Over the past few decades, the programming at our symphony concerts has become routine and predictable. I’m certainly not the only one to notice this, but almost every program follows one of two patterns: Either overture, concerto, intermission, symphony; or, overture, smaller symphony (perhaps Mozart), intermission and then big concerto (like Rachmaninoff Third). Over and over, this pattern holds, which leaves a lot of great music never played. Programming has become stultified.
And even the list of symphonies and concertos that do regularly make the cut has shrunk to a roster of “fan favorites.” When was the last time you heard a live performance of, say, the Bruckner Sixth or the Joachim Violin Concerto? They used to be played — they show up in old programs.
Of course, you can find recordings of everything. If you want an Atterberg symphony, there are multiple CDs on Amazon. But go to Symphony Hall and you will wait a very long time and grow your beard very gray.
There is a particular class of music that has suffered by this development: those shorter, once-familiar staples of both concerts and Looney-Tunes animations. They used to be a regular part of symphony concerts but now are seen as “not serious enough” for well-bred audiences seeking morally and spiritually uplifting artistic experiences. That is too bad, because a lot of this music is absolutely brilliant, and what is more everyone loves it, to the point of being able to whistle the tunes.
The conductor Thomas Beecham once said, “Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.” And, “Music first and last should sound well, should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.”
Beecham was one of the greatest conductors of the 20th Century, and could lead a great performance of a Beethoven symphony, so he wasn’t a mere light-weight. But he regularly included in his programs what he called “lollipops,” which are the smaller, brighter pieces that get short shrift nowadays, pieces such as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite or Handel’s Largo from Xerxes. There were excerpts from longer pieces, and shorter concerted works for piano or violin soloists that weren’t full-lengths concertos. When was the last time you heard a live performance of Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso? It is a brilliant show piece for a virtuoso violinist.
There are several registers of concert music. At the top sits the top-hat and tails music of Brahms and Beethoven. At the lower end are the Pops concerts with their orchestrated show tunes and movie scores. Arthur Fiedler ruled that kingdom, and included lightweight but catchy music by Leroy Anderson or Albert Ketèlbey. In between there are the New Years concerts of Strauss waltzes and polkas. Fiedler often included some of the more serious music in his Boston Pops programs, but those works have all mostly disappeared from Carnegie or Severance halls.
If you look at symphony programs from a hundred years ago, or two hundred, you find these shorter pieces sprinkled in among the symphonies and tone poems, with no apologies made for their simple popularity. Concerts, after all, are meant to be entertainment.
In Haydn’s day, when middle class supplanted the aristocracy as the prime audience for concert music, his programs included singers, soloists, maybe a chorus and a symphony (then called an “Overture”), which often had its movements split up, with bits of song or violin music in between. It was a varied experience, more like a music hall show than a serious artistic event. They were meant to be popular; meant to sell tickets.
Even in the earlier 20th century, concerts featured both heavy and light classics. But the helium has fizzled out of the balloon.
In the LP era, Beecham released several records made up solely of these lighter, brighter gems, in albums titled “Lollipops.”
They were once the common cultural inheritance of American and European culture. They made up the bulk of recordings from the first half of the 20th century, when 78 rpm records could contain only about 5 minutes on a side, which made recordings of entire symphonies or complete operas both exorbitantly expensive and with 20 or 30 sides on 12-inch discs, really, really heavy to haul around. And so, shorter, popular pieces, like the encores of violinist Fritz Kreisler, became best sellers. I am old enough to have once owned piles of 78 rpm classical music recordings.
A last vestige of that can be found in the recitals of Itzhak Perlman. I’ve seen him several times and it’s always the same. A warm-up sonata, played very well, but nothing special, followed by a major piece performed to blow your socks off (I heard him do the Strauss Violin Sonata — a piece not thought of as among Strauss’ best work — and make it sound like the greatest thing every written for the fiddle); then, after intermission, he spends the last half of the recital playing old short pieces, sometimes requests, and tells corny jokes in between — real Borscht-Belt material. And so, we hear Hora Staccato and Liebesfreud, pieces otherwise consigned to history.
