There�s something about warm weather and the spunky new car (as opposed to the massive mommobile that is my usual mode of transport) that makes me 17 years old. I got up early this morning to drive to a local forest preserve for a quiet hike and I drove too fast all the way there with all the windows rolled down, the music cranked, and singing at the top of my lungs, banging out drum rhythms on the steering wheel at every stoplight.

Somehow the driving helped me feel a little less geeky about the morning activity, which involved not only hiking but prairie, woods, binoculars and lots of twittering. I�m not an experienced or avid bird watcher, but I do enjoy the process. Also I like my binoculars. They make me feel like a spy. Maybe I�m actually 7, not 17 today.

This is my favorite time of year to go to that particular preserve, as the mosquitoes have not yet spawned and it is not yet too hot to be able to comfortably hike across the prairie and back. And the prairie is where all the birds were this morning. The sound was incredible. Robins, meadowlarks, red-wing blackbirds and a number of other songs I�m not yet able to identify, all performing a collections of sound that was symphonic in scope.

Birdwatching, or listening, which is really what I like to do, is a very satisfying activity for a musician. What the sound in the prairie lacked in structure, it made up for in timbre and counterpoint. I found myself thinking about Olivier Messaien.

For those unfamiliar with Messaien, he is one of the quirkier composers of the twentieth century. He regularly claimed that he never listened to music by anyone else and therefore was completely uninfluenced, which is clearly untrue but it says a lot about the image he had of himself and his work. His compositions break so many rules that they offer as careful an accounting of compositional traditions as pieces that follow every one. He was a brilliant organist � I was fortunate to hear him play at Notre Dame the last summer I spent in Paris � and many of his organ compositions have become standard repertoire. There are two of his pieces that are on my personal can�t-live-without list: The quartet for the end of time and his opera St. Francis of Assisi.

Like many composers coming out of the Paris Conservatoire, Messaien published a treatise on harmony. Many such documents are profoundly uninteresting or redundant. A few offer insight into the works of the composers who wrote them. Messaien�s includes a chapter on bird songs, including a volume of page after page of transcriptions. I can�t say that listening to birds makes me want to transcribe their sounds and attempt to use them in some kind of formal composition, but I can understand how that might appeal. I had the privilege of playing tam-tam in a performance of Messaien�s �Oiseaux Exotiques� a number of years ago, which is made of a series of layers of the composers transcriptions of birdsongs (plus some other stuff). It bears absolutely no resemblance to anything avian, but it is interesting to listen to, a kind of organized chaos, much like the sounds in the prairie preserve this morning.

More successful attempts at recreating the actual sounds of birds were made in the Renaissance, when various bird names and sounds made up an elaborate code for sexual behavior (the best known of these is the use of cuckoo for the cuckold). These works were generally for a cappella voices. My personal favorite is Clement Janequin�s �Chanson des Oyseaux.� Very fun, if tricky to sing. That�s today�s recommended listening.

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