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Is Birdsong Music?
Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird
By Hollis Taylor Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Hollis Taylor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02648-4
CHAPTER 1
An Outback Epiphany
WOGARNO STATION, Western Australia, 13 April 2001: Drought has set its oven on slow bake. This autumn, they must assign acres to a sheep rather than sheep to an acre. On our drive up the five-mile dirt track to Lizard Rock, a sacred Aboriginal site, we pass a cinnabar lakebed frosted with cracked salt. Round a bend, a nonsensical white pile on the left vies for our attention: "bone dry" made manifest in the stacked remains of starving sheep, shot during the last drought. I can't take it in.
At noon, several hundred people crowd onto an ancient ironstone outcropping to hear my concert. I marvel that they could all find the place. The canopy erected to protect me and my violin from the sun barely manages. I'm a hostage to brightness and heat: head spinning, ears hissing, lights shooting in my eyes. The devil's box suffers Dante's Inferno.
Back at the homestead, the flash and rumble of a flock of galahs (Cacatua roseicapilla) cut across the sky. Wheeling in unison, they seem to say: "Look at us — we're pink, we're grey, we're pink again. Look!" On landing, their metallic "chirrink-chirrink" mixes with the windmill's creak and slurp. A few of the parrots ride it like a Ferris wheel. Others abseil down the stays of the homestead's radio mast, beak on wire. The raucous squawking from these party animals intensifies when one galah ups the ante: a flapping of wings during descent produces several mad circles around the wire. Copy-galahs are quick to follow. Let's twist and shout.
I wander about, collecting grass fishhooks in my socks. Haphazard tin sheds and aging fences, inventions of necessity encouraged to stand for yet another season, masquerade as one-of-a-kind designs. I'm photographing weathered wooden posts coifed with curls and tangles of charismatic wire when I feel a nudge on the back of my leg. It's Macca, the border collie pack leader. Apparently, he intends to chaperone me on my investigations. I always appreciate local knowledge.
He's quite attentive, but after a while I begin to wonder if Macca is just looking for a way to pass time, or if I am a personality so lacking in self-confidence as to appear sheepish. A border collie stare cannot be ignored, nor can it be appeased by tossing a stick or a snack. I feel object to his subject. When we arrive back where we began, he and the other dogs succeed in roping me into a game that takes three forms and switches from one to another for no obvious reason: kick the ball, stare at the ball, or stare at Marmalade, the cat. I'm trying to grasp the rules of the game, wondering whether Kick-and-Stare is all that happens for an hour and if I'm being a good sport or just a pushover, when out of the blue I hear a leisurely, rich-toned phrase. It's a jazz flutist in a tree. An explosion of sound in another tree answers — a long, bold rattle descends sharply and swiftly, and a duet ensues — no, a trio. Twenty otherworldly seconds pass: low, slow, and enticingly familiar. I had no idea birds sang in trios.
"It's the pied butcherbird," Eva explains to me later. "They get their name from snatching other birds' babies right out of a nest. Then they'll wedge their prey into the fork of a tree or skewer it on a broken branch. And they attack people's eyes," she warns, "so some folks wear hats with eyes drawn on the back to confuse the birds."
I notate several irresistible melodies, later writing in my travel journal devoted to this, my first trip to and across the Australian continent: Enchanted. Hard to put together this songster's name and savage reputation with this angelic voice. Won over by blue notes, hip riffs, and syncopated chimes, I've fallen head over heels for a convict.
Hearing these birds was an epiphany, but my partner, Jon, and I only heard one other pied butcherbird during our trip. When stopped at the Western Australia/Northern Territory border, we offered up our grapes to the quarantine officer, but he didn't want them — officers only collect from traffic headed in the opposite direction. Just then, a pied butcherbird who was perched atop the welcome sign tilted back their head, opened their bill, and puffed out in song: a born performer who turns on for an audience — or so we told ourselves. Again, I grabbed my journal and notated some phrases.
When we arrived back in Sydney two months later, pied butcherbirds were still on my mind. Disappointingly, commercial recordings of them were scarcely available. On returning to Paris, I put my hasty notations away. After that, the few times I came across them, I bumped up against the same notion: while the birds' phrases had inspired the composer in me, I was not so interested in "improving" them. I wanted to know more precisely what these birds were up to. It seemed that something extraordinary was transpiring in their songs, and though my memory of them was fading, the enchantment remained.
