music can penetrate the core of our physical being. It can make us weep, or give us intense pleasure. Music, like being in love, can temporarily transform our whole existence. But the links between the art of music and the reality of human emotions are difficult to define; so difficult that, as we shall see, many distinguished musicians have abandoned any attempt to do so, and have tried to persuade us that musical works consist of disembodied patterns of sound which have no connection with other forms of human experience.
Can music be related to the sounds made by other species? The most obviously ‘musical’ of such sounds are those found in bird-song. Birds employ both noises and tones in their singing; but the proportion of definable tones is often high enough for some people to rate some bird-songs as ‘music’. Bird-song has a number of different functions. By locating the singer, it both advertises a territory as desirable, and also acts as a warning to rivals. Birds in search of a mate sing more vigorously than those who are already mated, thus supporting Darwin’s notion that song was originally a sexual invitation. Bird-song is predominantly a male activity, dependent upon the production of the male sex hormone, testosterone, although duets between male and female occur in some species. Given sufficient testosterone, female birds who do not usually sing will master the same repertoire of songs as the male.5
Charles Hartshorne, the American ornithologist and philosopher, claims that bird-song shows variation of both pitch and tempo: accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo, change of key, and variations on a theme. Some birds, like the Wood thrush Hylochicla mustelina, have a repertoire of as many as nine songs which can follow each other in a variety of different combinations. Hartshorne argues:
Bird songs resemble human music both in the sound patterns and in the behavior setting. Songs illustrate the aesthetic mean between chaotic irregularity and monotonous regularity … The essential difference from human music is in the brief temporal span of the bird’s repeatable patterns, commonly three seconds or less, with an upper limit of about fifteen seconds. This limitation conforms to the concept of primitive musicality. Every simple musical device, even transposition and simultaneous harmony, occurs in bird music.6
He goes on to state that birds sing far more than is biologically necessary for the various forms of communication. He suggests that bird-song has partially escaped from practical usage to become an activity which is engaged in for its own sake: an expression of avian joie de vivre.
Singing repels rival males, but only when nearby; and it attracts mates. It is persisted in without any obvious immediate result, and hence must be largely self-rewarding. It expresses no one limited emotional attitude and conveys more information than mere chirps or squeaks. In all these ways song functions like music.7
Other observers disagree, claiming that bird-song is so biologically demanding that it is unlikely to be produced unless it is serving some useful function.
Is it possible that human music originated from the imitation of bird-song? Géza Révész, who was a professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and a friend of Béla Bartók, dismisses this possibility on two counts. First, if human music really began in this way, we should be able to point to examples of music resembling bird-song in isolated pre-literate communities. Instead, we find complex rhythmic patterns bearing no resemblance to avian music. Second, bird-song is not easily imitated. Slowing down modern recordings of bird-songs has demonstrated that they are even more complicated than previously supposed; but one only has to listen to a thrush singing in the garden to realize that imitation of his song is technically difficult. Liszt’s ‘Légende’ for solo piano, ‘St François d’Assise: La Prédication aux oiseaux’, manages to suggest the twittering of birds in ways which are both ingenious and musically convincing. I have heard a tape of American bird-song which persuasively suggests that Dvořák incorporated themes derived from it following his sojourn in the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa. Olivier Messiaen made more use of bird-song in his music than any other composer. But these are sophisticated, late developments in the history of music. It is probable that early man took very little notice of bird-song, since it bore scant relevance to his immediate concerns.8
Lévi-Strauss affirms that music is in a special category compared with the other arts, and also agrees that bird-song cannot be the origin of human music.
If, through lack of verisimilitude, we dismiss the whistling of the wind through the reeds of the Nile, which is referred to by Diodorus, we are left with little but bird song – Lucretius’ liquidas avium voces – that can serve as a natural model for music. Although ornithologists and acousticians agree about the musicality of the sounds uttered by birds, the gratuitous and unverifiable hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relation between bird song and music is hardly worth discussing.9
Stravinsky points out that natural sounds, like the murmur of the breeze in the trees, the rippling of a brook or the song of a bird, suggest music to us but are not themselves music: ‘I conclude that tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.’10
It is not surprising that Stravinsky emphasizes organization as the leading feature of music, since he himself was one of the most meticulous, orderly, and obsessionally neat composers in the history of music. But his emphatic statement is surely right. Bird-song has some elements of music in it, but, although variations upon inherited patterns occur, it is too obviously dependent upon in-built templates to be compared with human music.
In general, music bears so little resemblance to the sounds made by other species that some scholars regard it as an entirely separate phenomenon. This is the view of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, who was, until his untimely death, Professor of Social Anthropology at the Queen’s University of Belfast, as well as being an accomplished musician.
There is so much music in the world that it is reasonable to suppose that music, like language and possibly religion, is a species-specific trait of man. Essential physiological and cognitive processes that generate musical composition and performance may even be genetically inherited, and therefore present in almost every human being.11
If music is indeed species-specific, there might seem to be little point in comparing it with the sounds made by other species. But those who have studied the sounds made by subhuman primates, and who have discovered what functions these sounds serve, find interesting parallels with human music. Gelada monkeys produce a wide variety of sounds of different pitches which accompany all their social interactions. They also use many different rhythms, accents, and types of vocalization. The particular type of sound which an individual produces indicates his emotional state at the time and, in the longer term, aids the development of stable bonds between different individuals. When tensions between individuals exist, these can sometimes be resolved by synchronizing and coordinating vocal expressions.
Human beings, like geladas, also use rhythm and melody to resolve emotional conflicts. This is perhaps the main social function served by group singing in people … Music is the ‘language’ of emotional and physiological arousal. A culturally agreed-upon pattern of rhythm and melody, i.e., a song, that is sung together, provides a shared form of emotion that, at least during the course of the song, carries along the participants so that they experience their bodies responding emotionally in very similar ways. This is the source of the feeling of solidarity and good will that comes with choral singing: people’s physiological arousals are in synchrony and in harmony, at least for a brief period. It seems possible that during the course of human evolution the use of rhythm and melody for the purposes of speaking sentences grew directly out of its use in choral singing. It also seems likely that geladas singing their sound sequences together synchronously and harmoniously also perhaps experience such a temporary physiological synchrony.12
We shall return to the subject of group arousal in the next chapter. Meanwhile, let us consider some other speculations about the origin
