Did birds teach humans to sing? I have no way of knowing but certainly, many composers have used direct quotations from bird songs and calls in their music.
The call notes of cuckoos and nightingales…and larks and roosters can be in many European works.
Here in America, Dvorak, while spending a summer in Spillville, Iowa, established a love/hate relationship with a scarlet tanager. Its song became the melodic basis for the “American Quintet.”
Amy Beach faithfully replicated the vesper serenade of “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” as did Randall Thompson in “Come In” from the choral cycle “Frostiana”
Bird quotations are obvious to birders, but often go unnoticed by musicologists.
A case in point is the “Symphony No. 2, the Romantic” by Howard Hanson. Though I have never found anything in liner notes or reviews, I like to think that during the summer he spent at Interlochen, Hanson became familiar with the pileated woodpecker and that he inserted its call in his symphony.
The suggestion that Hanson borrowed the trumpet passage from the “Woody Woodpecker Song” is ludicrous. The symphony preceded the cartoon character by several decades.
And it’s probably just my imagination, but who knows? Maybe Hanson really was inspired by a bird. And to me, as the fanfare for the Interlochen Theme, the call notes of the pileated woodpecker seem to celebrate a unique place where nature and music come together.
