Even so, Meredith West argues in her seminal 1990 paper that Star could already sing the motif when Mozart bought him in the shop. She relies heavily on the evidence provided in what we know of Mozart’s little expense book combined with her research on the nature of starlings:
Given our observation that whistled tunes are altered and incorporated into mixed themes, we assume that the melody was new to the bird because it was so close a copy of the original. Thus, we entertain the possibility that Mozart, like other animal lovers, had already visited the shop and interacted with the starling before 27 May. Mozart was known to hum and whistle a good deal. Why should he refrain in the presence of a bird that seems to elicit such behavior so easily?
When I spoke to Dr. West recently, nearly thirty years after the publication of her paper, she told me that she still feels this is the most likely way for events to have unfolded. It is entirely plausible; Mozart was drawn into a shop full of singing birds. How could he not be? Wolfgang had kept birds during his childhood and loved them. The exuberance of the starling’s song he now heard—so different from the canaries he had grown up with—piqued his native curiosity. In her paper, West supports her theory that Mozart was attracted to this particular bird for more than its song, noting that, like a starling, Mozart himself was attuned to nonverbal communication and to visual cues. She invokes the feeling that overwhelmed Mozart at a performance of The Magic Flute, where he found the “silent approval,” as he wrote to Constanze—his feeling that the audience members were attuned, involved, in love with his music—even more gratifying than their enthusiastic applause. Mozart observed in his audience the same attitude assumed by a starling when something captures its interest. When you talk to a tame starling, it jumps as close to you as it can get, tilts its head, and listens. So gratifying! Mozart was well aware of his own gifts, yet craved attention and approval for his music. When visited by Mozart in the shop, Star gave the composer these very things. As West writes:
To be whistled to by Mozart! Surely the bird would have adopted its listening posture, thereby rewarding the potential buyer with “silent applause.”
While the canaries and finches were flying around their little shop cages, thrashing and singing within their own little worlds, here was an iridescent bird looking right at Mozart and seeming to wonder, What will this man say next? What will he sing? What will he whistle? Wolfgang could not resist such an agreeable audience. He whistled his dear little phrase. Whistled it again—four times, five. Carmen takes much longer than this to learn a new word, but a particularly gifted and willing starling mimic could begin to pick up the phrase that fast. Perhaps Mozart visited a couple more times, unable to resist the call of this flirtatious new friend. And when Star had learned a passable version of the motif? Well, how could Wolfgang not take such a friend home?
My own imagined tale, recounted at the beginning of this book, is a variation on West’s theme. Here Star has learned the motif before purchase, but Mozart did not teach the bird his tune. Instead, he was drawn into the shop by the sound of the bird singing it, as if following the fragrance of a freshly baked Viennese plum cake. This, too, is possible. The bird catcher’s stall was almost certainly on the Graben, a vital commercial district bustling with shoppers and musicians day and night. Mozart composed the concerto when living at 29 Graben, the apartment’s windows just above the string of markets and sellers of all kinds. He was still copying the music over in May, when the windows would have been open to the spring air after a dust-settling rain and the musical strains might have filtered out into the world and perhaps into a starling’s little ear. There is no reason that Star could not have picked up a bit of the motif and played it over on his starling tongue until it came out nearly in the form that Mozart had composed. And once it did, there would have been no stopping the repetition—starlings love to share freshly learned mimicked sounds.
