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Works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams in the "Environs Messiaen" festival will be featured in a sound installation at the Johnson Museum and an outdoor performance at Cornell Plantations.

The sounds of the natural environment – and their inspiration on the music of composers like Olivier Messiaen, who used recordings of bird songs from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology – will be celebrated in a music festival March 5-9 at Cornell, “Environs Messiaen: Nature Rendered at the Keyboard.”

“Messiaen loved birdsong,” says pianist and festival co-director Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, a graduate student in music. “He’d construct an entire sound world around each bird’s voice, treating it much like a character in a play.”

The festival features events across campus – five concerts, four lectures, a film screening and a sound installation – and the talents of students and faculty, guest performers and music scholars. It is presented by the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Department of Music and Cornell Plantations.

One of the most influential and creative musicians of the 20th century, Messiaen (1908-1992) did not just hear sounds, but also saw and felt them as specific colors – a neurological condition known as synesthesia. His work reflects this complex perception of the world, suggesting deep connectivity throughout all of nature.

The keyboard instruments he used included the ondes Martenot, which will be heard in a concert, “Immeasurable Space,” March 5 at 8 p.m. in Sage Chapel. From its use in classic Hollywood film scores to the music of artists ranging from Édith Piaf to Radiohead, the electronic instrument’s history is explored in filmmaker Caroline Martel’s documentary “Wavemakers,” to be shown March 6 at 4 p.m. in B21 Lincoln Hall.

In honor of Cornell’s Sesquicentennial and the Lab of Ornithology’s centennial, the festival highlights a shared page in the histories of the lab and the Department of Music. From the 1950s on, Messiaen made extensive use of recordings from the Lab, and he and his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, visited Cornell in 1973 and performed excerpts from Messiaen’s “Catalogue d’oiseaux.”

A special performance, March 7 at 2 p.m. at the Lab of Ornithology, will commemorate that event. Ronald Hoy, the Merksamer Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior and an expert in animals’ use of sound, will give an introduction. Seating is limited and registration is required, at http://bit.ly/messiaenbirds. The performance will be streamed live at http://dl.allaboutbirds.org/concert.

Messiaen and Loriod also performed “Visions de l’Amen” at Cornell in 1973. The Environs Messiaen festival will culminate with that work March 8 in Barnes Hall Auditorium, in a two-piano recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovitch, presented as part of the Cornell Concert Series (tickets are available online).

Aimard, who was a student of Messiaen and Loriod, will offer a master class on “Catalogue d’oiseaux,” March 9 at 10 a.m. in Barnes Hall.

All festival events are free and open to the public except the March 8 Cornell Concert Series program.

In addition to works by Messiaen, the festival features music by 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams, whose electronic soundscape “Veils” will be played continuously from March 1-10 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. A March 8 performance of his “songbirdsongs” for piccolo and percussion will be held outdoors at Cornell Plantations (seating limited, online registration required).

The festival is the brainchild of pianists Xak Bjerken, a professor of performance; and McCullough, a DMA graduate student. Cosponsors include the Cornell Council for the Arts, the French Studies Program, the Institute for European Studies and the University Lectures Committee.

Based at Cornell, the Westfield Center promotes the work of performers, instrument makers and scholars through events, programs and publications.