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ONE

Why Do Birds Sing?

And Other Tales

In 1913, Henry Oldys, a biologist working for the US Department of Agriculture, wrote enthusiastically to readers of the nation’s premier journal of bird science, The Auk, “Astonishing and revolutionary as it may seem, there is no escape from the conclusion that the evolution of bird music independently parallels the evolution of human music.”¹ Born in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Oldys was part of a generation exposed to controversial new ideas about the role animals played in human social and cultural development. In the foreground of this controversy were the names of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whose ideas about the animal origins of human song put birdsong on the map of the new science of cultural evolution. Over the course of the next century, thinkers like Oldys increasingly took up the question of how animals, especially birds, were tied to the evolutionary origins of song. As music historian Robert Lach explained, the question “Why do birds sing?” was seen by scholars of culture and science as “the key to the problem of the origin of language and music.”² At its heart, this was a question that meant rethinking the capacity for music, raising surprisingly complex questions not only about animals, but about human beings and just how special their musical abilities really were.

Why do birds sing? By asking this question at all, intellectuals such as Lach and Oldys imagined a capacity for music that held forth the tantalizing promise of connecting song, still imagined today as deeply human, to a totally alien world of nonhuman experience. The evolutionary discourse that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around Darwin’s and Spencer’s texts debated the relation of these two worlds, struggling to fill the gap between the music of modern civilized humans and the primal sounds of their animal ancestors. The unknown space of this gap contained the key to a biological science of culture, in an era deeply invested in justifying racial hierarchies through science. As evolutionary historian Peter Bowler has explained, “virtually all evolutionists [at this time] accepted the linear image of human origins and used it to justify prevailing racial prejudice.”³ It is a period in which Darwinian evolution coexisted with diverse theories of saltation, orthogenesis, neo-Lamarckism, eugenics, social Darwinism, and other approaches that invited comparison between biology and culture.⁴ Against this backdrop, music emerged as one of the “missing links” that promised to fill the gap between biology and culture in evolution’s story with the sounds of animals’ cries and “primitive” human songs.

At the center of these debates about music were the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The two men were well known, Darwin for his history of biological evolution in the Origin of Species and Spencer for his studies of human development in works such as The Principles of Sociology. Their theories of music reflected their broader interests: Darwin, the biological historian, argued that music like birdsong affected mate selection and offspring, while Spencer, the social historian, argued that song had to do with the boundary between human reason and emotion.⁵ For Darwin, birdsong and human song were both legitimate forms of music; for Spencer, only humans made true music. As later authors debated music’s place in evolution, the subtleties of Darwin’s and Spencer’s arguments were sometimes lost in accounts of Darwin as the defender of animal musicality, and Spencer as his opponent.

This discourse took shape across numerous disciplines, sometimes in indirect ways. In this chapter, I reconstruct its main arguments by drawing on voices from a wide range of disciplinary identities and a period spanning several decades, connecting the threads that crossed these disciplinary and temporal divides. The Darwin-Spencer debates about music’s origins mark an initial stage in this discourse, which took place in the late nineteenth century. Its primary contributors were European evolutionists, including the biologists August Weismann and George Romanes, and the British psychologists James Sully and Edmund Gurney. Other voices in these debates, like Lach, were formally trained music scholars from Europe or the United States. They were the first generation of “musicologists,” historians of music who turned away from biographies of great masters like Beethoven and Bach toward a broader-reaching social science inspired by figures such as Spencer.⁶ A third set of voices in musical evolutionism came from the natural and social sciences, where biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists had an interest in connecting animal aesthetics to human development, particularly in Britain and the United States, where Darwinism was on the rise. Finally, the voice of the naturalist had an important role in these debates as well, contributing firsthand experience shaped by hunting, hiking, and observation. This was particularly true for experts in birdsong, a field so new that there was no formal schooling in it—Oldys was a case in point, working as a lawyer and auditor before building his reputation as a biologist with the Department of Agriculture.

