Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  SIL’s methodology was a failure. (“Have you seen this Christ?” the Pirahã people asked Everett.) And regarding language, Everett realized fairly early on that the Pirahã do not use recursion. Later studies by other linguists (including Hauser’s research partner Tecumseh Fitch, who flew to the Amazon to do on-the-ground fieldwork) have failed to show that the Pirahã can recognize recursive patterns. In a new article, Everett stresses that this is not because the Pirahã lack intelligence; rather, it is “about the connection between their culture and grammar.”

  When he began his graduate studies, Everett was an enthusiastic disciple of Chomskyan linguistics, but the more he learned about the Pirahã culture and language, the more he fell away from his adherence to the notion of Universal Grammar. The Pirahã language, he came to insist, is a “severe counterexample” to UG, and he stressed his further belief that the Pirahã are not an isolated case but that scholars don’t know of more exceptions because the entrenched linguistic theory has for so long stifled the impulse to inquire. “I think one of the reasons that we haven’t found other groups like this,” Everett said in an interview for the New Yorker, “is because we’ve been told, basically, that it’s not possible.” In the face of Everett’s ongoing research, Chomsky continued to insist that “there is no coherent alternative” to UG.

  Outside of linguistics, I follow Chomsky’s political activism and commentary with interest. But I cannot mourn Universal Grammar’s decline in the evolving field of modern linguistics. It is increasingly viewed as misguided and outworn at best and, some argue, unintentionally racist at worst. Obviously Chomsky would never have envisioned such a reading. But if the Pirahã do not recognize recursion, then making an absolute link between recursion and human language could certainly be interpreted as a diminishing of their humanity and that of any other tribal groups like them.

  Gentner was not surprised by Chomsky’s response to his starling studies, but he was disappointed that the negative reaction appeared to be based on personal attachment to a particular view rather than on stringent science. The starting process in Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky’s “The Faculty of Language” paper—the process of elimination that led the researchers to suggest the uniqueness of recursion—presumes a level of knowledge about what is happening in animal consciousness, communication, vocalization, and pattern recognition that is far beyond the human capacity to fully understand, both in 2002 when the paper was published and today. To presuppose that it is possible for three men to determine exactly what every earthly human group and animal species can or cannot accomplish in their communication is to begin from a place of astonishing hubris, an overstatement of what we do know, and surely also an overreach of what we can know.

  No one is suggesting that human language is not unique and wonderful. As Gentner told me, “There will never be a nonhuman that can model human language, but until we can understand some mechanism that is shared across species, we can’t even start to ask what is unique about human language.” Yet we find that even among the most liberal intellectuals, there persists a notion that humans and human abilities must somehow remain at the center of the universe. The research on starling vocalizations and recursive pattern recognition pushes humans a little further off our self-created pedestal and deeper into the delightful mix of creatures that is the earth’s truest symphony. We are at the edge of a new paradigm shift in the nature of scientific discourse, and we are being led by one of the world’s most common, most reviled birds.

  Darwin believed that all human capacities have an ancestral pathway, which of course makes evolutionary sense. There is no reason to tease out our consciousness in general, or our language in particular, from the wondrous, graced, earthen tangle in which we live. He wrote in The Descent of Man, “The sounds uttered by birds offer in several aspects the nearest analogy to language.” That was 1871. Now researchers are observing that the pattern of vocal learning in human infants—from babbling to forming words to developing words into phrases and sentences—mirrors the way young birds learn their songs from adults. Duke University neuroscientist Erich Jarvis recently published an unprecedented study in the journal Science that mapped the genomes of forty-eight different species of birds. Jarvis had always been interested in avian voices, and determined years ago that the way birds learn song patterns seems to parallel the way humans learn to form words. He was hoping that his genetic research would expand on other work showing similar parts of human and avian brains are involved in vocal patterning. The results surprised even him. Jarvis and his co-researchers found fifty overlapping genes in humans and birds that correlate with vocal learning. In birds that were more adept at learning new songs, these genes were more often expressed. Jarvis’s conclusions are momentous: “This means that vocal learning in birds and humans are more similar to each other for these genes in song and speech brain areas than other birds and primates are to them.” There is at least one way that I am more biologically similar to little Carmen than I am to a chimp, the nearest animal relative of Homo sapiens.

  The basic brain structure that we share with other animals, including birds, is ancient, predating complex communication. This suggests that the commonalities in our modern brains and genes around language are more likely to stem from convergent evolution—where two organisms evolve a similar physical characteristic in parallel—rather than from a close evolutionary relationship. But it’s far easier to study birds long term in a lab than it is to study humans, and Jarvis hopes his and others’ new work will shed light on the murky topic of language evolution. We have a fossil record to teach us about physical evolution, but we have no recordings of humans speaking seventy thousand years ago. If birds and humans learn language similarly now, it is possible that our evolutionary pathways to language have run much the same course.

