Realism in Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques: A Correlation Analysis

One of the most famous composers of the 20th century, Olivier Messiaen, drew some of his greatest inspirations from birds. Messiaen, a devout Catholic throughout his life, saw birds as perhaps the greatest musicians with abilities that seemed divinely endowed. He studied birds from all around the world and captured some of their magic in the form of musical transcriptions in his work which he claimed to be “parfaitement authentiques”[2]. In fact, while most musicologists agree that some of Messiaen’s compositions do bear striking artistic similarities to real birdsongs, there has been little in the way of substantiating Messiaen’s claim with rigorous analysis to quantify such claims. The research presented in this paper aims to do just that. In essence, it focuses on testing several sections of Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques by comparing specific musical transcriptions in it to actual birdsong recordings that were used to compose those pieces. This project aims to extend upon the research done on the same subject by a musicology professor and a Messiaen scholar at Cornell University, Dr. Robert Fallon. It does this by employing a much more mathematical approach to quantitatively measure and evaluate the correlations that may arise between the birdsong and the music. This research project had two distinct phases of progression. The first phase was a ten week long summer project that dealt with much of the preliminary research on Messiaen, his music, and his fascination with birdsong. During the summer, a lot of the algorithms that are used to analyze, graphically represent, and quantify the similarities between the