Although many of these men and women operated in separate professional spheres, they were connected by books, pamphlets, and journals. Print was the medium of their discourse, allowing widely flung experts and amateurs to trade ideas. In the pages that follow, I trace the war in print over animal musicality from its initial phase in the Darwin-Spencer debates of the 1870s to later appropriations of their ideas in the early twentieth century. Although Darwin’s and Spencer’s opposed theories of music were not solely about music’s role in determining human uniqueness, the texts inspired by them often returned to this refrain. In tracing this burgeoning science of music to the texts that inspired it, I hope to show how listening to culture and listening to nature merged over a period of several decades to produce a practice of hearing biocultural difference, where song became a measure of other species’ worth. The stakes of this debate were not merely an argument about evolutionary origins. They were about personhood, for to be a musician—human or animal—was to be a person.

BIRDS IN PRINT

Though Darwin and Spencer were a touchstone for debates about animal musicality, interest in the topic of animal musicality was already in the air. Scholars of the nineteenth century published anecdotal accounts of dogs, cats, and even horses barking, yowling, and marching in time to human music, hoping to understand where to draw the line between human and nonhuman ability.⁷ In the early twentieth century, psychologists and physiologists published measurements of animals’ pulse rates in response to music, and the salivation of dogs as they recognized melody, harmony, and tempo.⁸ Decades before the arrival of “ecomusicology,” George Herzog was able to ask members of the American Musicological Society, “Do Animals Have Music?” while The Musical Quarterly surveyed the musical taste of a veritable zoo of animals including dogs, cats, birds, snakes, monkeys, mice, cows, horses, chickens, and a flying squirrel.⁹ The possibility that music was a universal capacity remained open well into the twentieth century: as Herzog put it, “there seems to be no criterion for any theoretical separation of the vocal expression of animals from human music.”¹⁰

Advocates of animal musicality could be quite persuasive.¹¹ In 1871, the year Darwin’s Descent was published, an article by American minister Samuel Lockwood in The American Naturalist sparked a decade-long vogue in mouse music. Lockwood’s essay documented his singing pet mouse Hespie in astounding detail. Describing Hespie’s daily life and singing habits, Lockwood recorded her high-pitched songs using prose descriptions and transcriptions of Western musical notation. Arias like her “Wheel Song,” he argued, were testaments to her musical taste, precision, and baroque sensibility for ornamentation.¹² Interest in Lockwood’s singing mouse spread from Darwin’s Descent to the British journal Nature.¹³ Another symptom of animal music’s popularity was British nature writer Charles Cornish’s Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent’s Park Gardens, published in 1894. The book documented a series of informal experiments in which Cornish engaged a violinist to play for animals at the Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens in London.¹⁴ Cornish, an author of British nature guides, walked around the zoo with his assistant playing popular tunes for selected animals, usually the Scottish reel “The Keel Row.” (Scottish tunes were still considered exotic “natural melodies” free of any preconceived system, and thus might have seemed more appropriate for animal ears.)¹⁵ The results of Cornish’s “experiments” were occasionally absurd—he claimed, for example, that wolves and sheep responded differently to “The Keel Row” because they were natural enemies, and that sheep preferred the “Shepherd’s Call” sequence from William Tell because they were pastoral animals. But many of Cornish’s examples were compelling, such as the photograph that showed axis deer turning their large ears to listen to the violinist.¹⁶ Like more and more descriptions of musical animals, Cornish’s account documented animals who were sensitive and aware musical listeners.

Of all these anecdotes of musical creatures, those describing birds were the most compelling. “From the wearisome sameness of a sparrow’s chirp,” wrote the British psychologist James Sully, “up to the elaborate song of the skylark or nightingale, there presents itself something like a complete evolution of vocal melody.”¹⁷ The variety that separated simple one-note calls from the long, complex songs of birds like the nightingale seemed to contain the story of music’s development. Music scholars, ornithologists, naturalists, and science writers looked at topics ranging from the evolution of musical taste in birds to comparisons between American birds and American composer Stephen Foster’s songwriting.¹⁸ Musical notation in bird guides reinforced the impression that birdsong was a musical artifact, subject to the laws of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Asserting the fundamental musicality of birdsong, ornithologist Francis Allen asked, “how can we escape imputing the origin and development of this beauty in bird-song to an aesthetic sense in the birds themselves?”¹⁹ Perhaps most important, birds held a place of honor in Darwin’s claims about music, for he argued that one could “hear daily in the singing of birds” evidence that animals uttered musical notes.²⁰

FIGURE 1.1 Hespie the mouse’s favorite song in the exercise wheel. Lockwood, “A Singing Hesperomys.”