  While the reaction to Gentner’s starling research from some linguists was negative, the response from the public was enthusiastic. His work was initially published in a scientific journal, but it got picked up by numerous public radio stations and was summarized in popular magazines and newspapers—more than usual for such a paper. This is not so surprising. I believe that it is a natural human tendency to seek and to recognize connection across species boundaries. We are delighted when things we know to be true in our hearts and our bones are validated by science.

  In 2012 an international consortium of prominent scientists signed a document called “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness,” in which they proclaimed that animals, from birds to mammals to octopuses, possess consciousness similar to humans’. The paper stands at the forefront of what is said to be a new and more enlightened understanding. It is wonderful that animal consciousness is finally being recognized as respectable within high scientific discourse, and I hope that this paper and work like it will help ground a higher standard of ethics for animal treatment in science, agriculture, and entertainment. But I cannot help but think that as an academic declaration, it comes a bit late. Darwin made the same claim in print 162 years prior. And do most of us really need a scientific document to inform us that the animals we live with are conscious beings? I believe that the human sense of connection with the more-than-human world is innate and joyous. It is our truest way of being, of dwelling, of relating. It is not new; it is very old. It surfaces in the art and culture of every civilization across place and time—in stories of human-animal relationships that are based on respect, awareness, knowledge, and love.

  I have no desire to confer on any animal a capacity that it doesn’t have. There is no need. Animals have capacities enough—those we do understand, those we do not yet know, those we can never know because they reside in the unique minds of other-than-human beings. Starlings gather knowledge of their world by gaping. Parrots learn with their tongues, raccoons with the sensitive pads on the palms of their front paws, earthworms with their shining skins. “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,” wrote Emerson, “which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity
.” And to me, this is the beauty of Gentner’s work, and work like his. It reminds us of the creative awareness, at once scientific and poetic, that we stand on a continuum of being, of life. That we are part and parcel, along with every creature that crosses our path, of a fierce and beautiful intelligence.

  Interlude

  THE HEART OF TIME FOR BIRDS AND MOZART

  Conductor Michel Swierczewski said of Mozart, “I have a theory that he is someone who lived faster than other people… When I think of his life as a film, I always see it as an accelerated movie.” I have long held the same notion. By the time of Mozart’s final illness and early passing, at age thirty-four, he had witnessed the death of his mother, his father, and four of his children, had suffered financial highs and lows, and had experienced the exuberance and anxious depression characteristic of artistic brilliance, all while composing quartets, quintets, symphonies, concertos, masses, dances, quadrilles, several of the finest operas ever written, and a beautiful requiem, the pages laid out across his lap as he died. Lessons, conducting, concerts, concertmastering, court composing. Thousands upon thousands of pages of manuscript written, copied over, published. Thousands of letters sent far and near. Thousands of miles traveled by horse-drawn carriage.

  Certainly, in terms of the conditions of daily existence, Mozart was no different from the typical Viennese of his time. But in the pace of his work, juxtaposed with the hardship of his personal life and the complexity of his artist’s mind, he was anything but typical. It is as if the space of a life opened wider in order to contain him.

  New research confirms something that I have always believed to be possible. For smaller animals, time is perceived in slow motion. In a 2013 study published in Animal Behaviour, researchers at Trinity College in Dublin used flashing lights to determine the temporal resolution at which information can be processed by a variety of species. They learned that animals with smaller bodies and higher metabolisms (like houseflies or birds) perceive and process more information in a unit of time than larger animals with slower metabolisms (like elephants or humans). This is why, when we think we are being so sneaky with the rolled-up newspaper, the fly gets away most of the time—the sequence of events is unfolding more slowly for the fly. One commentator likened the effect to the “bullet time” sequence in the film The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves dodges the bullets coming at him in seeming slow motion while his coattails toss in the wind. To the shooter, the bullets are going at full speed, but in the Matrix, Reeves’s character can duck the slow-moving bullets easily. According to this new study, birds live in the Matrix.

  The implications of this research take us far beyond the notion of dog years—the idea that the lives of shorter-lived animals proceed at a pace that can be measured against a human time scale to find a comparable person-age. Instead, we are invited to think far more expansively and relativistically about time. I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird’s life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. Is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them? That we can tot up the length of certain lives in our usual linear fashion but that these lives do not fit into this linear measure, that more, somehow, has been lived?

  The potential for such experience is woven into our cultural mythologies. In the Western archive, we find Faerie, a realm into which one might enter through chance or mishap or, often, flute music. Faerie is the place where worlds meet—wild and domestic, dream and reality, language and poetry, human footsteps overlaid upon those of woodland creatures and leaves and mushrooms. It is the land of the imagination, and of the suspension of time, of the practical interlaced with the magical. Certainly it is the world of The Magic Flute.

