Clément Janequin, famous in his own day, remains so today for his hundreds of delightful French chansons. While the dramatic La guerre may have been more widely known during Janequin's lifetime, the whimsical Le chant des oiseaux (Song of the birds) composed around 1520 is now the most famous of them all. Janequin was fond of onomatopoeic effects—singers making sounds rather than words—in his chansons, and in Le chant des oiseaux that fondness prods the composer, appropriately enough, to write many passages in which the singers do not so much sing as make bird-calls to one another!

Le chant des oiseaux, or Réveillez vous, as it is more properly titled (after its incipit), is, like all save a very few of Janequin's chansons, written for four voices and was first published by the legendary Parisian printer Pierre Attaingnant in 1528. It has five clearly delineated sections of music, each of which makes a strong cadence at the end, and each of which, save the last as compared to the fourth, is longer than the one preceding it; each section grows progressively more full of bird-call sounds.

After the brief opening portion of music, each section commences with the same little cell of bass-tenor quasi-imitation. Examples of the bird-call sounds that have made this chanson so famous and which make it so fun to sing are: "huit huit huit huit," "fi ti fi ti frr," "oyti oyti trr," "turri turri qrr" and, in dense imitation in the final section, "coqu coqu coqu."

© All Music Guide