One day, Carmen was hanging out in her aviary on a branch by the window. All of a sudden, a Cooper’s hawk perched briefly in the big camellia tree just outside, then threw himself, feet forward, into Carmen’s closed window, talons aimed at her breast. Now, many birds flit at Carmen’s window. There are chickadees, bushtits, house finches, and hummingbirds. Some of them, like crows, are almost as big as the Cooper’s hawk. She observes them with a curious eye. Sometimes, she will hop over for a closer look; sometimes she will hop away and watch them, wondering, from a distance. This day, when a bird-eating predator she had never seen in her life came at her window, she let out a shriek I did not know she was capable of and hurled herself across the room and onto my shoulder, where she spent the next fifteen minutes panting and—another behavior I’d never witnessed—shivering. The Cooper’s hawk banged against the window a couple more times (because he was flying from the nearby camellia, he was unable to get up much speed and was not at all injured, but he did appear to be exceedingly put out). He sat peering in from his perch among the pink flowers for two hours. Meanwhile, I had this suddenly wild bird on my shoulder who, in her own mind, had just narrowly escaped death. Here was a feral intelligence I hadn’t been certain she possessed. But such evolved and wild knowing runs through blood, heart, and imagination—in birds, in each of us.
When I set out to follow the story of Mozart and his starling, I saw at its center a shining, irresistible paradox: one of the greatest and most loved composers in all of history was inspired by a common, despised starling. Now I muse upon the many facets of this tale, and it is wonderful, yes, even more wonderful than I had imagined. But looking back at the trail that I have wandered with these kindred birds—one in history and one in my home—I see also that, as both humans and birds so often are, I have been tricked by my attraction to the shiny little object. For in the end, it is not the exceptionality of this story that is the true wonder. It is its ordinariness.
In the creatures that intertwine with our lives, those we see daily and those that watch us from urban and wild places—from between branches and beneath leaves and under eaves and stairwells and culverts and the sides of walks and pathways—we share everything. We share breath, and biology, and blood. We share our needs for food and water and shelter. We share the imperative to mate and to give new life and to keep our young safe and warm and fed. We share susceptibility to disease and the potential to suffer and an inevitable frailty in the face of these things. We share a certain death. We share everything, constantly, every moment of every day and night, across eons. And in this shared earthly living, when we give our attention to it, we find the basis of our compassion, and of our empathy for other creatures.
And yet we have so much more in common than these of-the-body needs. We all poop, yes. But we all ponder, too, in a manner that may or may not be human but is whole and wondrous. We are at every moment surrounded by consciousness, a feast of unique intelligences. Every creature has its particular ways and wiles. Each being has its own presence, voice, silence, song, body, place. We are bound by our sameness and our uniqueness in equal measure—both spring from our shared being on a vital, conscious earth. This is a wild communion. And it is in this recognition that we move beyond simple compassion to a more certain, more essential sense of relatedness, of kinship.
Mozart felt this, I know. Like me, he was drawn at first to the shiny thing —in his case it was Star’s singing back to him the song he himself had written. But in his elegy poem we see that a different relationship evolved. The bird’s mimicry is not once mentioned. This is a poem to a kindred creature whose presence brought play, sound, song, joy, and friendliness to the maestro’s life. And in the work that Star inspired, this is what we see too. A shared sense of mischief, music, and delight. The word kinship comes from Old English—of the same kind, and therefore related. Kindly and kindness also grow from this root—the bearing toward others that kinship inspires.
I have always thought of all creatures—all organisms, really—as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness—ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy. Starlings, though pretty, were a rift in this vision. They fluttered outside this wholeness. But my thinking has evolved. Ecologically, it is true—starlings do not belong in this country, this city; but relationally, it is not true. We live together in a tangled complexity. I listen to the starlings mimic back to me my own profound ecological shortcomings. Carmen is a creature with a body, voice, and consciousness in the world. In this, we are sisters. And all these unwelcomed starlings on the grassy parking strip? Yes, they are my relations too.
The Cartesian belief in an absolute separateness of lives, bodies, and brains maintains a foothold in the traditions of our modern culture. We see it in the ways that we are pitted against one another in commerce, in education, and in the small, daily jealousies of our own minds. We see it in the ways that we continue to find it culturally acceptable to diminish animals in agriculture, in entertainment, and in scientific experimentation. And yet, when we are attentive, we find that we are not separate, not alone. We are not isolated little minds wandering on a large and indifferent earth. We are surrounded by our kin, by all of life, beings with whom we are wayfarers together. Instead of walking upon, we walk within, and this within-ness brings our imaginations to life. We are inspired—literally “breathed upon”—together.
Our creativity and our connection to other beings is tangled in a beautiful etymology. The words creative and creature spring from the same Latin root, creare, “to produce, to grow, to bring into existence.” It was Ged, Ursula Le Guin’s beloved young wizard of Earthsea, who learned after the fall of his individual pride that the wise person is “one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.” Through such understanding we arrive at a new wholeness. We become more receptive and free in body and in imagination, and our unique potential for creative magnificence is enlivened. We become the listening artists of our own lives and culture.
