KATONAH, N.Y. - Birds have all the time participated in concert events right here in Caramoor, the place performances are open air. Particularly within the early night, they lend their voice and sing their songs. Why not? They stay within the massive bushes and the bucolic grounds of this outdated area. The musicians are solely guests.
However this weekend, Caramoor welcomed the birds and sparked conversations between human and avian musicians in a sequence entitled "Caramoor Takes Wing! Celebrating Birdsong ". The principle provide consisted of a powerful illustration of Messiaen's "Fowl Catalog", a tough suite of 13 piano items lasting over two and a half hours interpreted by Pierre-Laurent Aimard in thrice in two days.
Messiaen was fascinated by birdsong from an early age. However within the "Catalog", written between 1956 and 1958, he explores it with nearly Obsessive intensity, making each piece a portrait not only of a particular species, but also of his region in France - the colors, the temperature and the "scents", as he called them, the landscape.
To expand its field of action, this mini-festival included an open-air performance of John Luther Adams' songbirdsongs of the Sandbox Percussion ensemble and two piccolo players, as well as two bird walks on Sunday morning, hosted by the Bedford Audubon Society, as well as a round table. asked if it was exaggerated to describe the vocalizations of the birds.
Are the birds talking in their wonderful way? Do they make music, as humans think?
The musicians are fascinated by the singing of birds since ancient times. Vivaldi's most famous piece, "The Four Seasons", is rich in evocations of birds, as the sonnets accompanying these concertos clearly show. The festival began early Saturday afternoon, when the mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital was the soloist of the baroque orchestra of Venice in a program including "Summer" of "The Four Seasons", with Mr. Avital playing a version of the elaborate solo part of the violin.
But the idealized pieces of chirps and cuckoos that Vivaldi integrates into the music are nothing like the amazing sounds of real birds hung on Messiaen - extremely high records, breathtaking tempos, strange rhythmic complexity and precision, bursts of notes ring pointillist riffs.
The series began seriously Saturday night at Caramoor's Sunken Garden, where clarinetist and naturalist David Rothenberg engaged in a live improvisation with the birds. While the sounds of birds drifted in the area, Mr. Rothenberg imitated them. But he had to activate a recording of such sounds to really engage the conversation.
As night fell and Mr. Aimard appeared in the Spanish court to play the first installment of the Messiaen cycle, the birds chirped. For me, it seemed to me that Messiaen's music had inspired them to participate even more.
The 13 pieces represent various birds at different times of the day. Mr. Aimard grouped the evening, morning, and afternoon plays into three sub-suites. The first piece he played, "The Curlew", evoked the global approach adopted by Messiaen. Passages of bird songs burst into frenzied bursts. Sometimes waves of entangled notes combine to suggest piercing sounds. The chirps of repetitive riffs can seem floating and charming, but also manic and a little terrifying.
Episodes of bird songs alternate with passages that unfold in thick, resonant harmonies, such as dense choruses, or choppy chord lengths that seem to reflect the emotions elicited by the birds. Early Sunday morning at 7:30 pm, it appeared that many birds were ready and waiting when Mr. Aimard began the second installment. In "Le Bouscarle", the pointillist paintings are so thick and fast that even the most fiercely modern works of Pierre Boulez, a student at Messiaen, would have seemed tamed by comparison. Yet the play was also rich in beautiful harmonic episodes and deliciously twitter tracks.
The question of whether birds sing, if we understand well, was first addressed in the group discussion. Ornithologist J. Alan Clark said that for him, whether you speak of bird songs, calls or vocalizations, it was only semantics. Yes, some birds, especially males, sing to announce their presence and occupy a territory to attract a mate, he said. But, citing Bird O. Prum's recent work "The Evolution of Beauty", Clark added that birds, like many animals, can have an innate appreciation of the beauty that inspires their song. For his part, Mr. Rothenberg asked if people should be called music. After all, he said, the birds were around and emitting their sounds well before us.
In his comments, Mr. Aimard placed "Catalog" in the context of Messiaen's development as a composer. In the 1950s, he said, Messiaen was in a creative crisis. The music was undergoing radical changes, with avant-garde techniques such as serialism capturing the intellectual highlands. Messiaen really loved birds. But he also considered the modernist qualities of their songs as a means of developing his own musical language.
The most difficult aspect of these works concerns their episodic structures. Each of them appeared as a series of arbitrary events, despite many recurring elements. The most extreme is the central work of the cycle, "La Rousserolle Effarvatte", a bold 30-minute piece, both captivating and confusing. Yet, as Mr. Aimard played to complete the Sunday afternoon series at the Venetian Theater, every twinkling, lush and intense moment mingled.
It was a perfect touch that in a space above a row of lights near the stage, there was a bird's nest. A bird mother continued to fly with what looked like pieces of food to feed her family. Other birds visited too - sometimes to sing, sometimes just to listen.
Caramoor takes the wing! Celebrate birdsong
Played Saturday and Sunday at Caramoor, Katonah, N.Y.
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