Catalogue d’oiseaux

Album by Olivier Messiaen & Yvonne Loriod

Catalogue d'oiseaux is a cycle of thirteen piano pieces by French composer Olivier Messiaen, composed between 1956 and 1958. The works deploy Messiaen's characteristic modes of limited transposition, additive and non-retrogradable rhythms and detailed transcriptions of birdsong, creating dense, colouristic piano textures that reflect his interest in ornithology and liturgical notions of time, and they form a significant component of his mature solo-piano repertoire and mid-20th-century developments in harmonic and rhythmic language.