It’s migration season in Wisconsin. I like listening to and recognizing birds within the spring, whether or not they’re simply passing by way of or are year-round residents.
As mating season ramps up, the birdsong turns into particularly attention-grabbing, with lovely and complicated songs expressing the drive to draw mates and defend territories.
The Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology has been one among my best treasures and aids in figuring out the birds I hear. WPR’s former “Morning Edition” host Melissa Ingells launched me to it. Just begin the recorder and the app returns the names of all of the birds it hears, highlighting each because it sings.
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We know that public radio listeners take pleasure in birding and different out of doors actions. And judging from the playing cards I’ve acquired, listeners take pleasure in birds depicted in artwork as effectively. I treasure all of the letters and playing cards despatched over the years, and I not too long ago put among the bird-themed photographs on the door of my workplace — it lifts my spirits to see them.
There is an extended historical past in classical music of composers emulating birdsong, from Antonio Vivaldi’s “Goldfinch Concerto” to Amy Beach’s “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.” Ottorini Respighi’s “The Birds” additionally involves thoughts, with the hen scratching round on the bottom and the dove’s mushy name. Other items seize the sensation {that a} chicken’s music would possibly convey, like François Couperin’s “Le Rossignol-en-Amour” (The Nightingale in Love.)
One of the earliest chicken items was a pop music of its time: “Le Chant des Oiseaux” (The Song of the Birds) by Clement Janequin, which has the choir emulating a number of totally different chicken songs. (Janequin, by the way in which, was a well-known Parisian songwriter born in 1485!) Another of that ilk is Thomas Weelkes’s “The Nightingale, the Organ of Delight,” of 1608, by which the choir sings in regards to the blackbird, thrush and lark.
It’s the cuckoo who reigns supreme in music, although, with numerous items incorporating its iconic easy name utilizing the interval of a minor third. Handel’s “Organ Concerto in F,” nicknamed “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” is a good instance. So is Johann Schmelzer’s “Cuckoo Sonata” with a recorder offering the voice of the chicken. There’s additionally Frederick Delius’s pretty “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, and Peter Tchaikovsky’s art song, “Cuckoo.”
This is all fantastic music to take pleasure in year-round, however nothing beats the actual factor on a stunning spring day in Wisconsin.
