Birdscapes, Soundscapes, and Silence: Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux revisited

Abstract

In his monumental, 13-part cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux for piano solo (1956-58), French composer Olivier Messiaen integrates birdsong into his specific system of harmony and rhythm. Through his accompanying verbal texts, Messiaen places birds from different species into certain landscapes, seasons and daytimes.
While Messiaen’s birdsong compositions have been analyzed musically, they can be as artistic archives of French ecological soundscapes from the 1950s. Messiaen, an avid birdwatcher and serious ornithologist, tried to encode the acousmatic impressions of his listening experiences in diverse landscapes and situations into the formal framework of the musical score.
Considering the anthropogenic loss of bird habitats, bird species and individual birds since then, after Rachel Carsons’s Silent Spring (1962) and Crutzen’s and Stoermer’s momentous introduction of the Anthropocene with all its discursive consequences, this paper rereads Messiaen’s Catalogue as an ecologically meaningful soundscape in the sense of Krause’s (2013) biophony, comparable in principle with contemporary soundscape and biophony experiences in French landscapes. More than 60 years after its creation, the bird(song) catalogue suggests ecological loss and a fragility of biodiversity that the composer might not have intended. While Messiaen’s original project can be understood as the transformation of biophony into an artefact of human culture, this critical rereading aims to transfer the musical artworks back into bioacoustics, operating in the contact zones between avian and anthropic cultures, hereby following Haraway’s (2003) concept of naturecultures.