  Sometimes when Carmen sits on my shoulder, I close my eyes and listen. She weighs nothing; were it not for the tiny prick of her toenails I might not even know she was there. If all is quiet, and my ear is close enough to her warm feathered breast, I can hear her heartbeat. My heart rate, like Mozart’s and most humans’, is about 80 beats per minute. Carmen’s, like Star’s and most songbirds’, is about 450 beats per minute. Larger birds have slower heart rates (chickens’ are about 245); smaller birds have faster ones (hummingbirds’ are about 1,000). I put my hand on my heart and my ear to Carmen’s breast and feel the pace of our two lives coursing by.

  The metronome was patented by German inventor Johann Maelzel in 1815. All dedicated students of music are subject to its tyranny, but most composers continue to resist suggesting exact tempos for their work. Instead, the tempos at the top of a musical score are descriptive, suggestive, subjective, and highly relative. Allegretto (fairly brisk, but not fast), allegro non troppo (fast, but not too fast), lentissimo (slower than slow). We know that music can bend and change our perception of time, and myriad studies show how easy it is for humans to fall into a changed relationship with time when listening to skillfully composed music. The UK’s Royal Automobile Club even determined the most dangerous music to listen to while driving: Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Evidently, the risk is not that the listener becomes overinvolved in the music or that the music itself is too fast, but that the ecstatic nature of the music interrupts drivers’ normal sense of speed, causing them to unconsciously drive faster.

  The late Welsh poet John O’Donohue believed that “music is, perhaps, the art form that brings us closest to the eternal because it changes immediately and irreversibly the way we experience time.” This, he felt, creates a bridge between the visible world and the invisible, or the imaginal, as it is called in the scholarship, where our usual measures make little sense. Mozart lived in this world of music, with ever-changing tempos in his head and a starling on his shoulder. Could it be that his experience of the passing of time was unique, that time unfolded for him in a distinctive, idiosyncratic way? I like to imagine that he experienced the interval of his own swift life with the expanded heart-time of a bird.

  Eight

  BIRDS OF A FEATHER

  In June of 1787, Mozart entered a new composition, Ein musikalischer Spass, or A Musical Joke, into his catalog of completed works—the first piece he had finished since the death of his father and then his starling. The work is now designated K. 522, and is an unusual chamber ensemble for two French horns, two violins, viola, and bass. Mozart never shied away from complexity, but we know from his words and music that he was always against disharmony. This divertimento is a Mozartian anomaly, lurching wildly and unpredictably between keys and sprinkled with discordant accidentals. At the time of its publication, the piece was not given much regard as serious music, and those who paid it any mind believed that it was meant to parody the ineptitude of the current musical establishment or was perhaps even a spoof of a particular composer. It is rumored that Czech composer Leopold Koželuch actually attacked Mozart on a visit to Prague, convinced that he was the parodied artist.

  It has been a great sadness to me, and a kind of irony, that Carmen takes almost no interest in Mozart’s music. I did, after all, pluck her from her nest and raise her from a scrawny, dying nestling to study a starling’s relationship to the great composer. I wouldn’t mind so much if she didn’t seem interested in music at all, but she loves almost all other music. All except Mozart’s—or most of Mozart’s. As I mentioned, she does at least enjoy the final movement of Star’s concerto. But there is one other Mozart composition that she dearly loves, and to me it seems another dimension of Mozart’s Joke—as if he has reached beyond the grave to play one last trick. This starling I live with, this supposed kindred spirit to the maestro, sits blithely plucking at her feathers while Mozart’s sublime Mass in C Minor drifts from the stereo speakers. But the much-maligned, musically dubious divertimento, the Musical Joke? Carmen leaps t
o life like an opera hero. She tilts her head. She looks at me as if something wild is happening and she expects that I, too, should recognize it. And if she is truly carried away, she will toss her little head back and sing. After that she will look at me again as if to say, Was that good? It’s so cute and innocent it almost breaks my heart. I want to be annoyed, but instead I give her a kiss on the neck, which she hates. She fluffs the kiss off. “Very pretty,” I tell her.

  After Mozart’s death, when his music was being passed around and played in his honor, musicians were reluctant to perform A Musical Joke because it made them sound incompetent; modern musicians are equally unenthusiastic. Some contemporary musicologists agree with the parody theory. Some feel that Wolfgang was working through his relationship with his father, who had died the previous month (though I find it doubtful that he would have treated this subject comically so soon after Leopold’s death, or ever). Some think it contains a hidden message not yet understood. Some are convinced that this was an instance in which Mozart simply lost his way and created a superficial piece, lacking in significance. Most just find it unlistenable. Liner notes from a Deutsche Grammophon recording sum up the popular view: “In the first movement we hear the awkward, unproportioned, and illogical piecing together of uninspired material… the andante cantabile contains a grotesque cadenza, which goes on far too long and pretentiously ends with a comical deep pizzicato.” By the end, the commentator declares, Mozart is writing like an “amateur composer” who “has lost all control of his incongruous mixture.”