But scholarship that has surfaced since the publication of West’s paper suggests another, more plausible way by which Star could have gleaned the tune before Mozart met him. We now suspect that the concerto might have had a somewhat earlier public debut at a prestigious concert with Emperor Joseph II in attendance at the beautiful Kärntnertor Theater (now the footprint of the famous Hotel Sacher) on April 29. This would be in line with Mozart’s typical eagerness to place a piece before the public eye, even if the ink on the pages wasn’t quite dry. It would not even have been the newest work by Mozart performed that night, for the evening’s program was ordered in part to feature the virtuoso violinist Regina Strinasacchi. Wolfgang wrote to his father on April 24, a Saturday: “We have the famous Strinasacchi from Mantua here right now; she is a very good violinist, has excellent taste and a lot of feeling in her playing.” Mozart loved to compose specifically for particular virtuosos or voices—some of his pieces were so difficult that they could be performed by only one exceptional artist. He continued astonishingly: “I’m composing a Sonata for her at this moment that we’ll be performing together Thursday in her concert at the Theater.” It takes a lot of temerity to compose a piece just days before it will be performed before the emperor. It has become a famous (and true) Mozart anecdote that he played the piano part this night from an unfinished penciled score, improvising the cadenzas and conducting at the same time.
It is now cautiously believed by many scholars that the Piano Concerto in G debuted publicly this night as well, also with Mozart at the piano. It would certainly have given the tune a chance to get out on the street before Mozart met and bought Star. The theater was just a ten-minute or so walk from the district where the bird catcher’s shop likely stood, down a cobbled street past the Hofburg Palace at the end of the Graben (near the current opera house).
And the vector from performance hall to starling? The famous whistlers of Vienna, of course—the everyday street-walking people who soaked in the surrounding music and then whistled it back out again. Humming and whistling filled the streets of eighteenth-century Vienna. There were no radios, no iPods. There were only these public performances and the repetition of a strong theme, as in this concerto where the catchy motif that occurs repeatedly within the allegretto and is reprised in the finale was an intentional gift from the composer to the audience; it gave people something memorable to take home.
It is said that from childhood, Mozart could memorize whole symphonies after one hearing well enough to write them down note-perfect. (In 1770, Leopold was traveling with his fourteen-year-old son and wrote home to Anna Maria after attending a performance at the Sistine Chapel, “You have often heard of the great Miserere, in Rome. It is so greatly prized that the performers in the Sistine chapel are forbidden on pain of excommunication to copy it.” Leopold was not exaggerating. He went on. “But we have it already. Wolfgang has written it down.”) Most people, of course, did not have this skill. Composers—and Mozart was a master at this—would create a refrain not just for the art of their music, but for the heart and ear of their public, who would have an easy-to-remember phrase to carry with them and hum in days to come. Star could well have heard Mozart’s tune whistled from the street by a concertgoer. Even more likely, since starlings learn best from personal interaction, someone who had attended the concerto performance might have stopped into the shop and whistled the phrase to the bird, who then learned it quickly.
All of these possible pathways to Star learning the motif involve educated imagination but no exaggeration of known facts, Mozart’s biography, the musical timeline, or starling capabilities. All are within the realm of the intelligently possible. Yet there is a gray area here. What if Star learned the motif after Mozart brought him home, and Mozart simply added the musical notation to his notebook later? That would explain everything.
But here’s the catch: If the bird learned the song after he came to live in the Mozart home, Wolfgang would have had to record the purchase of the bird, then go back to his notebook and record the mimicked motif later, once Star had started to sing it. This doesn’t seem lik
e such a hard thing, except for the fact that Mozart was a dismal record keeper. He did maintain a good catalog of his finished music, but other than that he didn’t keep track of much at all. He had no diary, just the listing of purchases in this little book, and within a year even this effort would lapse—the last pages of the expense notebook were given over to practicing written English.
Like many on Mozart’s trail, I long to get my hands on that booklet. Was there a change in ink used? Odd spacing? Anything that might indicate that the musical notation was made at a different time from the purchase notation? Sadly, we do not have the actual expense book to search for further clues—its whereabouts, if it still exists, are unknown. It may be hiding in the labyrinthine bowels of some German university or falling to dust in the basement of one of Constanze’s distant descendants. For practical and scholarly purposes, the notebook is simply gone.
But recall that in the facsimile pages copied directly from the notebook, the commentator clearly stated that the musical entry appeared zugleich folgende, or “immediately following,” the recording of the expense for the bird, which would support the idea that the notation was made at the time Star was purchased. Thus, what we can know of the ephemera does seem to point to the mystery of a bird in a shop having learned Mozart’s song before coming to live in the family home. In truth, though, there is no way to know for certain, and I have come to accept that those who claim otherwise are overreaching.
