rsc

I'm not doing a travelogue.

jwg will presumably post some pictures, eventually. I'm just going to throw in a few highlights (or sidelights) from our recent trip. This is the first one (in case you didn't notice).

The cuckoo and the nightingale figure in a lot of European romantic poetry and song. There is, in fact, a Handel organ concerto nicknamed "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale", and one can hardly dip into 19th-century art song without stumbling across nightingales right and left.

But while living in America one doesn't get much opportunity to hear the primary reference; there are no nightingales on this continent, and the only American species of cuckoo doesn't say its name. So I'm pretty sure that I'd never heard either bird live before.

But during our first night in Conques, I heard the fairly complicated song of a somewhat distant bird that sounded a lot to me like the occasional recording I've heard of actual nightingales (as opposed to the remarkably various musical representations of same). I couldn't be absolutely sure, as it had to compete with the snoring of somebody who was much nearer, and I later heard some daytime birds (probably finches) with equally complicated songs, but I'm going to choose to believe that it was an actual nightingale that I heard that night.

The next day, as we were hiking up the hill opposite Conques, we heard, coming from across the valley, an absolutely unmistakeable two-note call, a perfect descending major third, repeated monotonously. It sounded exactly like its representations by the clarinet in the second movement of Beethoven's 6th symphony and in Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals. So there's no doubt whatever about the cuckoo (discounting the remote possibility that somebody was hidden on the hillside playing monotonous thirds on a clarinet).