walter benjamin

Birds also recall our first origins. Their songs were considered by the philosopher Walter Benjamin as pre-linguistic sounds. In a preparatory note to his ‘Theses on the concept of history,’ he takes up the myth of the Tower of Babel where men are condemned by God to express themselves through a multitude of different languages. Benjamin supposes that originally they only spoke of one, resembling the one of the birds. In this regard, he evokes a rare Christian evocation of the first manifestation of the language of men: ‘The messianic world is a world of total and integral actuality. Universal history exists only in him. What is designated today by this term can only be a kind of Esperanto. Nothing can match it until the confusion that goes back to the Tower of Babel has been resolved. It presupposes a language into which any text, from living or dead languages, will be translated. Or, better said, the latter is language as such. It is not understood as written but as what is celebrated. This festival is devoid of any ceremony and knows no festive songs. His language is the one of prose itself and it will be understood by every man, as Sunday children understand the language of birds.’ The legend of children who, on Sundays, miraculously understand the song of birds was once common.

olivier messiaen

This reference to the language of birds as the primary universal language has also guided the contemporary compositions of musician Olivier Messiaen. He turns it into an energy that transports him: ‘As soon as I hear a bird chirp, I recover my strength and forget my worries. I can be dying, if I hear a bird chirp, I’m cured!’ Messiaen is perhaps the author who makes us best understand the immense loss represented by the disappearance of birds in the city, but also in the countryside. In France, according to the National Center for Scientific

Research and the National Museum of Natural History, about a third of birds have disappeared in the past 15 years in the countryside. Insecticides are not the only cause of that. There is also the reduction of grasslands, the artificialization of agricultural soils and the increase in predators.

As a great observer of nature, Messiaen calls himself as much a composer as an ornithologist. He frequented the greatest ornithologists and traveled the world to discover new species of birds, spending hours listening to and transcribing their songs in order to use them as material for his compositions. This natural music inspired his work ‘Le Réveil des Oiseaux’ in which he uses various instrumental possibilities taking up the intonations of birdsong: trills, accents, glissando... On the scores, he indicates that it is necessary to play for example according to a ‘pinched sonority,’ in ‘pleading,’ with a ‘ferocious meow,’ in a ‘little irritated’ way.

The composer even notes the songs of birds in the form of onomatopoeia for information purposes, and recommends that performers take walks in the forest in the spring, especially early in the morning, to familiarize themselves with the models that inspired his compositions.

It also takes into account the landscape, region and climate in which the birds live. In ‘Catalog d’oiseaus,’ made up of thirteen pieces, Olivier Messiaen tries to accurately render the typical bird songs of a region. He specifies that: ‘Each play is written in honor of a French province. (...) the hours of day and night that change this landscape are also present, with their colors, their temperatures, the magic of their scents. As with certain artists, architects and landscape architects, the landscape dimension is constantly present in his compositions. He says: ‘I like all natures, and I like all landscapes, but I have a predilection for the mountains because I spent my childhood in Grenoble and I saw, from a young age, (…) especially wild places which are the most beautiful in France.’

Messiaen is also sensitive to time, noting the times of day and night when songbirds congregate. Here is an example of one of his works called Awakening of the birds. It all starts with a nightingale solo sung at midnight performed on the piano. Then two other nightingales come to join him in a lively exchange (still performed on the piano). After a brief silence, other songs of the night emerge in the darkness: little owl on the solo violin, bush owl on the little clarinet, lark lulu on the little flute... Nature is gently stirring. At dawn, around 4am, other birds wake up: hoopoe, woodpecker, robin, sparrow… more than fifteen different species successively appear. As various instruments gradually come into play, the songs of the birds mingle with each other in a joyful cacophony. Suddenly, silence is made to welcome the sunrise. Then, during the morning, the babbling of the birds resumes its course. Sometimes one after the other, sometimes together, the songs of the warbler, the song thrush, or even the blackbird dialogue through a colorful and original orchestration. A long piano cadenza takes up fragments of songs, calls and cries of many birds (greenfinch, blue tit, oriole, etc.) to end with a duet between robin and blackbird. At noon, after a new period of silence, we hear the chaffinch, the blackbird and the drumming of the great spotted woodpecker. The work ends with the call of the cuckoo interpreted by the Chinese blocks. Olivier Messiaen recalls the poetic words of some great creators in search of a global sensitivity relating to the world as it is perceived by children at birth: ‘Music is a perpetual dialogue between space and time, between sound and color, a dialogue which results in a unification: time is a space, sound is a color, space is a complex of superimposed times, sound complexes exist simultaneously as color complexes. A dimension that is very personal to him, he pushes this detachment from the materialism and productivism of our contemporary world by getting closer to his Christian roots, because for him the songs of birds have a spiritual value identifiable with the words of the messengers of God. More generally, he suggests that ‘The musician who thinks, sees, hears, speaks by means of these fundamental notions, can to a certain extent approach the beyond.’

The artificialization of water sources, the multiplication of monumental buildings and the extinction of birds are all consequences, at the time of the Anthropocene, of the overexploitation of nature and the domination of man over the land. Babylon served here as a starting point for reflection. The Babylonian civilization has been used by authors to refer to an originally better world, while others have used, on the contrary, the myth of the Tower of Babel to evoke the disproportionate ambition of men putting the world on the edge of chaos. That our contemporaries deprive themselves of the sound of running water, of fraternal sociality, or of the songs of nocturnal birds, for example, may appear futile. After all, this does not prevent humanity from continuing to exist and even to develop. But one day we will have to ask ourselves this question: is it to live or to survive? By depriving himself of primary pleasures, by depriving himself of poetry, man risks condemning himself to an existence devoid of meaning.