But why couldn’t symphony orchestras do something similar, make half a program of shorter tchochkes and tuneful shorter pieces. Perhaps load them up in the first half of a concert and follow that with a second-half major symphony.
Or, do it like Perlman and leave the audience warm and fuzzy as they leave the auditorium humming the old familiar tunes of Offenbach or Ferde Grofé.
Somehow, symphony programs need to be decongested, and let breathe more freely. And there is all this wonderful music that is kept in storage that should be pulled out and given some sunshine.
Happiness is a strange emotion, not a single thing, but really an umbrella term for a diffuse group of hard-to-define states. Periodically, studies are published about which nation is the happiest (usually, it seems, a Scandinavian country.) But what they are measuring is a rather tepid version of happiness. Usually, if we ask if someone is happy, what we mean is an absence of problems — basically a neutral state in which we are not currently threatened, hurting, being oppressed, or worried. “Are you happy?” “Yeah, sure, I guess so.” Enough to eat, a roof over the head, a relationship that isn’t a chore, no pending hospital bills or tax audits.
Really, that is a condition to be wished for, as dull as it sounds. For most people in the world, its achievement would be a godsend. So, I don’t want to downplay such a state. Not getting bombed is a net positive. Yet, there are other happinesses. Falling in love, birth of a child, success at work — these all provide a joyful uplift that raises the psyche above the day-to-day and makes life more radiant, if only briefly. It is a state we cannot maintain over long periods without being considered a bit loopy. So, we return back to the state of happiness that is unremarkable.
But, as adults, we can watch our children at play and recognize in their faces such a state of unreflective happiness that can only break our hearts. Oh, what they don’t know yet about being alive. It’s not just an emotion: The entire body explodes with it.
There is what I might call “body happiness,” which they express in movement, in play, in dancing and skipping, singing, letting out squeals that express the inner state that, as adults, we can only mourn the loss of. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.”
I mention all this because one of the reasons I listen to music — primarily, for me, what is called classical music — is its ability to evoke emotions in its listeners. They arise sympathetically and are often emotions more subtle than mere language can name. It has been said that music is more precise than words, and I recognize that, whenever I am moved by a quartet or sonata but cannot speak exactly the words that would distort the emotion into easily fixed categories.
A standard symphony moves from thought to thought, emotion to emotion, in ways that express the same sort of progress a story makes, beginning, middle, end. Episodes all build together to a longer, coherent emotional or intellectual ride. Our limbic system moves along with that progress and we can basically take our emotional selves through the moves. The widest range is the most completely human.
And one of the things music can express is that ebullient, body happiness, so that we can feel it again.
Mostly, it jumps out of a single movement in the whole, or even a few bars in the movement, but it is inexpressible joy, and it makes our body move, to tap toes or sway our bodies to and fro, often with a surprised smile on our faces. I think of the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, for instance, or the scherzo from Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony. I can’t sit still while listening.
George Frideric Handel has two “happy”numbers in his Acis and Galatea. The opening chorus sings of “Oh the pleasures of the plains, happy nymphs and happy swains,” which extolls the life of the peasants, and a love duet that repeats endlessly, “Happy, happy, happy we.” It all sets up the tragic ending.
But, there are a very few works that take that body happiness from start to finish, works you can play or stream, that will infallibly lift your mood and remind you of the happiness that is upwards of neutral, and can replace all the fret and sorrow for the length of its performance, and usually, for some time after, as you bathe in the memory of its tunes.
There are at least eight of these that I can name, which always leave me uplifted, my senses turned up several notches, and my memory of childhood’s version of happiness is re-animated.
Prime among these is Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. It bounces and sings through five distinct movements, each of which floods with tune, rhythm and color, anchored by the bottom notes of the double bass.
