Sully, Weismann, and so many others believed in. It was a machinery binding humans to animals, and culture to biology, all through the power of beauty. “To those who like to think of the human race as closely bound to the rest of the animal world,” wrote Sully, “it will be a very grateful thought that o’ the pleasure which our ear drinks in from divine melody … even the tiny and fragile warbler of the woods has its own appropriate experience.”74
ANIMAL AESTHETICS
At the crux of these debates about birds and humans was the question of that tiny warbler’s experience. “If our great biologist is correct,” wrote science writer Grant Allen, “this theory of sexual selection thus becomes of the first importance for the aesthetic philosopher, because they are really the only solid evidence for the existence of a love for beauty in the infra-human world.”75 Could animals have an aesthetic experience? Did they have taste, sensibility, artistry? Did sexual selection mean that animals cared about what was beautiful? These questions guided many notions of animal behavior at the end of the nineteenth century toward a reductive view of animals as machines, with music situated in a uniquely human domain of moral development.
Aesthetic theory since the eighteenth century had constructed aesthetics to be deeply entangled in civil and moral development. Lord Kames reminded art critics in the 1760s, “We need only reflect, that delicacy of taste necessarily heightens our feeling of pain and pleasure; and of course our sympathy, which is the capital branch of every social passion.”76 Nineteenth-century concepts of aesthetics built on this theory that, to quote historian Marjorie Garson, “sensibility adopts and elaborates on the link between aesthetic responsiveness and social feeling.”77 Thinkers such as Hegel, Helmholtz, and Fechner speculated broadly about the ties binding together aesthetics, society, and morality.78 Taste was the mark of moral cultivation and social bonding; according to historian John Finney, it was common knowledge that music “civilized, formed character and educated morally” those who learned it.79 In Spencer’s essay on music, these themes of moral and social development were very explicit. Music was “the basis of all the higher affections” because it had evolved to make humans sympathetic, “sharers in the joys and sorrows of others.”80 The ties between music, sociality, and moral sense were what made music “the difference between the cruelty of the barbarous and the humanity of the civilized.”81
Evolutionists opposed to animal aesthetics imagined birdsong as a precursor to human aesthetics that lacked human discrimination. “Even if it be admitted that they [the birds] really appreciate singing,” wrote music scholar and comparative psychologist Richard Wallaschek in 1893, “their discriminative taste for bird-minstrelsy could as little be called a feeling for music as their distinguishing one bird’s plumage from another amounts to a feeling for painting.”82 “Is the bird’s song a composition?” he had asked. “Certainly not … Birds have no conscious intention of charming.”83 Wallaschek’s colleague Carl Stumpf similarly argued that birds lacked the capacity for taste; instead, he claimed that aesthetic ability could be measured by the human (rational) ability to recognize transposed melodies, the musical analogue of translating language. (Stumpf never learned that Pavlov’s later work with dogs would disprove his claim.)84
Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s landmark text An Introduction to Comparative Psychology offered a definitive description of this approach in 1894. Morgan’s book outlined a law of behavioral study that has now served generations of scientists: “in no case is an animal activity to be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be fairly interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”85 “Morgan’s canon” gave scientists a reductive approach to behavior that was intended to put to rest spurious claims about animal consciousness by excluding animals from the life of the mind. In Morgan’s formulation, only humans had music; only humans had language; and, consequently, only humans had developed, rational souls.86
The reception of Morgan’s work was positive, with reviewers calling it “rare” and “vigorous.”87 Later studies of animals often turned to it as the gold standard, and Morgan’s canon became a widely accepted norm in laboratory psychology. “So successful did Morgan’s canon become,” wrote science historian Gregory Radick in 2007, “that it now takes some effort to see it as anything other than the crystallization of scientific good sense.”88
Morgan was particularly troubled by Darwinian sexual selection, in which animals expressed choice, emotion, and aesthetic sensibility through song. “Many biologists, for example, believe that birds select their mates from among numerous suitors because of their song or because of their bright plumage,” he wrote. “Does not this, it may be asked, imply that she has a standard of excellence, and selects that mate which she perceives as the nearer of the two to such standard? But … it does not necessarily follow that she perceives the relation, or compares the two competing males to an ideal standard, or even the one with the other.”89 Morgan’s explanation of a “standard of excellence” invoked Spencerian parallels between animals and human races, contrasting a “Somersetshire rustic’s” bland reaction to Wells Cathedral (a response corresponding to the bird’s lack of aesthetic reflection) to the “perceptive” mentality of aesthetic people (presumably of Morgan’s breeding) to explain why birds and rustics lacked aesthetics.90 According to Morgan’s canon, one could not assume that either the bird or the human rustic had aesthetic ideals. After an extensive explanation arguing that birds did not make aesthetic choices because they could not be shown to make rational choices, he concluded that “we are bound by our canon of interpretation not to assume the higher faculty of interpretation”—aesthetics.91
Naturalists, especially bird lovers, fought this reductive vision of animal behavior by turning to music. Psychologist James Sully had already offered a reply to the Morgans of the world in 1879: “Mr. Darwin has recently taught us that certain birds display a very considerable amount of taste.”92 Anything less than this belief, later nature lovers argued, was an “egocentric standpoint” that privileged human culture.93 Instead of the rat mazes or puzzle boxes that Morgan’s followers used to measure animal intelligence in laboratory settings, a series of increasingly sophisticated studies of birdsong used music’s listening skills to prove their point.
The first defenders of nature’s music verged on the poetic in their enthusiasm for natural sound. Relying on prose, poetry, and musical scores, one author described the tiny sound of a flea’s feet landing on a nightcap in 1841; decades later, in 1896, another wrote out the song of a faucet dripping in the key of B-flat major; and in 1910 the same tradition was alive and well in the sound of a moth tearing out of its cocoon in the night.94 Comparable descriptions of “primitive” music were often limited to prose or simple transcriptions emphasizing the superiority of Western music.95
By the early twentieth century, however, studies of birdsong were becoming more sophisticated, both in their documentation of sound and in the use of music as evidence of animal aesthetics. Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews’s Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, first published in 1904 and reissued in 1921 with new additions, documented the songs of over one hundred different species in detailed musical transcriptions. Mathews, a voice teacher, naturalist, and illustrator, used his musical expertise to author several sonic field guides in the early twentieth century.96 Although he imagined the Field Book of Wild Birds as a bird guide for the general public, readers were asked to do some quite difficult musical tasks. One of his favorite birds, the hermit thrush, occupied more than ten pages of the book. Mathews argued that the hermit thrush understood basic harmony, could transpose his melodies, and—revealing a class of racialized musical categories that do not map neatly onto our twenty-first century imaginations—compared the bird favorably to Southern Negros, Scottish bagpipers, and Dvoràk.97
The culmination of Mathews’s description of