FIGURE 1.2 Axis deer listening to “The Keel Row.” Cornish, Life at the Zoo, 118.

DARWIN AND SPENCER

There are, as is well known, two leading theories with regard to the origin of music—Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Herbert Spencer’s.²¹

Until the end of the nineteenth century, discussions of music’s natural origins ranged from the mind-bending powers of musical ratios in Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique, completed in 1767. As early as 1650, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described a remarkable sloth singing a diatonic hexachord, as well as a bevy of singing birds that made later appearances in many a discussion of nonhuman musicality.²² Thinkers and philosophers such as Rousseau and Kircher, and the more recently minted names of Schiller, Herder, Wagner, and Helmholtz, added weight and expertise to questions about the origins of music throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. By the end of the nineteenth century, music had become the most prestigious of the fine arts, its unique powers of emotional expression making it, in the words of British social philosopher Herbert Spencer, “one of the characteristics of our age.”²³ Music was repeatedly described as the “language of the soul” by intellectuals ranging from Johann Herder to Russian author Andrei Bely.²⁴ But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music’s spiritual language increasingly took on an evolutionary tone, becoming integral to a growing discourse about biology’s relationship to human culture and identity. Even the fictional detective-violinist Sherlock Holmes became a musical evolutionist, reminding his companion Dr. Watson that daring ideas about music and language were necessary to grasp the breadth of nature’s ways:

“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at.”

“That’s a rather broad idea,” I remarked.

“One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,” he answered.²⁵

By the time Sherlock Holmes was hunting down criminals with his cold British logic, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer had become public voices of modern science, and the two leading figures in musical evolutionism: “the two theories of the origin of music which have claimed the attention of critics are Darwin’s and Spencer’s.”²⁶

Framing these ideas “as broad as Nature” was a much older set of beliefs about the place of language in human identity. In Darwin’s day, it was widely assumed that language demarcated a definitive leap between human and animal psyches, a rupture whose relation to music was uncertain. Eighteenth-century figures such as Rousseau and Herder had popularized theories that language was the seat of human intelligence, emphasizing the rational ties that bound Homo sapiens, the man of reason, into a universal talking brotherhood. Enlightenment theories of language prompted so much speculation over the following century that the Parisian Société de Linguistique issued an ineffectual ban on the topic of language origins in 1866, hoping to control further debate.²⁷ Instead, the topic continued to thrive, fostering guesses about syntax, grammar, and translatability as possible trademarks of the intelligent mind separating human language from animal vocalizations. As Henri Bergson explained in L’Évolution créatrice of 1907, human language hinged on the distinction between instinct and invention: “the instinctive sign [of the animal] is adherent, the intelligent sign [of the human] is mobile”—that is, animal cries had a fixed, instinctive meaning dictated by nature, while human words were a matter of invented convention and, therefore, a mark of superior intelligence.²⁸ Even with the rise of colonialism and a corresponding emphasis on racial distinctions at the turn of the century, Bergson’s contemporaries still believed, as Herder had, that humanity could be universally defined as “the talking animal.”²⁹ Attempts like Richard Garner’s to decode primate language, described by historian of science Gregory Radick, extended this intelligent sign no further than humanity’s closest relatives.³⁰

Music had a very ambiguous relationship to this view of language. The sounds of birdsong and other musical animal vocalizations were not the intelligent signs of language, nor were they the proto-linguistic responses biologists dubbed “calls.” But neither were they innate—some animals had to learn their songs through such arduous study that the idea of animal conservatories with “properly qualified professors” to refine animals’ musical abilities was floated at the turn of the century.³¹ Though not a mark of reason, song in animals seemed very similar to song in humans. As a result, music occupied an undefined—and potentially contested—territory between animal expression and human linguistic rationality. For evolutionists like Darwin and Spencer, defining this ambiguous territory would mean defining what it meant to be human.

Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, used music and aesthetics to challenge prevailing beliefs about this boundary line between humans and other animals. “The place of song in the life of the bird has since the days of Darwin been a question of dispute between the scientists,” wrote ornithologist Chauncey Hawkins in 1918.³² This “dispute” echoed the broader anxieties about human uniqueness that had surrounded the Origin of Species, but focused on a new question: whether culture, instead of biology, was what set humans apart from the animals. One of the most controversial implications of the Descent was that it did not.

Darwin’s Origin of Species from 1859 had located biological history in a process of natural selection that depended on a species’ successful reproduction. In the Descent, Darwin argued that aesthetics had their origins not in divine providence but in a special kind of selection called “sexual selection,” in which animals chose their mates. Darwin spent nearly a quarter of the Descent on birds and sexual selection, displacing primates in a surprise move that voted with ink in favor of music’s role in human development. He suggested that human aesthetics descended directly from the selective processes that occurred when animals had the power to choose their own mates, arguing that generations of attracting, being chosen, and having offspring had bred a sense and appreciation of beauty in certain animals. For Darwin, these animals had the same capacity for musicality as humans. The British naturalist lauded the musical abilities of spiders, frogs, tortoises, alligators, gibbons, dogs, seals, and even Lockwood’s mouse Hespie, returning throughout his text to the question of music’s origins.³³ Passion, love, breeding, persuasion, and social power all had a place in this unusual narrative of humanity’s link to animals through a process that looked very much like free will. “The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago aroused each others’ ardent passions during their courtship and rivalry.”³⁴ Darwin’s theory was popularized by figures ranging from the fictional Holmes to psychologists such as James Sully and Edmund Gurney, and musicologists such as Jules Combarieau and Robert Lach, gaining a considerable number of adherents by the early twentieth century.³⁵

But sexual selection was a very different story from the cold and random chance of natural selection. Many intellectuals, however respectful of Darwinian evolution, were troubled by the theory that aesthetics’ origins lay in the loves, choices, and passions of animals. For many, it was simply too difficult to reconcile the impersonal forces of nature that dominated evolutionary theory with the personal, fickle individuals creating emotions that led to choosing a mate whose offspring would then choose future generations. The first-ever book on birdsong’s evolution, Charles Witchell’s The Evolution of Bird-Song, with Observances on the Influence of Heredity and Imitation of 1896, devoted almost all of its opening chapter to a critique of Darwin’s theory of musical evolution, concluding that despite certain compelling features of sexual selection, the songs of birds could not “reasonably be considered to be directly occasioned by the emotion of love.”³⁶ The biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently engineered his own natural selection theory, argued that Darwinian sexual selection in which animals seemed to “consciously” choose their future was wrong, and should be replaced with natural selection.³⁷ Wallace’s colleague August Weismann agreed, writing that “the musical sense is not a result of sexual selection,” and arguing instead for a nineteenth-century version of Steven Pinker’s description of music as deliciously unnecessary “auditory cheesecake”—a delightful coincidence of acoustic development useless in survival terms.³⁸

Darwin’s most visible opponent on the matter of musical evolution was his contemporary Herbert Spencer. Spencer, a British social and political philosopher, had been a public advocate for Darwinian natural selection. Both Darwin and Spencer thought music might offer new ways to understand human differences. But while Darwin’s work was rooted in theories of biological reproduction, Spencer’s approach was framed by sociology. His writings about music, which located aesthetics in human social life rather than biological history, became the public foil for Darwin’s thinking on aesthetics, with “Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Herbert Spencer’s” theories becoming polar twins in the discourse of music’s origins.³⁹

The first of Spencer’s texts on music actually predated the Descent, becoming newly relevant after Darwin’s controversial book was published. Written in 1857, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Spencer’s “The Origin and Function of Music” put forward an argument very similar to Herder’s from the previous century, treating music as the emotional component of early language. Spencer approached all animal sounds as exclamations or “impassioned utterances” caused by restless emotional energy. Birdsong was, in his view, functionally equivalent to barking dogs, purring cats, roaring lions, and any other shrieks and moans of pain, joy, or suffering.⁴⁰ Human vocalizations, on the other hand, were uniquely rational, developing into speech, chant, and song. The evolution of these utterances could be explained as a side effect of environmental pressures and local competition, but had nothing to do with choice, aesthetics, or, especially, sexual reproduction. Spencer’s take on music was fundamentally a sociological one, connecting aesthetics to prevailing beliefs about reason, language, and the emotions. It was about human experience, not biological history; Spencer’s theory was entirely disinterested in the development of the syrinxes, tongues, mouths, and ears that accompanied song.

