Birdsong (Episode 2)

The creaking of the stork, the trill of the nightingale, the call of the lark, the clucking of the hen, the cawing of the crow...an almost infinite wealth of songs. As Olivier Messiaen, who has traveled the globe recording birdsong, states, ‘In terms of artistic hierarchy, birds are the greatest musicians that exist on our planet.’

During the Renaissance, in 1520, the French priest and musician Clément Janequin composed onomatopoeic verses to imitate the blackbird, the nightingale, and a number of other species. And today, aren't jazz orchestras like flocks of birds, with their saxophones and trumpets twirling between harmonies like birds playing through air currents? In 1946 Charlie Parker composed “Ornithology”, a reference to his nickname ‘Bird’. And Eric Dolphy flies between different styles, hovering peacefully before plunging into despair without a hint of irony.

Often in lyrics, the bird is used to describe human feelings or behaviours: doing “The Ostrich” (Steppenwolf); letting life slip away in Belle and Sebastian’s “I’m A Cuckoo”; being eaten away with jealousy (Neil Young); being afraid of everything and nothing (The Police). On the other hand, people become birds when they travel, escape, explore, when they drive a fast car (The Modern Lovers). In ‘The Turtle Dove’, a sailor tries to console his beloved before going off to sea. He is like the turtledove – in winter he leaves the countries of the north to fly to Africa, but he always makes it home in the end.

The singer-poets (Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison) equate the bird with the Absolute. They testify to the existence of love (Pulp), accompanying us on our travels. In “Cirrus Minor”, Pink Floyd describe an idyllic landscape: ‘Yellow bird, you are not long, in singing and in flying on, in laughing and in leaving…’ Fly high, like the albatross (Fleetwood Mac).

But when the dream wears off, harsh reality hits. In a brief interlude, Phish describe the destruction of nature, where sweet birdsong is swallowed up by a lorry horn. King Gizzard try to understand our industrialised lives from the point of view of the bird. ‘To a bird, what's a plane? A shiny flying elephant…’ Let us not forget that all the birds disappearing right now are disappearing because of us.