Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  Of all the things Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart brought to human sound, the most important might be his sense of surprise. His compositions, while almost always law-abiding, are full of trickery—leading tones that drop away from roots, accidentals that jar the listening mind from its diverted stupor, minuets too syncopated to dance to. His beloved Piano Concerto in D Minor begins not with a sturdy melody, but an anti-tune of the same repeated notes bouncing about the orchestra. Songs from his early operas confounded audiences with their false endings. He reveled in keys like A minor, with its air of turmoil and instability.

  These caprices, though stuck inside the pinfold of common practice, are what made him a star. As the old German saying goes, the music of Bach gave us God’s word, Beethoven’s gave us God’s fire, but Mozart’s gave God’s laughter to the world. He found the accidents in song that reminded music to glorify the playful, the mischievous, the pop! that sends Jack exploding from the box after so much measured cranking.

  So the starling’s playful G-sharp must have felt more than schön to the maestro, and worth more to him than thirty-four damn kreutzer. Think of it—he’d whistled a tune steeped in Vienna’s golden algebra to a thing with feathers, and then the animal bobbed its little head and whistled back to him a glorious, deviant, Mozartean wink. This wasn’t just schön; it was game recognizing game! It’s difficult to imagine a more priceless moment: one of the greatest thinkers in history bonding with a bird brain.

  We still know very little about the starling brain, really. Our science is just catching up to the species’s complex body and behavior, some 225 years after Mozart’s death. Among our recent discoveries is a sturdy musical form inside one type of starling song. Though the structure allows enough variation for one starling to sound nothing like the next bird over, all courting males organize their love songs into a four-part sequence of whistle, warble, click, and screech.

  Each bird begins with a set of repeated whistles—a kind of reedy introduction. Next, as the feathers at his throat seethe and puff, he weaves a run of maddening musical snippets—as few as ten or as many as thirty-five—curated into descending tones. Some of these snippets are filched from nearby species (or lawn equipment, or cellular phones). It’s here, in this second movement, that the “twin-kle, twin-kle” meets the chackerchacker, the smoke alarm, and the Bee Gees. Without stopping, he then slams into the third section, that of the percussive click solo. Syncopated and noteless rattles shoot from his beak at presto speed, as many as fifteen clicks per second. And then he ends with a fortissimo finale of loud, exclamatory shrieks—enough to wake the neighbors.

  It can take him a full minute to sing through all four movements, and then the starling is silent for a moment. Some birds even bow when they’ve finished.

  Nearly every courting male in the wild follows this pattern. The four movements are audible even to human ears if we listen closely enough. Because a bird can log so many random sounds in his song bank, the permutations of starling form are endless. And unlike the work of Mozart and company, there is no discernable meter, math, or key dictating the starling’s changes from the whistle movement to the warble movement or from click to screech. The bird can do what it wants in each section for as long as it likes. This gives the courted female two distinct pleasures: she can lean on the familiarity of the song structure, but she can also hear the freestyle within the movement—a report of her lover’s unique mind.

  Because of its tendency to absorb sound, the starling’s song is not tuneful as much as it is expansive. The world spills into its music; the real meets the obsessive, the merry smashes into the flatulent. The compositions of this species are joyful and ugly and dissonant and divine. And though less predictable than the whippoorwill’s or the skylark’s, the starling’s song is by no means less confident.

  Though we know this much about starling composition, the mental process that cultivates these choices—whatever gray matter lets a starling write its own song and wills it to vary its tunes—remains mysterious. After a millennium of searching, we cannot figure out where in the brain this starling song is bred. It’s possible the whole process is the result of a mental function humans simply don’t possess. Or most of us don’t, anyway.

  Mozart’s brain is as much a mystery as a starling’s. It was never autopsied and his genetic line ended with his two surviving children. In 1801, a gravedigger claimed he’d unearthed Mozart’s skull, but no one has been able to prove it. We’ve simply spent the past two hundred years guessing what went on in Mozart’s head, and as long as we keep his six-hundred-plus compositions in heavy rotation, we’ll always have half a mind to try to figure him out. His music’s heavy presence in our lives, from “Twinkle, Twinkle” to the Requiem, keeps us guessing.

  The old ideas of Mozart as a perpetual child or as a mere recipient of dictation from God have dissolved in recent years, thanks to computer studies of his “autograph scores” that show revision after revision scribbled onto the pages in multiple inks. We now know Mozart drafted and woodshedded for his entire career. He didn’t simply spit music out; musical ideas incubated inside him for decades.

  Despite our better understanding of the scope of his efforts, it’s difficult to ignore the flighty irreverence he possessed, both on and off the staff. Many have wondered why a brain that prone to perfection was so hell-bent on vandalism. Mozart loved to chatter, play, and shock. Who, for example, could imagine Bach or Beethoven jumping out of his chair at a performance, as Mozart did, and somersaulting around while the soloist committed a boring improvisation on a theme from The Marriage of Figaro? And not only interrupting that lame performance, but then meowing a countermelody over it?