When I first drafted this chapter, I included my best guess as to when and how Star learned Mozart’s tune. But I deleted it. I didn’t even put it into my Cutting-Room Floor File for possible revisiting. I deleted it into the ether, where it belongs. My grail chalice has been filled with an elixir that is perhaps headier than the wine of fact—it is filled with swirling, essential uncertainty and the difficult, mature task of dwelling in such a state.
And yet, I believe inquiry into what we do know to be true matters tremendously. History like this that has a basis in fact yet lies outside of memory is necessarily subject to imagination. To make it comprehensible, to make it real to our artful human minds, we tell it as a story. But when we force our will, rather than our intelligence and honesty, on a historical story, it loses its reality and is diminished. At its heart, the story of Mozart and Star is beautiful, meaningful, and true. It is belittled and made false by exaggeration and mere rumor—the starling did not teach the motif to Mozart; the starling did not sing an entire concerto. But we can perceive the sweet and authentic center. We know that an unusual friendship between one of history’s most loved composers and one of the world’s least loved birds began in May of 1784, when, in one order or another, Mozart wrote the starling’s song in his book, conferred his judgment—Das war schön!—plunked down his kreuzer, and took the bird home, smiling like a jackass eating thistles.
Seven
CHOMSKY’S STARLING
C’mere, honey! Tom, Claire, and I were standing in the kitchen as Carmen called from her aviary. We all stared at one another, silently. As usual, Claire voiced the brave thought first: “She made a sentence.” No one spoke after that except Carmen, who said, C’mere, honey!
In the past, Carmen had mimicked Hi, honey, and C’mere, but never C’mere, honey! So, yes, it seemed that she had just combined words and phrases, albeit simple ones, into a new pattern that made sense. Instead of mimicking a sentence she’d heard, it appeared that she had done something of a different order: she’d made a sentence of her own. Finally, I ventured uncertainly, “That wasn’t a sentence,” at least not an intentional one. Either she’d put the words together in a new way that happened to make sense (she jumbled up her repertoire all the time), or we had unwittingly been saying, “C’mere, honey,” to her, and she’d latched onto it. Is it impossible that she meant to create a small sentence? Probably, yes. But given what I’ve learned, both from Carmen and from the current science on birds and language, I will never underestimate the possibilities —for starlings, or for any of the beautiful, bewildering voices in our more-than-human world.*
It is easy enough to find a starling voice to contemplate. At any time of year, we can meander down the sidewalk and stand beneath a starling settled on an electric wire—its favorite urban perch. It is tempting to conclude that the long jumble of whistles, gurgles, and clicks we hear is nothing more than a haphazard mess of sound. But it isn’t. With a bit of attention, it is not difficult to tease out the sequence. Starlings will sometimes sit there and rehearse seemingly random whistles and imitations and various kinds of chatter. But in a full-fledged song bout, where the bird throws its head skyward and lets loose for five seconds, or twenty, or up to forty-five, the song is divided into easily recognizable sections that follow a predictable pattern. The first is the whistle. This is a series of long, wild, teakettle-ish sounds, ranging stormily up and down the tonal spectrum. (It leads to some confusion among those who encounter captive starlings like Carmen and are waiting for them to mimic something; “She’s imitating the teakettle!” visitors delightedly announce when they hear Carmen’s whistle—alas, she imitates a lot of household sounds, but this one is just a good old wild-starling voice.) After the whistle there is a quick pause, then the bird will break into its own personal repertoire of sound phrases, some of them mimicked, some of them learned from other starlings, some of them invented in its singular starling brain, all of them gathered into a sequence that is entirely unique to this individual bird. The literature claims that a single bird will have somewhere between six and thirty individual sounds in its repertoire, but based on Carmen’s performance, I suspect the number of phrases for a gifted wild bird is beyond our current expectation. To me, Carmen is a wondrous mimic, but in the starling world she is simply average. She has fifteen phrases in her mimicked repertoire (that I recognize—there are probably more), and she is learning more all the time. Though females are fine mimics, a gifted male will mimic more phrases—and of higher complexity—than the average female. I have a hard time believing that among the millions of starlings in the world, thirty is the upward limit for a precocious male singer.
