Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy
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 the hermit thrush was a comparison between the bird’s song and the opening measures of the final movement of Beethoven’s famous “Moonlight” Sonata. His example is eerily compelling, 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