I followed my hunch four years later as a doctoral candidate researching pied butcherbird vocalizations. Since I had spent the previous thirty years of my career as a practicing musician and not an academic, I plunged into my research with the naive expectation that there would be no resistance from the natural sciences or musicology and that it would be a relatively simple task to bring them together in the course of my investigations — this in spite of scientist C. P. Snow's influential lecture-cum-book The Two Cultures, which details what many assume to be a truism: a difference in methodologies and a notable absence of dialogue between the sciences and the humanities. I needed a home base from which I could, if not unite them, at least navigate between the two, a place where the musical, personal, anecdotal, scientific, philosophical, and environmental could sit beside one another and keep polite, even good, company ... a place where I could ask what turns out for some to be an impolite question: Is birdsong music?
I initially thought the question, while good, failed to be the most pressing one. My newfound passion saw me probing how to best describe, illuminate, and celebrate pied butcherbird vocalizations. What did that bird sing? My enthusiasm also went to other questions: What can musicians tell us about birdsong that no one else could? What might birdsong tell us about the human capacity for music that nothing else could? I found a place where I could ask all of these questions and where the birds could guide me in determining both answers and further questions.
THE FIELD OF ZOÖMUSICOLOGY
Enter zoömusicology (which I pronounce "zoh-uh-musicology," not "zoomusicology"), a rapprochement and partial remedy to this historical disciplinary tension — but also the source of new tensions. As the study of music in animal culture, zoömusicology allows for unapologetically bringing musicological tools and ways of knowing to the project, for honoring painstaking long-term field observation (well-known in ethnography and the natural sciences), for giving a place to thick description and the materiality of the experience of music, and for allowing the exceptional and mysterious to play a part in shaping a species' depiction. With no standardized methodology or fixed research questions, work under this umbrella is best considered a mixed-methods, multiperspectival field rather than a discipline.
Given my broad topic and readership, I will at times define terms that may seem self-evident. For instance, while for some, "animal" refers too narrowly to mammals only, others find the term too general for the wide variety of species under this label. Although "earth others," "animal others," "nonhuman" and "more-than-human" have currency, I find them unsatisfactory. I want a word that emphasizes kinship over difference, so "others" and "nonhumans" do not fit the bill. The meaning of "more-than-human" is not immediately apparent and only appeals to a handful of specialists. "Creature," "kin," and "critters" are fine but too awkward for regular use, while "wild community" omits the domestic contingent. This brings us back to "animal," and although humans are of course animals in denotation if not connotation, I will employ the word (with respect and wonder) to signify what most of us assume it to mean: any member of the kingdom Animalia other than a human being. That said, I will spend most of my time dwelling not on generic animals but on individual birds and their achievements.
The musical properties of animal sounds have many champions. "It is probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet," proclaimed composer Olivier Messiaen. His teacher Paul Dukas had advised students "to admire, analyze and notate" birdsong, and Messiaen passed this example on to his own students, most notably composer François-Bernard Mâche. Although Mâche is often credited with coining the word zoomusicologie in 1983, biologist and musicologist Péter Szoke apparently preceded him, writing in 1969 about Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher's "zoomusicological representation of the cock-crow." In addition, Szoke and Miroslav Filip used the term "ornithomusicology" in a 1977 article, following on the heels of an article Szoke wrote in Hungarian in 1963 in which he employed ornitomuzikológia. Nevertheless, it is Mâche who has eloquently and meticulously given zoömusicology its initial theoretical, and to some extent methodological, underpinnings.
Although he does not straightforwardly define zoömusicology, Mâche devotes a long chapter from his monograph Music, Myth and Nature to the subject. Several sentences could be read as, if not definitional, at least foundational. For instance, he writes, "If these manifestations from the animal sound world are presented to the ears of musicians, it is possible that they will hear them differently from ethological specialists," drawing attention to the signal importance of a musical ear in the study of sound. He encourages us to regard animals' sonic gestures beyond their assumed social functions and to drop the scare quotes around animal music that signal a metaphor rather than the real thing.
Mâche opens a path of analysis among the songs of the sedge warbler (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus) and Blyth's reed warbler (Acrocephalus dumetorum) and Stravinsky's repetitive yet unpredictable rhythms in The Rite of Spring and Les noces, and he links the arithmetical procedures of the skylark (Alauda arvensis) to the "chromaticisms of durations" favored by Messiaen. A comprehensive grasp of the Western canon also allows Mâche to draw a comparison between the marsh warbler's (Acrocephalus palustris) syntactical procedure of elimination and a Beethoven recapitulation, wherein the thematic material is typically reduced to its core, which he also compares to a Debussy theme left suspended in silence. In addition, Mâche understands avian deployments of repetition as essential tools of invention rather than as fill-ins due to a lapse of imagination.
While in this monograph he sometimes writes "musics" in the plural, in a later volume Mâche makes a case for music to be thought of as a singularity. He argues in both books for the linkage of all music and musical capacities. In tracing the musical archetypes and kinds of organization known in human music to birdsongs, he notes that the same solutions crop up, prompting him to conclude that the origins of music must have a fundamental basis in the biology of all living beings. Efforts to slow down a birdsong and speed up a whale song produce remarkably similar results and are just one example in support of his thesis.