After the initial whistle and repertoire sections of the song bout, there is another swift pause. A male bird will now perform a series of clicks and rattles. This is one vocalization that females do not usually employ, and it’s a fair way to tell if you are listening to a male or female bird.* The song will end with a whistled crescendo, different from the initial section in that it is quicker, more direct, less varied, and usually louder. That is the full starling song: whistle, repertoire, rattle, crescendo. It may differ a bit here and there, but it is dependable on the whole. This is no sweet-fluted wood thrush strain. This song is crazy-wild. It’s gorgeous, in a loopy starling way. And it springs from a little bird with no idea that it has, in the pattern of its song, dropped its shining little body and brain into a turbulent academic debate—one that is both scientific and poetic. Here biology, language, art, music, consciousness, and—yes—human ego mingle, dance, and clash.
In the 1950s, a brilliant young linguist at MIT named Noam Chomsky was doing some hard thinking about the nature and uniqueness of human language. When Chomsky set to work on the topic, all of the social sciences, including the academic discipline of linguistics, were dominated by the tenets of behaviorism, which held that the only proper arena of psychological study for both humans and animals was observable, measurable, external behavior. Behaviorism had gained ascendance within the sciences in the previous decade due to its ability to quantify human and animal responses in experimental settings, making so-called soft sciences, like psychology, hard, like mathematics and chemistry. Work on something as murky and unknowable as consciousness was relegated to a scientific backwater while the behaviorist model garnered grants and publication in the best journals. On the language front, behaviorism’s progenitor B. F. Skinner decreed that children learned words and grammar by being positively reinforced for correct usage. The payoff most often came in the form of a response—eye conta
ct, attention from an adult, or the chocolate cupcake the child had requested using the proper words. Such rewards, for Skinner, were akin to a lab rat getting its Purina Lab Chow pellet after pushing the right button.*
Chomsky penned a scathing review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, and like Kant responding to Hume, woke from his “dogmatic slumber” to promulgate his own view. He pointed out that children create grammatical sentences following patterns that they have never heard, proving that instruction and reward are insufficient to explain the complexity of human language learning. He came to believe that humans are endowed with a faculty for language, a “language organ,” as he misleadingly described it (since it cannot be said to be housed in a discrete physical structure), that contained a universal and immutable set of rules shared by all human languages, no matter how varied these languages appeared on the surface. This is Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, or UG. We generate meaning by using these linguistic rules to combine words, build clauses, and incorporate these clauses into longer sentences.
More than this, humans don’t make sentences solely by adding to them bit by bit, as if a sentence were a rat growing a longer tail. Instead, we often embed phrases within sentences, a process linguists call recursion. Take the discrete phrase, also a short sentence, Mozart played the violin. We could add to it in linear fashion: Mozart played the violin and liked birds. Or we could employ the syntactical device of recursion to embed the added information into the original sentence: Mozart, who liked birds, played the violin. And we could go on: Mozart, who liked birds, and in fact composed with a starling perched on his shoulder, played the violin. Perhaps: Mozart, who liked birds, and in fact composed with a starling, which had shockingly iridescent feathers, perched on his shoulder, played the violin. We could do this forever, limited only by breath and the capacity of memory. Many animals communicate in the linear fashion, we know. Cetaceans, elephants, winter wrens—all add complexity to their vocalizations by taking a starting motif and adding to it, then adding some more. But using recursion, humans are able to make meaning through sentences that are more like blossoming peonies, growing from within. Chomsky came to believe that the capacity for recursion is not only unique to humans but the defining characteristic that sets human language apart from all other forms of communication among living beings.
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