Natural selection | 17 May 2018

‘All fish in flood and fowl of flight/ Be mirthful now and make melody’ writes the poet William Dunbar in the verses that Sir Charles Hubert Parry set to music as Ode on the Nativity. In David Matthews’s new Ninth Symphony, one particular fowl does exactly that. The symphony’s central movement begins on strings: an idyll of grey skies and shivering leaves. Matthews gradually introduces blocks of woodwind and brass, including a heavily stylised burst of birdsong. And then, in the stillness of the movement’s closing bars, the E flat clarinet imitates the voice of what Matthews calls ‘my local song thrush’ — unmistakably drawn from life, but equally clearly showing the hand of the artist: heightened, pure, somehow more real than any field recording.

Naive? Yes and no: Messiaen made birdsong respectable in contemporary music, but many of his imitators — hearing only rhythmic complexity where he perceived divine harmony — end up sounding likea bag of spanners.