Music without Borders - biomusicology research

Science News,  April 15, 2000  by Susan Milius

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When the starling died, Mozart held graveside ceremonies, singing hymns and reciting a poem he'd written for the fallen songster. Baptista agrees with two other ornithologists who have argued that Mozart's next composition, an odd sextet for strings and two horns, known as "A Musical Joke," shows starling style. Mozart wrote it only 8 days after the death of his bird, and it includes such starlinglike bits as intertwined tunes, off-key recapitulations, and an abrupt ending.

Also, Baptista suggests new evidence for the starling's influence. He points out that starlings have the two-part syrinx, or voice organ, typical of songbirds and can belt out two songs at the same time. Baptista has even documented a starling simultaneously mimicking two birds--a grey fantail and a kelp gull--with the two sides of its syrinx. So, the final cadence of the sextet, essentially written in two keys played simultaneously, might honor the starling singing in two voices.

Mozart wasn't the only composer moved by birdsongs. Beethoven may have been such a fan that he plagiarized a motif from a contemporary feathered composer. Baptista plays the suspicious phrases, which form the lilting opening to the rondo of Beethoven's "Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61." A birder noted in 1953 that a European blackbird, a relative of U.S. robins, had come up with the same theme. Almost 30 years later, another sharp listener reported the same blackbird song. Both he and Baptista noted that generations of blackbirds seem to have preserved that tune, so perhaps it dated back to a time when Beethoven himself heard and borrowed it.

At least some of the enthusiasm for bird music comes from the sounds themselves, which lie so close to counterparts in the music of people. From ornithology recordings, Baptista conjures much of an orchestra. For oboe, for example, he selects the Australian diamond firetail finch, and for flute, he picks the long whistles of the white-bellied green imperial pigeon and the descending run of short notes uttered by the strawberry finch. He elects as bassoonist the common potoo, with a call that reminds him of the beginning of Mozart's clarinet quintet, albeit slightly off-key. He even finds an avian tuba: a western crowned pigeon of New Guinea booming out its courtship song.

Ornithologists have noted birdsongs pitched to the same musical scales used by people, Baptista points out. Wood thrushes can conform to the familiar Western diatonic scale; canyon wrens come close to the more complex chromatic scale, and hermit thrushes sing with the pentatonic scale of traditional Asian music.

Baptista can also summon from birds the rhythm and volume modulations that human composers employ: an accelerando in the wood warbler's windup, a swelling crescendo from the Heuglin's robin-chat, a fading diminuendo from the Swainson's thrush, and so on. Such musical phenomena as the borrowing of melodies, singing in duets or duels, and passing down traditions through families from generation to generation also show up in birds, Baptista reports.