This webpage enables detailed comparison of five of Messiaen's birdsongs with the actual birdsongs he used as models. The spectrograms, the 78 rpm records from which he derived the North American birdsongs in Oiseaux exotiques, and Messiaen's aesethetic of imitation are discussed in Robert Fallon, "The Record of Realism in Messiaen's Bird Style," in Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature, ed. Christopher Dingle & Nigel Simeone (Ashgate, 2007).

 

In 2001, I was conducting research in the Music Department of the Bibliothèque National in Paris when I noticed some unusual words in English among Messiaen's cahiers of birdsong notations. I was able to discover the source of these phrases, such as "Birds of the North Woods" in a set of 78rpm records published as Birds of North America. Upon returning to the United States, I acquired a copy of these records from San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences—in fact, the personal copy of ornithologist Luis Felipe Baptista, who had recently passed away. I converted these 1942 recordings into a digital format, then converted select passages that sounded like Messiaen into spectrographs. The result was the first detailed study of Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions and the first to compare his music with the birdsong from which he took musical dication. 

 

The first half of my book chapter "The Record of Realism in Messiaen's Bird Style" discusses these transcriptions and concludes he was faithful to his models about two-thirds of the time, with several deviations from his models inserted for musical and symbolic reasons. The second half of the chapter contextualizes Messiaen's prizing of accurate transcription within the context of contemporary artistic trends, especially "double realism," which I now call "Gothic spirituality."