And though, as Mozart learned with Star and I learned with Carmen, it is natural to come into attentive communion through the individual creatures before us—this bird, this raccoon, this tree (for we are learning that trees have their own systems of communication and knowing)—these individuals are not ends in themselves but a kind of window onto the totality of existence. I waited so eagerly for Carmen to mimic back the concerto’s motif. Now I see that she has been calling out something much bigger, much more vital; she has been singing back the song of life, all of life, all the time.
Nine
MOZART’S EAR AND THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
In a dusty corner of Mozart’s birth-house museum in Salzburg, there is a small room with lesser ephemera tucked into glass cases and tacked onto walls: cards and concert notes and silhouette portraits of distant relatives. I was there on a sunny day, and the rooms were dark. I’d been at the museum for hours, seen all I thought I wanted to see, and was feeling tempted to rush outside into the light and visit the aproned chestnut vendor I’d passed by the front step on my way in. But I reminded myself that I’d come all this way to contemplate such bits and bobs, so I sighed and stepped through the door frame. Nothing much caught my eye until I spotted a little lithograph, not much bigger than a postcard, at chest height near the door leading out of the room. On it, there were two penciled ears. The one on the right was labeled Gewöhnliches Ohr (“normal ear”). The one on the left was labeled Mozart’s Ohr.
This sketch had been printed in the biography of Mozart by Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Constanze’s second husband, with the comment “The construction of Mozart’s ears was completely different from the norm” and the claim that Wolfga
ng and Constanze’s son Franz had inherited this rare ear shape. At first, both ears pictured looked normal to me, so I began to surreptitiously inspect the ears of other Mozart pilgrims in the room to get a better sense of what most ears really look like. Sure enough, the Mozart ear had at least two distinctions. The large, curved, upper part of the ear, called the antihelix (as I learned in my later research of outer ear anatomy), is broad, flat, and rather squared, and the small flap in front of the ear canal, called the tragus, is greatly reduced.
It is difficult to find portraits of Mozart to corroborate Nissen’s claim; in most paintings, his hair is covering his ears. But a portrait of Franz and brother Carl as young boys (the only two Mozart children to survive beyond infancy) does seem to show a reduced tragus on Franz (his upper ear is not visible), and the book by Nissen was overseen by Constanze, who would have known more than anyone living about Mozart’s ears. She insisted that certain things be whitewashed in the biography, but there would have been no reason to misinform readers about an ear; the sketch is likely credible.* It is probable that the strangeness of Mozart’s ears caused him some embarrassment—maybe they are always covered in portraits because he wanted to hide them. This auricular nonconformity remains rare today, but it is not unheard of and is colloquially called “Mozart ear” by specialists.
A sketch of Mozart’s ear (left) and a normal ear.
What might it mean for a composer, of all people, to have an oddly shaped ear? A person like Mozart, whose life was dedicated to creation via sound? When I got home from Austria I talked with ear doctors and audiologists, and though everyone I spoke to emphasized that they were speculating, there was a general consensus. A fully formed tragus helps distinguish sounds that come from both the front and the rear. Sounds that originate in front of a person can sometimes be overwhelming to the inner ear, and it is believed the tragus provides a small barrier that subtly filters such sounds. Sounds that come from behind, by contrast, are already dampened by the ear pinna, so the tragus has an opposite function—it serves as a funnel that collects sound and bounces it into the inner ear. For someone with a small or nonexistent tragus, sounds coming from the front might be louder, fuller, more nuanced, or more distinct. Sounds from behind, however, might be dissipated or diminished, making it difficult for the listener to tell where they came from.
The impact of all this on Mozart as a composer is a matter of conjecture, but it does seem likely, at the very least, that Mozart experienced sound somewhat differently than most of us. It is impossible to say whether such an altered listening influenced his compositions, but it would certainly have led to an uncommon immersion in the aural dimension of life. I wonder how Mozart tilted his head to calm the sound before him, discern the sound from behind, or balance his heightened sense of the difference between the two. I think of Carmen’s sweet turn of head—the way she lifts her strange bird ear whenever I call her name or when she is listening attentively to music or, really, to anything. Star did this too, as starlings do.
One morning early this spring I was walking in the wooded park near my home. The migratory flycatchers, tanagers, thrushes, and warblers were just beginning to arrive, thin from their long flights—all the way from Mexico, Central America, South America. I’d left my binoculars at home that day, intent on walking unencumbered and letting my other, nonvisual senses get in shape for the onslaught of growth and movement and birdsong that the season would bring. I heard a little chip in an aspen and stopped to listen. There I was startled by a young man who passed, paused, and looked back at me. “I like the way you tilt your head,” he told me, and walked on. The oddest compliment I’d ever received, but I liked it. Yes, I thought, this is just the attitude I want to cultivate. The tilt of the head, the listening for something just beyond normal hearing.