Darwin had briefly referenced Spencer’s essay in the Descent, but he provided a more vigorous response in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Though respectful of Spencer’s general ideas, Darwin argued that in treating all animal sounds as the same type of sound, Spencer and those like him had essentially missed the point. Spencer’s pig uttered generic exclamatory grunts; Darwin’s pig uttered a special “deep grunt of satisfaction … when pleased with its food, [that] is widely different from its harsh scream of pain or terror.”⁴¹ The barking dog that opened Spencer’s essay had yet another way of making sounds: “But with the dog … the bark of anger and that of joy are sounds which by no means stand in opposition to each other; and so it is in some cases.”⁴² Spencer and other advocates of the natural-selection approach to music, Darwin implied, simply failed to recognize musicality as a distinct mode of sound production, thereby failing to recognize what everybody else knew: “that animals utter musical notes is familiar to every one, as we may hear daily in the singing of birds.”⁴³ Psychologist Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880) added further rankle to Darwin’s criticisms, claiming a Darwinian approach was “directly opposed” to Spencer’s theories.⁴⁴ Gurney even parodied Spencer’s idea that melody originated in speech cadences, with a mock example tracing J. S. Bach’s cantata Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott to pseudo-evolutionary origins in the English exclamation “Heigh-ho!”⁴⁵

In response to his critics, Spencer had his essay reissued in 1890 with a special postscript responding to Darwin and Gurney. “Mr. Darwin’s observations are inadequate, and his reasonings upon them inconclusive. Swayed by his doctrine of sexual selection, he has leaned towards the view that music had its origins in the expression of amatory feeling.”⁴⁶ “Mr. Gurney,” in his turn, suffered from “deficient knowledge of the laws of evolution” in his support for Darwin.⁴⁷ Objecting to the suspicious developmental gap between birds and primates in Darwin’s explanation, Spencer attacked the idea of birdsong as a courtship ritual, calling it “untenable” and adding, “What then is the true interpretation? Simply that like the whistling and humming of tunes by boys and men, the singing of birds results from overflow of energy.”⁴⁸ For Spencer, such sounds were merely precursors to expressions of emotion that would eventually become the cadences of speech and song. In the ensuing decade, Spencer reprinted his essay with further additions at least six more times before his death, cementing the perceived polarity between his work and Darwin’s. It was an opposition that generated a broad audience for musical evolutionism, building a tenuous musical bridge across the gap between biological evolution and human history.

SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Although the Darwin-Spencer debates appeared to be about sexual reproduction, in practice they were often about social evolution.⁴⁹ For intellectuals like Sully, “the genesis of animal music is at the same time the explanation of the early developments of song in the human race.”⁵⁰ In this approach, the songs of primitive human beings could be compared to the songs of advanced animal species. The result was, as science writer Grant Allen put it, a map of aesthetic evolution “from the simple and narrow feelings of the savage or the child to the full and expansive aesthetic catholicity of the cultivated adult.”⁵¹ Bird fanciers had long made comparisons between chicks raised by foster parents learning the foster species’ song, and human children learning the tongue of adoptive parents.⁵² References to Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas became a way to channel such comparisons into an explicitly evolutionary, linear, hierarchical discourse about the relationship between birds, humans, races, and the forms of difference that lay between.

