DOWNLOAD THE BOOKLET

Messiaen, Roché, and the Decline of Biodiversity

By Patrick Frémeaux

There are invisible lineages that pass neither through institutions nor schools, but through a shared way of listening to the world. The one that connects Olivier Messiaen to audio-naturalist Jean-Claude Roché belongs to this rare lineage. By making birds the first musicians of creation, Messiaen did more than enrich musical language: he shifted our perspective. He asserted that human music was not an invention, but an imperfect translation of a more ancient, vaster song already inscribed within the living world.

Roché, for his part, did not seek to translate. He chose to listen. Where Messiaen noted, transcribed, and composed, Roché remained faithful in another way: to the field, to breath, to presence. He did not want to transform birds into music, but to allow the music of birds to emerge. Microphone in hand, he traveled the world as one might move through an open score, attentive to rhythms, silences, interactions, and soundscapes in their continuity. In his work, birdsong is never isolated: it is relationship, context, ecosystem.

It is within this in-between space, between writing and recording, between art and science, that what I have called audio-naturalism was formed. And it is there that my own path became intertwined with Roché’s. By taking up, editing, and disseminating his work, by shaping more than one hundred and fifty recordings devoted to birdsong, I never felt I was producing a collection, but rather participating in a transmission. A fragile, almost urgent transmission, in a world where the voices of living things are gradually fading away.

Roché had amassed thousands of recordings, patiently and relentlessly, without always knowing what would become of them. He recorded because recording was necessary, much as one writes in order not to forget. My role was to move these traces from the status of archives to that of a shareable corpus, to give them an editorial form through which others might listen, learn, and feel.

Within this triangulation, Messiaen, Roché, and the editorial work I carried out at Frémeaux & Associés, emerges a continuity that transcends individuals. Messiaen revealed that birds were musicians. Roché showed that they must be listened to as such. And I have tried, in my own way, to ensure that this listening would not disappear, but circulate and become part of a collective memory. Bernard Fort accompanied us by publishing the reference book Listening to Birds and the Sounds of Nature with Frémeaux Pollen.

In this work of transmission, a new stage opens today with the reissue of Olivier Messiaen’s works, entrusted to Jean-Baptiste Mersiol. This is not merely a discographic restoration, but a gesture fully coherent with everything that came before: creating a dialogue between Messiaen’s musical writing and Roché’s attentive listening to the living world.

The Catalogue d’oiseaux, recorded in 1959 with Yvonne Loriod at the piano, appears here in all its breadth. Each piece, from Le Chocard des Alpes to La Rousserolle effarvatte, from Le Merle bleu to Le Courlis cendré, is not an imitation, but a recomposition of the sonic world. Messiaen unfolds a sensitive cartography of territories: mountains, marshes, garrigue landscapes, open skies. He does not merely notate songs; he inscribes within music the hours of the day, climates, silences, and tensions of the living world.

To this fresco are added Oiseaux exotiques, in which distant sonic worlds become orchestral material, and above all the Quartet for the End of Time, a work written in captivity during the war, where birdsong emerges as a figure of resistance and eternity. In the movement Abyss of the Birds, silence is never empty: it is the expectation of song, the promise of a life that persists.

The artistic direction behind this reissue therefore takes on its full meaning. Under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Mersiol, the goal is not simply to restore historic master recordings (Vega 1956, 1957, 1959, and Club Français du Disque 1957) but to restore clarity to a musical philosophy of the living world. To restore, contextualize, transmit: three gestures that prolong, in another form, what we sought to achieve with Roché.

For ultimately, Messiaen and Roché never ceased to dialogue, even from afar. One wrote the world into music; the other recorded it. One transformed; the other gathered. And today, by bringing these works together, editing them, and allowing them to circulate once again, the aim is to reunify these two gestures: listening and writing, capturing and transmitting.

In a world where birdsong is diminishing, where soundscapes are becoming simplified into silence, this reissue takes on a new dimension. It is no longer merely patrimonial. It becomes an act of memory and vigilance. To listen to Messiaen today is to hear what was once abundant, complex, vibrant. It is also to measure what is being lost.

Thus the same line continues: from Messiaen to Roché, from Roché to publishing, and from publishing to those who will listen. Not in order to preserve an untouched past, but to keep alive a fragile bond with the sonic world, and perhaps, through it, with life itself.

Patrick Frémeaux
Author of Après l’écocide (FAL3405)

© Frémeaux & Associés 2026

OLIVIER MESSIAEN ET LA DIRECTION ARTISTIQUE

CATALOGUES D’OISEAUX ET AUTRES OISEAUX

CD 1 : CATALOGUE D’OISEAUX Première partie

1. Le chocard des Alpes 8’51
2. La Bouscarle 10’15
3. Le merle de Roche 18’29
4. L’alouette Lulu 6’40
5. Le loriot 7’03
6. La rousserolle effarvatte Partie 1 19’36

CD 2 : CATALOGUE D’OISEAUX Deuxième partie

1. La rousserolle effarvatte Partie 2 10’04
2. La chouette hulotte 6’15
3. La buse variable 10’08
4. Le merle bleu 12’22
5. Le traquet stapazin 14’31
6. Le traquet rieur 9’02
7. L’alouette calandrelle 5’33

CD 3 : CATALOGUE D’OISEAUX (fin)
OISEAUX EXOTIQUES - QUATUOR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS

CATALOGUE D’OISEAUX (fin)

1. Le courlis cendré 9’30

OISEAUX EXOTIQUES

2. Oiseaux exotiques 13’54

QUATUOR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS

3. Liturgie de cristal 2’15
4. Vocalise pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps 3’55
5. Abîme des oiseaux 3’55
6. Intermède 5’03
7. Louange à l’éternité de Jésus 1’50
8. Danse de la fureur pour les sept trompettes 6’59
9. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps 7’51
10. Louange à l’immortalité 7’24

CD 1 : 3 X LP VEGA – VAL 11 – C 30 A 257(faces 1 & 2) – C 30 A 258 (face 3) – Matrices 30 BVG 865- 866- 867. 1959. Direction : Olivier Messiaen – Piano : Yvonne Loriod.

CD 2 : 3 X LP VEGA – VAL 11 – C 30 A 258 (faces4) – C 30 A 259 (faces 5 & 6)- Matrices 30 BVG 868-869-870. 1959. Direction : Olivier Messiaen – Piano : Yvonne Loriod.

CD 3 : (1) 3 X LP VEGA – VAL 11 - C 30 A 259 (face 6)- Matrice 30 BVG 870. 1959. Direction : Olivier Messiaen – Piano : Yvonne Loriod.

(2) LP VEGA – C 30 A 65. Matrice 30 BVG 280. 1956. Orchestre sous la direction de Rudolf Albert. Direction artistique : Olivier Messiaen.

(3-10) LP Club Français du Disque – 77 – 1957. Piano : Olivier Messiaen. Violon : Jean Pasquier. Clarinette : André Vacellier. Violoncelle : Etienne Pasquier.