Birdsong is the perfect invitation to such listening. Eleanor Ratcliffe at the University of Surrey is engaged in a years-long study to determine the effects of birdsong on listeners. She is learning that human reactions to birdsongs are as varied as the songs themselves. Most of us are unsettled by raucous vocalizations, like those of a crow chasing a predator from its nest. But when we hear the cooing of pigeons, or the spring song of robins, or even just the background chatter of yard birds? Ratcliffe’s study and those of others show that most people respond with decreased stress, increased calm, better concentration, brightened mood, and heightened creativity. Some find it easier to access meditative states while listening to birdsong.
All these responses are analogous to the way certain musical compositions lift and change our mood and increase our receptivity to the world around us. Both music and birdsong flit past our tympanic membranes, connect with our brains, brighten our minds, and transport our spirits. More than other ambient environmental sound, birdsong speaks in the musical language of pitch, rhythm, lilt, and repetition. But is it right to call birdsong music? By way of metaphor, there can be no argument. It is humans who chose the word song for the seasonal vocalizations of passerine birds, a word that is used in even the most academic of ornithological texts. But if we want to transcend metaphor and suggest that birdsong is music in the same way that human composition is music, then we are wandering into a scholarly fray that most of us did not know existed.
Birdsong carried through nearly every habitat on earth for millions of years before primates appeared, and so human evolution occurred against a backdrop of avian music. Cultures across all continents and times long before and after Mozart developed music that was inspired by and based on the sounds made by local birds. Over the decades, naturalists, ornithologists, musicologists, philosophers, and poets have found parallels and counterparts between the two. Scales, ornaments, trills, inversions, themes, variations. Not every passerine bird that sings uses all these attributes of human music, but all of them can be found in the combined repertoire of the world’s songbirds. Darwin noted the resemblance of birdsong to musical composition and believed that birds possess an aesthetic sense. The well-known ornithologist Luis Baptista, in his paper “Why Birdsong Is Sometimes Like Music,” writes, “Some birdsong is pitched to the same scale as Western music, which is one possible reason for human attraction to these sounds.” Other prominent ornithologists note that white-crowned sparrows sing a perfect fourth interval between their first and second notes; that the canyon wren, with its gorgeous cascading series of notes that bounce against the desert stone walls, sings in the chromatic scale of twelve pitches per octave; that the wood thrush’s layered song is pitched to the Western scale. The list could go on for pages.
One of the most intriguing comparisons of human music and birdsong was penned by the philosopher Charles Hartshorne, student of process theologian Alfred North Whitehead. Like Whitehead, Hartshorne saw the divine in the unfolding of earthly creation, in which humans participate. He was a gifted and committed amateur ornithologist, and he spent nearly an entire century—almost the whole of his 103-year life—immersed in the study of birdsong, research that culminated in his 1973 opus Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Birdsong. It’s an unusual book that combines scientific observation and quantification with the language of poetry, philosophy, and possibility. In his life of listening, Hartshorne located nearly every element of human musical composition in the songs of birds. Accelerando, ritardando, crescendo, diminuendo. Structure, rhythmic variation, melody, verse. The essential difference between avian and human music, suggested Hartshorne, is temporality, with the repeatable patterns in birdsong having an upper limit of about fifteen seconds (he evidently did not record starlings).
In spite of his well-documented examples and a book that is a wonder to read, Hartshorne has been criticized for being too expansive and speculative—too philosophical for the topic to hand, which some felt ought to remain securely in the scientific citadel. A recent paper published in Animal Behaviour seeks to set the record straight. For his paper “Is Birdsong Music? Evaluating Harmonic Intervals in Songs of a Neotropical Songbird,” Marcelo Ara
ya-Salas, a PhD candidate in the animal behavior lab at New Mexico State University, studied the voice of the tiny nightingale wren, Microcerculus philomela, chosen for its complex, musical-sounding song. The bird is just a little bit bigger than a mouse, brown all over, with delicate curved black-and-cream speckling on its breast. Its eyes are huge and black. When it throws its head back to sing, it almost seems to shape-shift—the song is so startling, loud, and beautiful that the bird appears to become twice as large as it really is. When the song is finished, there again is just the avian mouse in place of the giant singing wren.
Araya-Salas gathered recordings of the nightingale wren from its entire range across Central and South America and analyzed songs from eighty-one individual birds alongside the well-known chromatic, major diatonic, and major pentatonic scales. These scales, he argues, are the ones that “represent the most intuitive pattern in which birds might base their songs.” As a starting point for evaluation, he held up the “harmonic birdsong hypothesis,” the notion that if birdsong was music, then consecutive notes in a bird’s song should be closer to the harmonic intervals in these common scales than we would expect from chance. He evaluated 243 of his recordings alongside the musical scales to determine whether the wren songs conformed to harmonic intervals and determined that, in all of these comparisons, there were only six instances of wrens singing harmonic intervals, or about 2 percent—just what we would expect from chance, certainly not more. Araya-Salas argues, “If the frequencies are not determined by harmonic intervals in this species, it seems less likely that it happens in other birds with more complex song elements.” He concludes that those who suggest a closer parallel between music and birdsong are simply misguided. “Documented musical properties in birds might be caused by cultural biases of the listener or misunderstanding of the physics of musical compositions.”
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