for the pattern of the thrush’s song does sound rather like Beethoven’s melody. But Mathews went much farther than noting their similarity. He argued that the bird’s approach to harmony was the opposite of Beethoven’s, claiming that although both examples built excitement through rushed phrases and harmonic shifts, Beethoven moved from dominant to tonic, while the hermit thrush took a more traditional route, from tonic to dominant.98 Think for a moment about how many listening skills Mathews asked of his readers: identifying a wild bird by ear, listening carefully to it, identifying its musical scale by ear, recognizing the moment when the bird transposed its melody into a new key, and comparing the bird’s approach to harmony with Beethoven’s, which in turn demanded that the reader be familiar with the movements of the “Moonlight” Sonata.
Another bird widely acclaimed for its aesthetics was the American wood pewee. In 1904, Henry Oldys suggested that the wood pewee consciously grouped the phrases of its song in the form of a ballad, using the popular Stephen Foster song “Swanee River” as an example.99 Oldys, a longtime member of the American Ornithologists’ Union, had trained in law and worked as a government auditor before transferring to the Department of Agriculture, where he promoted game and conservation laws before turning his attention to studies of birdsong.100 In one of his many comparisons between human and avian song, Oldys argued that in both the pewee’s song and popular human ballads, melodies were repeated according to an A B A B1 pattern, suggesting that this technique made the wood pewee one of America’s more advanced avian singers. In “Swanee River,” the pattern follows each line of text; in the case of the wood pewee, the melody was different and moved much more quickly, but the pattern was the same: one phrase (“A”); a contrasting phrase that ended on a questioning high note (“B”); the first phrase again (“A”); and a final phrase based on the contrasting phrase, but with a lower-pitched closing note to round out the sequence (“B1”) (see Figure 1.4). Oldys seemed to take for granted that his listeners would hear a parallel in this comparison between the nonhuman musicality of the wood pewee and the lowbrow vernacular associations of “Swanee River” with minstrelsy and popular music, bringing the two styles into a kind of bridge between the higher stages of avian song and the lower stages of human music.
FIGURE 1.3 Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews, comparison between the song of the hermit thrush (top bird in illustration) and the closing movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Mathews, Field Book of Wild Birds.
Amazingly, Oldys’s argument was taken up and circulated in the ornithological community for forty years. Scientists such as Wallace Craig and Aretas Saunders continued to cite Oldys’s analogy for decades as a counterexample to mechanistic explanations of animal behavior, and the wood pewee was often held up as a model of aesthetic capacity in the animal world by American ornithologists.101 In 1944, Saunders reiterated, “all of the Stephen Foster melodies I know are built upon this plan”—by which he meant the wood pewee’s plan.102
FIGURE 1.4 Henry Oldys, comparison of the structure of Stephen Foster’s popular song “Swanee River” with the song of the wood pewee. Oldys, “The Rhythmical Song of the Wood Pewee.”
AVIAN LISTENERS
The debate about animal aesthetics had surprisingly high stakes. Intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed tremendous interest in the music-making abilities of birds, mice, tigers, and other creatures. On the surface, these writers responded to Darwin’s and Spencer’s opposed theories of music’s origins. But in practice, authors were often less interested in the details of evolutionary selective processes than in whether animals were capable of aesthetic creativity. The implications of animal aesthetics were huge, for music had a special place in social evolutionary theory at the borderline between human and animal nature. If animals made music, they were due the rights, status, and dignity that evolutionists like Spencer and Morgan attributed only to the most developed beings. Indeed, the holistic nature of social evolutionism meant that even one unexpected music-making creature might unravel all of evolutionism’s social order, disrupting its tidy taxonomies of masculinity, breeding, and human uniqueness.
I conclude this chapter with a turn toward questions about whether birds were listeners, and the way those questions exemplified this disruptive potential. Music was the “language of the soul” for the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century evolutionists found themselves asking if animals who understood this language had souls. In the natural history of the early twentieth century, these broad moralistic questions were succeeded by more detailed discussions about what it meant for a bird to listen. Songbirds in the writings of early twentieth-century naturalists are increasingly treated as beings with conscious feelings, goals, intentions, and self-reflection. In many ways, animal musicality had become about whether some birds were a new class of people, less privileged than idealized forms of European masculinity, but more respected than some of nature’s other denizens.
Nineteenth-century debates about the place of songbirds in social evolution sometimes turned directly to the language of morality and the human soul. Writing in 1879, James Sully described the stakes of animal aesthetics as the stakes of moral status: “the new doctrine of Evolution … has naturally tended to raise the intellectual and moral status of animals by suggesting that in them are to be found the germs of mental qualities previously supposed to be man’s exclusive possession. Among the attributes which science is thus attributing to the lower animals is the artistic impulse.”103 Darwin’s opponents had often used the word “soul” to describe the moral status of aesthetics, rallying around a psychic dividing line between human and nonhuman musicality. German biologist August Weismann called the nonhuman animal “soul-deaf” in 1890, adding that “the same differences [between human and nonhuman] … must prevail in the different stages of the development of the human soul.”104 A medical doctor of the period used the same language to argue that the “material ear of the body” had to be distinguished from the “spiritual ear of the mind,” the latter ensuring that “the intelligent comprehension of music, even by the higher animals, will always be more or less imperfect, because their soul is of a lower order.”105 Richard Wallaschek claimed, like Weismann, that it was “these peculiar qualities of ‘soul’ which have to be examined, and not a certain condition in the sense of hearing” in order to understand the shortcomings of birdsong.106 Music scholar William Wallace even turned the accusation of soul-deafness against Darwin in 1908, calling him “psychically deaf” for not recognizing the spiritual properties that made human music unique.107
Those spiritual ears, thoughts, and emotions summed up in the word “soul” entered naturalists’ writings in the early twentieth century through more focused questions about what it was like for birds to listen. Naturalists wondered what those nonhuman ears heard, and what beauty meant to them. “We must not forget,” wrote Robert Moore in 1913, “that what is beautiful to our ears, may not be to a bird’s,” as he pondered the way the fox sparrow seemed to determine its own song only after carefully listening to those around it.108 Several years later, another naturalist pointed out that the crow seemed to enjoy its harsh voice in the way an artist might. “Is he [the crow] not, in a limited way, a true artist, a composer as well as a performer? I ask it in all seriousness.”109 And in 1922, naturalist Richard Hunt wrote to The Condor to criticize Morgan’s canon, arguing that the mockingbird could hardly be explained as a tiny machine, for he “not only takes a ‘pleasurable satisfaction’ in the results of his vocal efforts, but he does so because he dwells upon those results with pardonable satisfaction … I believe that the bird’s interest in his own mimicry is ‘artistic.’”110
Nowhere
