Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques.(COMPOSER STUDIES)(Book review)

Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques. By Peter Hill and Nigel Simeonc. (Landmarks in Music since 1950.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xii, 128 p. 1SBN-10: 0754656306; ISBN-IS: 9780754656302. $69.95.] Compact disc, music examples, appendix, bibliography, discography, index.

In their book Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux ex-otiques, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone examine a pivotal stage in Messiaen's compositional development when he turned to birdsong as a primary resource of musical material during the 1950s. Although Messiaen had incorporated stylized versions of birdsong in his music of the 1930s and 1940s, he rendered birdcalls with greater accuracy in subsequent decades. Messiaen became increasingly preoccupied with birdsong after World War II. He began a systematic study in the early 1950s, which was aided by consultations with the French ornithologist, Jacques Delamain. As Messiaen scholarship informs us, the composer sought refuge in the world of birdsong after the composition of the Livre d'orgue (1951-52), the culmination of his so-called experimental period, because he was experiencing a creative dead end in his response to post-war European serialism. In other words, Messiaen overcame a compositional crisis by assimilating birdsong into his music, a turning point in his development as a composer. That is why Oiseaux exoliques (1955-56) is so significant in Messiaen's ceuvre, for it was the first work to integrate birdsong successfully into his musical language.

Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques is an important study for three main reasons. First, it outlines the evolution of Messiaen's compositional ideas in Oiseaux exotiques by directly linking the transcriptions found in his birdsong cahiers (notebooks) to his musical language. Because of the opportunity given to them by Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen to examine Messiaen's cahiers in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Hill and Simeone shed new light on Messiaen's music during this pivotal stage of his career. Second, the book offers a unique perspective on Oiseaux exotiques through recorded material provided on an accompanying compact disc. The disc consists of audio examples of American birdsongs taken from an anthology of six 78 rpm records titled American Bird Songs (1942), recorded for Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology. Messiaen transcribed these bird-songs and used them while composing Oiseaux exotiques. The compact disc also includes examples of Peter Hill playing Messiaen's transcriptions on the piano, as well as a recording of the world premiere of Oiseaux exotiques at the Petit. Theatre Marigny, Paris on 10 March 1956, taken from the original Vega recording (Vega C30A65, Accord/Universal 476 9209). Third, in order to provide a historical and musical background to Oiseaux exoliques, the book considers the origins of the Domaine musical concerts spearheaded by Pierre Boulez, as well as Messiaen's Reveil des oiseaux (1953). In particular, it supplies hitherto unknown information about Messiaen's involvement with the Domaine musical, along with an examination of Reveil des oiseaux that reveals how it actually belongs to the period of experimentation exemplified by Mode de valeurs et d'intensites (1949) because of its rule-based aesthetic rather than to Messiaen's later bird style (pp. 27-28).

But Hill and Simeone's book is not without its problems. Aside from minor editorial errors, such as the spelling of Klaus Schweizer's name as "Schweitzer" in a footnote (p. 4, n. 12), the listing of Antoine Golea's Reurontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1960) as "Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen" in the bibliography (p. 118), and the lack of diacritical marks in some French words such as "Eglise" (p. 18), the book's biggest shortcoming is its analytical commentary. Instead of the type of discourse currently practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, Hill and Simeone offer extravagant imagery that, although engaging at times in its descriptions of Oiseaux exotiques's continuity and texture, contributes little to a substantial theoretical understanding of the music.

Let us now turn to an examination of the book's contents where Hill and Simeone discuss the context, genesis, structure, and reception of Oiseaux exotiques, along with the work's relationship to Messiaen's later music. ...