It was written in 1819, when Schubert was 22 years old, and before the lingering illness that eventually killed him nine years later. The haunting of death darkens the later String Quintet that he completed in 1828, just two months before his death. But the “Trout” is the antithesis of all that: Life giving, life affirming, joyful from first bar to last. What can you do when every tune is an ear-worm. Once inside your body, you carry the “Trout” with you the rest of your life. Play it every time you need it.
Less well-known, but even more relentless is Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit, or “The Ox on the Roof.” Milhaud wrote it in 1919 after living in Brazil for two years in the French diplomatic service, and quotes dozens of Brazilian folk songs, adapted into a dance-hall band playing Latin rhythms, complete with güiro. He employs a polytonal technique, where different parts of the band play in different keys at the same time, giving the whole a piquancy and aliveness that has a feeling of spontaneity, like an amateur band in a smoky bar. It’s always just about to come apart.
Written in the Baroque form of ritornello, with an 8-bar tune coming back over an over between alternate dances, it has some 20 Brazilian tunes buried in it, with infectious beats that express the unabashed happiness of a sweaty dance hall. Evybody dance now!
Mostly we think of Johannes Brahms as a sober German burgher writing symphonies with the seriousness required of höchste Deutsches Kunst. But the boy could let his hair down, which he did with two sets of vocal quartets, Liebeslieder Waltzes, op. 52 and op. 65.
Brahms made his living, early in his career, when he moved to Vienna, as leader of various choruses such as the Singakademie and Musikverein, for which he wrote tons of choral music and songs. So, he had a popular streak in him.
The 33 songs, each no longer than a minute or two, celebrate bourgeois domestic love in tunes so meltingly gemütlich that you will have them running through your head for days. They were meant to be sung in homes or in taverns, so they are best with normal voices, not the operatically trained soloists that so often record the set. “Ich gäbe dir so gern hunderttausend Küsse” — “I long to give you a hundred thousand kisses.”
When Georges Bizet was a mere stripling of 17, he wrote a Symphony in C as an exercise for his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. It was never performed in his lifetime and ultimately forgotten about, until it was rediscovered in 1933, and performed two years later by Felix Wiengartner, a suitable conductor, whose first name means “happy.”
Bouncy and tuneful from first note to last, it has proven hugely popular since then, and one wonders why Bizet never had it published, in fact, never even mentioned it. It is a masterpiece, but not on one of those marble pedestals, but the kind that makes your ears grateful to be on your head. It is breezy and fluent and just makes you happy to be alive.
Georges Balanchine choreographed it for the Paris Opera Ballet, and I was lucky enough to see the New York City Ballet perform it with a live orchestra at the Palais Garnier in Paris, (where it was first performed in 1947). One of the highlights of my life.
Also a youthful work is Serge Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, written in 1916 when he was a conducting student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. When one of his teachers, Boris Asafyev, mused “that there is no true joyfulness to be found in Russian music,” as Prokofiev wrote, he responded with one of the happiest works ever written by a Russian.
And so, he wrote in his diary, “I composed a new finale, lively and blithe enough for there to be a complete absence of minor triads in the whole movement, only major ones.”
It displays what is often called the composer’s “wrong note Romanticism,” with catchy tunes and ascerbic harmonies, and was meant to mimic the spirit of Haydn and Mozart. What a joy.
Much shorter, at merely five minutes, but so fresh and lively as to become its composer’s most frequently performed piece, the overture Leonard Bernstein wrote to his musical Candide just can’t stop laughing, and teasing, with bubbling wit and elan.
The musical (or operetta — it could never entirely make up its mind and went through multiple reworkings) never quite caught on the way West Side Story has, but its overture, shaped as a mock Rossini overture, is irresistible.
Johann Strauss II produced music the way a lawn sprinkler sprays water. The “Waltz King” composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music and several operettas, all of surprisingly consistent craftsmanship.
No one in his right mind, though, would sit for all of it; before too long the program would become monotonous: How do you tell one polka from another. That is, except for the large handful of truly memorable masterpieces, all of which will raise you spirits and make you want to dance.
I mean, the Blue Danube, the Voices of Spring, Tales of the Vienna Woods, the Artist’s Life, the Kaiser Waltz — a CD full of the best Strauss is a must-have for any collection. It’s hardly surprising that Brahms envied Strauss’ gift for melody. Each is basically a tone poem in three-four time. Lift the spirits, make you smile and move your body.
Finally, there is Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, which displays a childlike joy in just spinning tunes, which is hardly surprising, since he wrote those tunes when he was a child, between the ages of 10 and 13. When he turned 20, he reworked the tunes into this four-movement suite for strings, with movements titled “Boisterous Bouree,” “Playful Pizzicato,” “Sentimental Sarabade,” and “Frolicsome Finale.” It premiered in 1934 with Britten conducting.
Since then, it has been recorded dozens of times, usually as a filler on discs with other Britten pieces.
There are other joyful pieces, but these are eight that come immediately to mind. They are each available in videos on YouTube, and worth seeking out, especially if you’re having a bit of a down day.
French composer Camille Saint-Saens was smarting from a concert tour in Germany that didn’t go over well, and so, in 1886, he withdrew to small Austrian village and wrote a short piece about music critics, which he called Personnages à longue oreilles, or “Characters with long ears,” in which the critics bray in imitation of asses — “hee-haw.” It is barely 45 seconds long, but it seems to have given him a bigger idea.
And so, he wrote thirteen accompanying short, mostly comic, compositions, each describing another animal, and had them played privately as La Carnaval des Animaux, or “The Carnival of Animals.” He wrote his publisher in Paris that he knew he should be working seriously on his Third Symphony, but that instead, he was having “such fun.”
Yet, fun wasn’t what he wanted to be remembered for. He was to be a serious and honored composer of five symphonies, many concertos and 12 operas. And so, he refused to allow the Carnival of Animals to be published until after his death.
The irony is that, along with his Danse Macabre and the Bacchanale from his opera Samson et Dalila, what he is best remembered for, and most loved, is this 25-minute-long musical menagerie. In fact, his best-known piece is undoubtedly The Swan, for cello and piano, the second-to-last section of the Carnival.
Many of the pieces parody famous music by other composers and popular songs, but I want to pick out, in particular, the second section, Poules et Coqs (“Hens and Roosters”), which gets its main theme from a 1726 piece for harpsichord by Jean-Philippe Rameau, called La Poule (“the Hen”), from his Suite in G from his Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin.
You can see the similarity, even in these few bars.
But that set me off on a search for other music about or imitating animals. It’s not just “Old MacDonald” and his “oink, oink, here and an oink, oink there,” but in fact, a long history of musical animals. Some famous, some obscure.
Of course, such animal imitations go back to prehistory, if we believe the musicologists, who tell us that they often feature in folk songs, from all around the world. “Old MacDonald” is only one of them in English. But there are Chinese songs, Turkish songs, Swahili songs, all with animal noises as part of their lyrics.
But I was most interested in Western art music, after the invention of musical notation and printing, where the music could be tracked down and maybe even listened to (on YouTube when available).
The earliest I found was from the middle of the 13th century, a ditty called Sumer is icumin in, with its lyrics “lhude sing cucu,” which have been set to various tunes, most of those I have heard include a melodic line that imitates the falling third of the cuckoo birdcall.
No doubt because the cuckoo’s call is so distinct and so clearly a falling third, it is about the most frequently used birdsong in classical music, as we will see (followed by the trilling of the nightingale).
Indeed, the next entry is Par Maintes Foy, by 14th century composer Jean Vaillant, which not only has the singers call out the cuckoo and the nightingale, but also the goldfinch, starling and quail. “Lire, lire, lirelon,” Toowee, toowee, toowee.”
But it isn’t all birds. In 1505, Josquin de Prez, perhaps the most famous of all early composers, published his El Grillo, which has its singers imitate the sound of a cricket.
Clement Jannequin (11485-1558) wrote Le Chant des Oiseaux (“Song of the Birds”) with a blackbird singing “Ti-ti, pi-ti;” the nightingale trilling on “Frian, frian;” and the cuckoo again doing his “Cu cu, cu cu.”
Pierre Passereau (1503-1553) wrote Il est Belle et Bon, in which a wife praises her husband for being so compliant and even feeding the chickens, which she then imitates “co co co co da.”
In his Book of Ayres with a Triplicitie of Musicke, from 1606, John Bartlett published a madrigal called Of All the Birds That I Do Know, in which words get repeated in a way that clearly evokes the chatter of birds. “Of all the birds that I do know, Philip my sparrow hath no peer … Philip will cry still, ‘yet, yet, yet, yet, yet, yet.’”
As we leave the vocal Renaissance and enter the more instrumental Baroque age, we begin having fiddles and hautboys imitating various birds and beasts.
Sonata Representativa (1669) by Heinrich Biber dedicates a movement each to imitations of nightingales, cuckoos, frogs, hens and roosters, quails and cats. Written for violin and continuo, it alternates short interludes with sections depicting animal sounds. After a Preludio, a Nightingale on the violin sings four eighth notes repeated and a long trill over a pedal; a Cuckoo hits repeated fast eighth notes making the usual cuckoo sound; then come Frogs with an appoggiatura of dissonant seconds, sounded together, and resolved upward, over and over to make croak; Hens cluck with upward portamento; quail have a repeated dotted rhythm “dah, da-dah;” a Cat comes mewing portamenti in nursery-rhyme-like tune; then all is rounded off with a march.
Georg Phillip Telemann wrote his Alster Overture, with a fourth movement imitating “Concertizing Frogs and Crows.” There is also a swan in another movement.
Of course, the most famous and familiar sounds come from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In the opening movement of the four concertos, we hear the squawking of birds. In the second movement, he has dogs barking, and in Summer, the slow movement has the strings buzzing around as a swarm of flies.
But it wasn’t only the Seasons: In his Flute Concerto, op. 10, no. 3, “Il Gardellino,” he has the flute imitate a goldfinch.
The keyboard is well represented, too. In addition to Rameau’s La Poule, there is Louis-Claude Daquin’s The Cuckoo and Francois Couperin’s Le Moucheron (“The Gnats”), to say nothing of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata No. 30 in E-flat, known as the “Cat Fugue,” with a tune that imitates a cat walking distractedly up a harpsichord keyboard (an early version, I guess, of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys).
Then, there’s Georg Friedrich Händel’s Organ Concerto No. 13, known as “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” from 1739, with birdsong in the second movement.
There’s no counting the birds, beasts and bugs in the music of Franz Joseph Haydn. He loved a good joke, and among his 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets (to say nothing of his 41 piano trios, 52 piano sonatas, and 126 baryton trios — not counting the additional 36 baryton works for that obsolete instrument with other pairings) you can find Symphony No. 82, “The Bear;” Symphony No. 83, “The Hen;” String Quartet op. 33, no. 3, “The Bird;” Quartet op. 50, no. 6, “The Frog;” Quartet op. 64, no. 5, “The Lark.”
And in his magnum opus, The Creation, in Part 2, describing Days 5 and 6 of the biblical creation, he has the orchestra imitate multiple birds and animals, including an eagle, a whale, a stag, lowing cattle, and even a worm.
As we move into the Romantic 19th century, the animals are truly fruitful and multiply, beginning with the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which ends with a cadenza that quote quail, nightingale and cuckoo.
