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Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques.

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Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques. By Peter Hill and Nigel Simeonc. (Landmarks in Music since 1950.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xii, 128 p. 1SBN-10: 0754656306; ISBN-IS: 9780754656302. $69.95.] Compact disc, music examples, appendix, bibliography, discography, index.

In their book Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux ex-otiques, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone examine a pivotal stage in Messiaen's compositional development when he turned to birdsong as a primary resource of musical material during the 1950s. Although Messiaen had incorporated stylized versions of birdsong in his music of the 1930s and 1940s, he rendered birdcalls with greater accuracy in subsequent decades. Messiaen became increasingly preoccupied with birdsong after World War II. He began a systematic study in the early 1950s, which was aided by consultations with the French ornithologist, Jacques Delamain. As Messiaen scholarship informs us, the composer sought refuge in the world of birdsong after the composition of the Livre d'orgue (1951-52), the culmination of his so-called experimental period, because he was experiencing a creative dead end in his response to post-war European serialism. In other words, Messiaen overcame a compositional crisis by assimilating birdsong into his music, a turning point in his development as a composer. That is...

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