Whenever I am in Paris, Mâche and I meet to pour over my latest batch of pied butcherbird recordings and to discuss my analytical results and challenges. His studio is filled with birdsong transcription notebooks — at least one for every letter of the alphabet, he tells me. Early in my research, upon hitting the roadblock of making "scientific" measurements on the one hand, and capturing the essence of a song on the other, I sought his advice. He urged me to first trust my ear, then measurements. Recalling that he used to make his transcriptions too precise, rendering them nearly illegible to other people, he tells me that these days, he simplifies.
Zoömusicology finds a kindred spirit in poet and ornithologist K. C. Halafoff, whose analysis of a superb lyrebird's (Menura novaehollandiae) song divides avian sounds into three categories: tonality items (those of definitive pitch); percussion items; and indefinite sounds. In his view, the lyrebird's vocalizations qualify as essentially tonal and are therefore a suitable candidate for conventional notation. Halafoff's side-by-side comparison of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) and a portion of lyrebird song stands out for the use of analytical terms like "introduction," "main theme," "exposition," "recapitulation," "bridge," and "coda" that identify a close structural resemblance of music by Stravinsky and the lyrebird.
While analogies with Western classical music give birdsong credibility in some corners, zoösemiotician, composer, and musicologist Dario Martinelli underlines the importance for zoömusicology of crafting a definition of music without a Euro-, ethno-, or anthropocentric bias. Like him, I am suspicious of definitions, given their cultural constructedness. The inescapable challenge for zoömusicology, however, is that it depends on the human analysis and valorization of the aesthetic qualities of animal sounds and our assignment of cultural meaning — all analysis transpires within the limits of our perception. Besides, to date, few studies of the aesthetics of animal sounds exist to compare and contrast solely within that system. So until a more expansive cross-species database flourishes and "the ultimate referent" is just one among many, a comparison with human music and our sense of musicality seems inevitable (hopefully one carried out in the most culturally neutral and inclusive way possible).
Quite understandably, Mâche privileges those birds who sing best to his ear. "Of some 8700 species of bird, around 4000 or 5000 are songbirds. Of these, 200 or 300 are of special interest to the musician through the variety of their signals," he estimates. "It may be said en passant that this is a ratio 50–100 times higher than that of professional musicians in relation to the total population of France." Along these lines, I have not fully risen to Martinelli's challenge to focus on a bird's own concept of music rather than being fixated on comparing it to our musical taste. To lure me in, pied butcherbirds had to strike parallels with my own sense of musicality.
People with an interest in zoömusicology often begin their comments with, "I'm not a zoömusicologist, but ..." Some feel they have not yet contributed to the field, some conduct their work under a different label, and others are simply not fond of the term. Because the word is an unfamiliar one, I may identify myself as a zoömusicologist, a field musicologist, or an ornithologist. In the words of entomologist E. O. Wilson, "Every species is a magic well. ... Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life." I believe zoömusicology can help us know a bird musician well.
RELATED FIELDS OF INQUIRY
Other fields of inquiry have similar interests, and although not all of them have sought formal recognition as disciplines or subdisciplines, they are at minimum scholarly trademarks. George List frames ethnomusicology as "the study of humanly produced patterns of sound, sound patterns that the members of the culture who produce them or the scholar who studies them conceive to be music. Since the definition includes the words 'humanly produced,'" he adds, "bird song lies without the province of ethnomusicology." Despite keeping animals at arm's length, ethnomusicology has relevance for zoömusicology in a number of parameters. For instance, beyond the tall, hand-wringing order of defining "music," which includes the debate of "music" versus "musics," ethnomusicology has participated in a search for or a distrust in (depending on the era and researcher) cultural universals. In this, the tyranny of ethnocentrism is always close at hand. How can we be anything but ethnocentric as we attempt to position ourselves in the world? Granted, when accompanied by a belief in the intrinsic superiority of one's own culture and an aversion to others' cultures, this "ism" is problematical.
Both fields require adapting a notation system to an unknown culture (typically an oral tradition characterized by some to be "primitive"), exploring a range of critical and methodological tools, and acquiring recording expertise, all the while developing disciplinary multilingualism and navigating cross-cultural borders — and how to explain the function and meaning of music in relation to cultural practices? Then there are the practical parallels: attending to personal safety in the field ("A dead journalist is not a good journalist," a war correspondent once told me), taking notes constantly, assembling a sizeable corpus, and funding sustained observation. The process is usually slow, painful, and, at least initially, filled with discouragement and setbacks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Is Birdsong Music? by Hollis Taylor. Copyright © 2017 Hollis Taylor. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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