So, let’s make a quick list — as quick as it can be with such a long zoo parade. There is Schubert’s song, The Trout; Robert Schumann’s Papillon and the Prophet Bird; the braying donkey in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Chopin’s Etude, op. 25, no. 9, known as “The Butterfly Etude.” Not forgetting that it was said that Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was inspired by the composer watching his dog, named Marquis, chasing its tail.
Cats screech over and over in the Cat Duet, attributed to Gioacchino Rossini (jury’s out on the authorship).
To continue: There are birdsongs in the woodwinds in Bedrich Smetana’s Bohemian Woods and Fields; The Flight of the Bumble Bee, from the opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov; The Lark by Mikhail Glinka; the Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; the “Dying Swan” and the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; and The Swans of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius.
In Scandanavia also, we have, but Edvard Grieg: The Butterly; Little Bird; The Pig; The Horsefly and the Fly; and Cow Call. And from his contemporary Norwegian composer The Hare and the Fox by Harald Saeverud.
Serge Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableau, op. 39, no. 2 for piano is called “The Sea and the Gulls.” Enrique Granados wrote The Maiden and the Nightingale. And Richard Strauss caused some grumpiness and consternation in his staid German audience when, in the middle of his tone poem Don Quixote, he has the orchestra imitate a herd of sheep. But Strauss was no stranger to vulgarity: It is one of his strong points.
Which brings us up to date with Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, which gives us, in order: a lion; hens and roosters; wild asses; tortoises, the elephant, kangaroos, fish in an aquarium, personnages a longue oreilles; a cuckoo in the woods; birds in the air (aviary); pianists practicing scales; fossils; the swan; and a finale that brings back many of the menagerie.
But it’s not over yet. As we move into the 20th century (and the winding-up of the 19th), there are some very beautiful evocations of nature and the animals in it. Such as: Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Or the fourth movement of his North Country Sketches, called “The March of Spring: Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors.”
Ralph Vaughn Williams gave us one of the most beautiful violin show-off pieces in his The Lark Ascending. He also put some swarm sounds in the overture to his ballet The Wasps. Edward Elgar wrote for voices a very peculiar piece called Owls: An Epitaph. Pianist Leopold Godowsky gave us, in his Java Suite, a movement called “Chattering Monkeys.”
Claude Debussy wrote Poissons d’Or (“Goldfish”) in his Images, Book 2, no. 3; and his counter-Impressionist Maurice Ravel wrote Oiseaux Triste (“Sad Birds”) in his Miroirs. Paraguayan guitar virtuoso Agustin Barrios wrote Las Abejas (“The Bees”).
Ottorino Respighi took music from early composers and reworked and orchestrated it in his Gli Ucelli (“the Birds”), with movements called “The Dove,” “The Hen,” “The Nightingale,” and “The Cuckoo.” But he goes one better in his Pines of Rome, by including an actual sound recording of a real nightingale. (Tape recorded animal sounds return later in the century.)
Whole chapters might be given over to Gustav Mahler, who began his very first symphony with cuckoo calls, and inserted all sorts of animals, birds, and natural sounds into his music, including cow bells in his Sixth Symphony and a donkey braying in his Third, so say nothing of the sleigh bells in the Fourth, fish in his song Saint Anthony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes. They show up again in his Second Symphony. Nature is never far from the surface in Mahler’s music.
But more than in Mahler, bird song is everywhere in the music of Olivier Messiaen. The man was obsessed with bird sounds. He used them often as the source of his thematic material (I hesitate to call them tunes), not simply transcribed, but often lowered in pitch, slowed down radically, or even played upside down or backwards.
His 1958 Catalogue d’Oiseaux (“Catalog of Birds”) is a collection of 13 pieces for piano, each of which is based on the call of a different bird, running from the Alpine chough, the Eurasian golden oriole, the blue rock thrush and the tawny owl, through the woodlark, Cetti’s warbler, the common buzzard and the Eurasian curlew. The whole catalog takes just short of three hours to perform.
Then, there is the Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux (“Small Sketches of Birds”) from 1985, six short piano pieces, about 2 minutes each, that picture blackbird, skylark, thrush and robin. The L’Abîme d’Oiseaux (“Abyss of Birds”) is one movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. Le Merele Noire (“Blackbird”) is from Le Reveil des Oiseaux (“Dawn Chorus”), La Fauvette des Jardins (“Garden Warbler”) — on and on through his works, the birds are the foundation of his music. A devout Catholic, Messiaen saw birds and their song as emblematic of the beauty of God’s creation.
Although, to be honest, it is usually hard to hear the music as bird calls, since they are so transformed by the composer. You kind of have to take his word for it.
It’s hard to keep up with Bela Bartok, also. He wrote many short piano pieces, some of which bear the names of animals. But there’s The Diary of a Fly (Mikrokosmos vol. 6, no. 42), and the famous Bear Dance from his Ten Easy Pieces.
But he is best known for the several “Night Music” pieces, from his Out of Doors suite for piano; the slow movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and the middle of his Piano Concerto No. 3. Wikipedia lists some 20 compositions where Bartok employs his Night Music, which imitates the sounds of a Hungarian summer evening, with insects chirping, birds singing and frogs croaking. The effect can be miraculous.
(Duke Ellington wrote his own versions of night music in his Queen’s Suite, with movements called “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” “Lightning Bugs and Frogs,” and “Apes and Peacocks.” I mention it here because, really, Ellington is classical music.)
Igor Stravinsky has elephants dancing in his Circus Polka, and nightingales warbling in his Chant du Rossignol. It has been reported that his Rite of Spring contains quotations from Russian folk songs about animals. I’m taking the musicologists’ word for that.
Sergei Prokofiev has his own menagerie in Peter and the Wolf, and Malcolm Arnold attempted to add animals to Saint-Saens’ zoo with his own Carnival of the Animals, written for the comic Hoffnung Festival in 1960. His additions are: The Giraffe; Sheep; Cows; Mice; Jumbo; and Chiroptera (Bats) — the last of which is a joke, since the musicians “play” so high in frequency that “only bats can hear it.” The audience hears silence until a final tinkling on a bell.
Several 20th century animal-musics were created as humor or jokes, including The Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs, op. 29, no. 8, by Samuel Barber; The Cat and the Mouse by Aaron Copland; the Promenade (Walking the Dog), written by George Gershwin for the Fred Astaire film, Shall We Dance, and The Procession of the Cats on Solstice Night by Bohuslav Martinu.
Then, there’s Ferde Grofe’s On the Trail from the Grand Canyon Suite, with its clopping hooves and braying donkey.
The Critics
Francis Poulenc took on the grasshopper, bear, lion and roosters for his Les Animaux Modèles, a ballet from 1942 based on the fables of La Fontaine.
I mentioned earlier Respighi’s recorded nightingales in The Pines of Rome. Alan Hovaness famously used recordings of the humpback and bowhead whales in his And God Created Great Whales. (George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae does not include actual whale songs, but uses electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano to imitate both whale songs and seagulls.)
And in 1972, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his Cantus Arcticus, subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, which uses recorded sounds of birds from northern Finland against a symphony orchestra.
This list does not exhaust the trove of animal-inspired concert music, but it is what I could dig up without spending two years on a doctoral dissertation. It is a tradition that continues, both in a simple vein, as with Sally Beamish’s Songs from Hafez, which reference the nightingale, the peacock and the hoopoe, and the more avant-garde work, such as Chris Hughes’ piece for cello and bird recording, Slow Motion Blackbird, which repeats the blackbird call for six minutes, slowing down each bar of music 5 percent (without changing pitch) until it is a slow, almost unfollowable adagio.
Most of this music is easily available, either on commercial recordings or through a YouTube video. Chirp chirp.
Richard Nilsen 