Evolutionary historian Peter Bowler has called social evolutionism “a system of cosmic progress,” while Timothy Ingold names it “the telos of an embodied purpose,” an inevitable forward-moving arrow of change that ranked race and species in order of development.⁵³ The hierarchy of this arrow was permeated by the nationalist politics and colonial economies of nineteenth-century Europe, Britain, and America, becoming the dominant vehicle of approaches to biological evolutionism.⁵⁴ Assumptions about race, class, and gender permeated musical explanations of human and animal difference. German evolutionist August Weismann compared the gap separating Beethoven from a “primitive” human musician to the distance between a parrot and a human, arguing that “we cannot suppose that any Beethovens were concealed among primitive men, or are running around among contemporary Australians or negroes,” because “savages are lower in mental development than civilized man.”⁵⁵ American naturalist Henry Oldys praised birds by connecting them to the very same savages, arguing that “the songs of some birds must be ranked above the best music of many primitive races of today.”⁵⁶ Even Cornish, in his lighthearted account of zoo animals, implied familiar racial stereotypes when he contrasted the European wolf’s “hideous sneer” on hearing music with the more “extreme and abject fear” of its Indian cousin.⁵⁷

Social evolutionism’s racial stereotyping was compelling in part because it addressed a real need for historians and social scientists. Older historians such as Thomas Carlyle had argued that social change was the work of influential kings and geniuses, the “great man” theory of history.⁵⁸ Biography, the main method of this approach, did little to explain changing communities or cultures; and by the end of the nineteenth century intellectuals ranging from Marx to Darwin sought alternative ways of understanding social change. While Darwin and many of his contemporaries espoused a social theory of groups rather than individuals, one of the most recognized theorists of this approach was Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s views on music were one facet of this larger sociological picture. Spencerian social evolution substituted an “enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages” for older biographical historiography, replacing the “great men” of historians like Thomas Carlyle with social science.⁵⁹ When Spencer asked his readers to understand music by comparing the sounds of a gentleman to those of a clown, or a refined lady to her servant, he argued that music was a mechanism of social change, defining—and potentially changing—human social classification.⁶⁰

These themes of social aggregates, progressive change, and classification might have seemed like established facts to many music lovers. Nineteenth-century composers such as Wagner and Busoni had viewed music as both highest in rank among the arts, and forward moving in time. Spencer too thought music was “the highest of the fine arts,” an art form he believed would open the gates to universal human sympathy in due time, fulfilling the ultimate goal of social evolution’s direction.⁶¹ By the early twentieth century, modernist composers fused primitive and futurist idioms in works like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to create a musical language out of this evolutionary outlook.

Specialists in music’s history were particularly interested in social evolutionism’s emphasis on human development. They openly debated the relative merits of Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories, arguing whether speech or song came first and producing a wave of successful textbooks with names like The Evolution of the Art of Music and Music, Its Laws and Evolution.⁶² Most sided with Spencer’s belief in human uniqueness. Guido Adler, one of the founders of the field, wrote that music’s history was “a matter of natural selection,” suggesting that musical styles were subject to evolutionary forces that made the strong flourish and diminished the weak.⁶³ Like Spencer, Adler advocated for a shift away from “great man” biographies to a history shaped by “epochs—large and small—or according to peoples, territories, regions, cities, and schools of art … without special consideration given to the life and effect of individual artists who have participated in this steady development.”⁶⁴ But Adler was opposed to Darwin’s sexual selection theory, writing in 1911 that, “no musical artistry can be explained by monkey instincts.”⁶⁵ Charles Hubert Parry, director of the Royal College of Music in London, explained the concept of music’s evolution at the end of the nineteenth century in a similar language of anthropological comparison:

The basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity; … Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through the study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the principles upon which they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced.⁶⁶

Parry’s approach favored racial rather than species development, deriding Darwin’s “childish theory” that music originated in birdsong.⁶⁷

Yet birdsong remained a convenient point of reference for other music scholars. Adler’s student Robert Lach, who supported Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, developed a taxonomy of musical ornaments based on the calls and songs of birds.⁶⁸ Lach even suggested that some of the great composers of the Italian baroque had birdlike taste, turning to the strophes of Caccini, Caldera, and Castello.⁶⁹ Shortly after Lach, American composer and critic Daniel Gregory Mason opened one of the first general histories of music published in the United States with a transcribed version of a bird near his home in Massachusetts, whose adherence to a D major triad impressed the musician with the likelihood that primitive scales derived from a natural order perceptible to the other animal kingdoms.⁷⁰

Naturalists looked even more closely at birds’ role in social evolution. Many saw hints of a parallel evolution in which “inferior singers” in the avian universe like the bullfinch or nuthatch contrasted with the more varied and creative minds of the thrush or the blackbird, just as advanced races contrasted with primitive ones.⁷¹ “Though the birds expressed themselves vocally ages before there were human ears to hear them,” wrote Simeon Pease Cheney, “it is hardly to be supposed that their singing bore much resemblance to the bird music of to-day.”⁷² By 1919, social cultivation among birds meant that “the characteristic songs of the species are preserved, just as primitive human language passes from individual to individual within the tribe, and as the folk-songs of the various races of men have been handed down from generation to generation.”⁷³ Like a crankshaft turning a pair of connected wheels, this telos of musical progression drove the evolutionary parallels between child and chick, bird and human that Spencer, Oldys, 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 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 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 was the link between music and personhood more clear than in the contested sphere of the female’s capacity to listen. Darwinian sexual selection and Spencerian social evolutionism located aesthetic capacity in the virility of men.¹¹¹ In the United States and Europe, theories of evolution that often represented women’s primary role as reproductive coincided with polarized public debates about women’s suffrage, rights, and roles outside the home.¹¹²

In a revealing episode, American ornithologist Chauncey Hawkins outraged his peers in 1918 with an article whose subtexts—published while Congress was attempting to ratify women’s right to vote in the United States—reflected human politics a bit too clearly.¹¹³ Claiming that song’s primary function was to frighten rival males and break down the female’s resistance to sex, Hawkins argued that sexual selection assumed an animal consciousness that could more easily be explained by the lively hormones of males. Males and females did not relate through musical aesthetics, he wrote, but through the brutal persistence and force that males needed to break down the “coy” reluctance of the female, a coyness he believed was nature’s necessary counterbalance to the female’s otherwise uncontrollable sexual impulses.¹¹⁴ Song, he argued, wasn’t about beauty or pleasure but about the fundamental differences between the sexes. “The male sings more vigorously because he is a male,” he wrote, explaining that vigor was part of the male’s necessary world.¹¹⁵

Although the article made some salient points about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theory, its mechanistic approach and gender politics drew a rapid response. Aretas Saunders quickly wrote to The Auk to criticize Hawkins for his inability to tell calls from songs, as well as for Hawkins’s claim that instances of female birdsong were aberrations caused by a hormonal imbalance, while Francis Allen mocked Hawkins for his naïve assumptions about “female constancy” and his inability to attribute agency to either gender.¹¹⁶ “Shall we deny an equal appreciation of [song] to the female?” asked Allen, adding, “and if the female appreciates the beauty of the male’s song, why should she not discriminate between the songs she hears and succumb most readily to the ardor of the finest singer?”¹¹⁷

Saunders, for his part, left his readers with a particularly striking description of courtship that represented male and female alike as sensitive and considerate listeners: “The Robin (Planestictus migratorius), in the late days of April when mating is in progress, may be found singing with its bill closed, the notes hardly audible for more than a hundred feet. At such times its mate is nearly always to be found in the same tree, evidently listening with pleasure to this whispered song, which is apparently sung for its benefit only.”¹¹⁸ It was a sound, he said, that he had heard frequently, and in both eastern and western robins; but neither in print nor in anecdote had he ever heard his experience corroborated, though birders today call this the “whisper song” and, just like Saunders, look for the listening female when they hear it.¹¹⁹

The listening robin, and her attentive mate, brought the questions of social evolutionism to a head. Were birds people? Was it foolish, or realistic, to imagine that a creature like a female robin could be such a discerning listener? Were artistic birds comparable to primitive humans, or to other kinds of people? Did naturalized notions of identity such as gender or savagery help scholars organize and interpret musical behavior within evolution’s social order? Over the next several decades, such questions began to take shape as questions of practice rather than theory. The musical evolutionism that began as a print war developed into a viable profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For intellectuals who worked in this profession, differing perspectives on the status, rights, and dignity of nonhuman musicians and other “others” had important implications for the way music was heard and studied.

In the chapters to come, I examine the role of this professional practice inside the spheres of museum work, fieldwork, and laboratory research. Although the contents and form of questions about animal musicality shifted depending on the changing circumstances and context of each of these locations, the question of animal personhood remained a backdrop to the way studies of music were performed. In those studies, music became a tool that could reveal who was capable of listening, and, in many cases, who was capable of being heard.