Birds in music

Birds have played a role in Western Classical music since at least the 14th century, when composers such as Jean Vaillant quoted birdsong in some of their compositions. Among the birds whose song is most often used in music are the nightingale and the cuckoo.

Composers and musicians have made use of birds in their music in different ways: they can be inspired by birdsong; they can intentionally imitate bird song in a composition; they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works, as Ottorino Respighi first did; or, like the cellist Beatrice Harrison in 1924 and more recently the jazz musician David Rothenberg, they can duet with birds.

Authors including Rothenberg have claimed that birds such as the hermit thrush sing on traditional scales as used in human music, but at least one songbird, the nightingale wren, does not choose notes in this way. However, among birds which habitually borrow phrases or sounds from other species such as the starling, the way they use variations of rhythm, relationships of musical pitch, and combinations of notes can resemble music. The similar motor constraints on human and avian song may have driven these to have similar song structures, including "arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases", long notes at the ends of phrases, and typically small differences in pitch between adjacent notes, at least in birds with a strong song structure like the Eurasian treecreeper.

Musicologists such as Matthew Head and Suzannah Clark believe that birdsong has had a large though admittedly unquantifiable influence on the development of music. Birdsong has influenced composers in several ways: they can be inspired by birdsong; they can intentionally imitate bird song in a composition; they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works; or they can duet with birds.

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