April and May are when the dawn chorus of birdsong gets into full voice. Even if you live in the city centre, listen carefully and you’ll hear at least some species welcoming the morning. Spend time near a green space and you should hear more.

If you’re not sure which birds are singing, there are plenty of videos (and apps) to help. Here’s one for a starter:

Birdsong is part of our daily soundtrack, connecting us to nature, whether it’s the chatter of house sparrows, whistling clicks from starlings or the vocal extravaganzas from blackbirds. It’s hardly surprising then that composers have felt moved to include bird sounds or their general presence into music. There are various Top Tens and other lists out there, plus this Wikipedia article which might be a good place to start.

Of course, there are the ever-present Lark ascending (Vaughan Williams) and On hearing the first cuckoo of spring (Delius). Other pieces celebrate birds as a whole, or as an ideal, or as in the previous examples, mimic their calls. Let’s see what else is out there.

Handel  ‘Sweet bird’ (from L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato)

Here the bird is largely fictional, an ideal, a general evocation of the delights of nature, though there are some nods to the nightingale’s song. In some ways, it’s an excuse for Handel to write a glorious duet between soprano voice and flute. Yet, especially in the introduction, there are the trills and  chirruping so characteristic of many birds. L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato is one of Handel’s lesser-known choral works. If you enjoy ‘Sweet bird’, why not explore more of the complete work.

John Luther Adams Strange birds passing

Written for flute choir, this modern piece appears to consider what it is to be a bird. An entry on a wind instrument repertoire site says this about the composer and his music.

One senses Adams is trying to capture the soul of being a bird — what it is to soar and circle, to move as the breeze dictates. In ‘Strange Birds Passing’, his repeated figures, using the same pitches in floating arpeggios working in easy counterpoint, are as a flock of birds whose wings flap in the same way but each in their own space.

Daquin ‘Le Coucou’ (from Premier Livre de pièces de clavecin, Troisième Suite)

From the general to the specific. The cuckoo makes another appearance, this time in a short piece for harpsichord by the eighteenth century French composer Louis-Claude Daquin. With its clear, two-note call, a cuckoo has one of the easiest bird calls to imitate – no trills or chirps required. 

Elgar Owls, op. 53 no. 4

In an article for The Guardian in 2015, Tom Service makes these comments about Owls:

Most revelatory of all, at least for me, was watching Mark Elder listen to Elgar’s Owls: An Epitaph (one of the Op 27 [53] part-songs) for the first time. He thinks it’s a practical joke, because the music is fragmentary, halting, dissonant and weird. It was the first time I’d heard this piece, too, and it’s the strangest three minutes of Elgar I’ve ever heard. This miniature song is the most powerful corrective I know to the idea of Elgar as moustachioed imperialist…

So definitely not the Elgar of Pomp and Circumstance Marches or even most of the large-scale orchestral works. In this short partsong, the hooting, mournful calls associated with owls make several appearances. There’s also a strong connection to the folklore symbolism of owls as night-time harbingers of death. 

Janequin Le chant des oyseaulx

Dating from the early 1500s, this French chanson describes a number of birds (song thrush, blackbird, nightingale, cuckoo and others). Here’s how one site describes the piece:

Le Chant Des Oiseaux or The Song of the Birds focuses on telling the story of 4 different birds and what they sounded [like]. The most astounding and entertaining part about this piece of music is that Janequin actually uses onomatopoeia to convey the sounds of the different birds.

You can also find an English translation there. Not that a translation is particularly helpful. Much of the text is composed of that onomatopoeia mentioned earlier ie. words or syllables devised to mimic particular sounds – in this case, birdsong. It is remarkably effective.

Messiaen Catalogue d’oiseaux:  ‘Chouette hulotte’ (Tawny owl)

Some 400 years later, another French composer, Olivier Messiaen, spent time throughout his life notating birdsong. It was an interest that fed through into his music, including Catalogue d’oiseaux for piano. A British Library blogpost  looks at how Messiaen and a close contemporary, Ludwig Koch, collected birds’ wildly differing calls. Here’s a comment on how Messiaen worked:

Interestingly enough for a musician who experimented with avant-garde techniques, Messiaen didn’t choose to write down what he heard using a progressive form of notation, but instead preferred to use the more traditional stave. He does this in a highly personal and sensitive way, by adding textual descriptions of the quality of a bird’s song, onomatopoeia to evoke its calls (a tried-and-tested ornithologist’s method), and symbols that provide an additional layer of detail to the notations. All of this provides a remarkably thorough depiction of the sounds that he encountered.  

Here, to finish this post, is Messiaen’s portrait in music of a Tawny owl: