The extroverted and comic conclusion to Canteloube's fourth set of Songs of the Auvergne is Lou Coucut (The Cuckoo). The text has its nonsensical moments ("there are none more beautiful than the cuckoo that sings, than my cuckoo, than your cuckoo, than anybody's cuckoo," repeated a few times each verse), and of course Canteloube makes soloists throughout the orchestra bounce the two-note cuckoo motif around. The singer has an earthy, breathy interjection near the end of each verse, reminding us that this is a folk song, and Canteloube makes good use of a small brass complement around the words "if all the cuckoos chose to wear bells, they would sound like five hundred trumpets." It's designed to make an audience chuckle, even if the text's Auvergnat dialect is incomprehensible to most people.

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