Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time'

I had been listening to this piece some when we were reading Sebald; the dissonance of birdsong transcriptions placed amid those strangely unnerving piano chords and menacing clarinet runs—plus the fact that Messiaen composed and first performed the piece in a prison camp in Görlitz during WWII—felt like they brought something to bear on Sebald's meditations on the natural world as a backdrop for the horrors of the 20th Century.

And then it shows up again in Outline! Here is the excerpt:

Presently Clio, the pianist, put her hand up. She said that she too had found it difficult to write about an animal. She knew nothing about animas: she had never even had a pet [...] But the assignment caused her to notice things differently: walking home, she had not looked at the things she looked at but instead had become, as she walked, increaingly aware of birds, not just the sight of them but also their sound, which, once she attuned her ear to it, she realized she could hear constantly all around her. She remembered then a piece of music she had not listened to for a long time, by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom. (p. 205–6)

Here it takes on a slightly different valence, due to Cusk's preoccupation with the way individuals (perhaps especially artists?) define themselves in the negative, by their relation to other lives and other stories. Messiaen paid attention to the birdsong because he was not, could not be, the bird.