Even birds of the same species never sing in precisely the same way twice. A single motif continually changes its duration, pacing, and direction, generating an ever-renewing musical flow. Within these rhythmic movements, Messiaen recognized the unique personality and vitality of each bird.

This perspective naturally reflects his broader philosophy of music. In Technique de mon langage musical, Messiaen describes rhythm as the most fundamental element of music. Melody and harmony derive their expressive power from rhythm, while the identity of a musical work depends on the way time itself is organized. This explains why he devoted such extraordinary attention to birdsong. Recording the correct pitches alone could never reveal the essence of a bird. Only by listening to its rhythm, breathing, pauses, and movement could its musical identity truly emerge.

His fascination with Ancient Greek metres, the Indian deçi-tâlas, non-retrogradable rhythms, and added values grew from the same search. These diverse rhythmic systems offered different ways of understanding musical time. Through them, Messiaen deepened his understanding of the rhythmic order he encountered in nature and transformed those experiences into an original musical language.

A Life Between Birdsong and Human Music

Having lived through two world wars and endured captivity as a prisoner of war, Messiaen came to question the world created by human civilization. In nature, however, he encountered another kind of order. In birds, he found teachers who reminded him of rhythm, time, and a musical truth that humanity had gradually forgotten.

Birds crossed the boundary between earth and sky. Messiaen sought to cross another: the boundary between nature’s music and human music. Perhaps, somewhere beyond our hearing, he is still listening to his greatest teachers.

References

Chadwick, Roderick, and Peter Hill. Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux: From Conception to Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Griffiths, Paul. Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Johnson, Robert Sherlaw. Messiaen. 2nd ed. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1989.

Kraft, David. Birdsong in the Music of Olivier Messiaen. PhD diss., Middlesex University, London, 2000.

Messiaen, Olivier. Technique de mon langage musical. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 2005.

Messiaen, Olivier. Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie. Tome V, Vol. 1: Chants d’oiseaux d’Europe. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 2014.

Samuel, Claude. Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel. Translated by E. Thomas Glasow. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994.