  We also see a vulgar streak in several prank tunes, many composed in tandem with his masterpieces. There is, in fact, a meow duet in the Mozart oeuvre. Also, the same year he made the luminous Fantasy no. 1 with Fugue, Mozart wrote a canon of six sober voices repeating “Leck mich im Arsch” (or “Lick Me in the Butt”). Another canon from that period begins with the phrase “good night” in several languages, then a sung “phooey phooey!” and a filthy line about crapping the bed.

  Away from the keyboard, Mozart was just as devious with wordplay, as seen in the polyglot prattle of his letters, like this one to his cousin:

  Muck!—muck!—oh, muck! O sweet word!—muck!—chuck! That’s good too!—muck, chuck!—muck!—suck—oh charmante!—muck, suck!—that’s what I like!—muck, chuck and suck!—chuck muck and suck muck!

  Some think the maestro’s mysterious brain was troubled by Tourette’s or, at the least, an attention disorder. His own brother-in-law wondered if Mozart “concealed his inner tension behind superficial frivolity” by mixing “the divine ideas of his music and … sudden outbursts of vulgar platitudes.” But this assumes, perhaps too hastily, that the vulgar didn’t participate in his divine ideas.

  Even though we now know Mozart’s brain was not God’s fax machine, many still describe it as some sort of sepulcher for only pristine sounds. But why didn’t he need it all—the vulgar and the formal, the right notes and the wrong ones, and even those whistled a half step sharp? A man obsessed with perfect tone might need to stay on nodding terms with aberration. What if Mozart played with bad notes and uncouth lyrics, with foreign language and nonsense, to hoard all the expression he could, just as Sturnus vulgaris hoards all possible sound in order to sing?

  Much earlier in his life, when he was still a baby-genius playing blindfolded for the aristocracy, Mozart’s best trick was an improvisational game not unlike an eighteenth-century rap battle. A court composer or some member of the cognoscenti would play a sparse bass line on the keys, over which Mozart would improvise a melody—sometimes complete with harmony or counterpoint. Then his much older opponent would answer back with a different melody, which Mozart would rework, and back and forth again and again until the challenger eventually crapped out. Pipsqueak Mozart never did, and his royal audiences delighted in these on-the-spot reworkings
of their musical rules. That’s how Mozart grew up—chasing melodies as they flew by him, hunting for the ways each note might pivot into something new. Since this inventiveness kept the Mozart family employed, one might see Wolfgang’s open receptors as a musical survival skill.

  Thanks to an upper-level connectivity we’ve only recently identified, starlings are hard-wired for reception, too. Video modeling has led some scientists to suggest that starling bodies fly at a “critical” state, meaning all their physical receivers—down to the cell, maybe even down to the protein—are attuned to simultaneous and dramatic variations within the group. This connection, seen in a mass of flying starlings—dipping, reeling, curling into itself midair—is beyond biology; it’s more like physics. A starling in flight is critical like an avalanche, like the ignition of atoms in a magnet, because each body holds the report of its neighboring bodies—and all those bodies’ potential—inside itself. But then again, this is merely a theory. What they do runs far past what we can understand and our evidence is somewhat spotty. Though we’ve lived with starlings for millennia, we’re still fumbling for a language to discuss certain aspects of their lives.

  Mozart could have kept his starling’s cage in the room with his billiard table, where he often composed. Or it might have stood in his bedchamber, where he stayed awake with his quill and notebook (both man and songbird were prone to singing while the rest of the house slept). No matter the living arrangements, the bird stayed with him for thirty-six of the most vibrant months of Mozart’s career. The maestro’s fortepiano was constantly being shipped from his music room out to the Mehlgrube for yet another subscription concert. Leopold Mozart complained in a letter that his son’s home buzzed at all hours with rabble-rousing factions: students, rehearsal groups, goofy late night jam sessions. Their noise was nonstop and deafening. Mozart reportedly hated being alone, even when he worked. And for those three years, work he did.

  That costly apartment on the Domgasse saw sixty-plus compositions finished in less than three years. The piano concerto as we still understand it was built in those rooms. The Haydn quartets premiered there. The “Jupiter” symphony began and Figaro ended. And with these heavy hitters came some of the most singable ditties in the repertoire: the wafting waltz-time start to the Piano Concerto no. 21 and the stately intervals of the Romanze in the Serenade no. 13 for strings. Melodies that two centuries of humans have since whistled could have first been volleyed between a genius and his Vogel Staar.

  And you can bet your Arsch that, if it were in earshot, Mozart’s starling junked these immortal melodies. As Mozart hammered them shiny, the bird sent the tunes back upside-down, at half-speed and double-time, and piped one inconsequential middle note for five straight seconds. It’s not difficult to imagine Mozart valuing this kind of collaboration, as he spent so much of this period reaching out to various “songbirds.” The starling was another musician to pump ideas into Mozart’s brain—like Haydn did, or Vienna’s top fiddlers, or his high-soprano sister-in-law with her gobsmacking range. Among the divas, the composers, and the virtuosi, that caged bird perched the furthest outside the Classical box, waiting to eat all the sound it was offered and spit back strange bits with starling gusto.

  Picture an early morning composing session, the starling’s cage near the sixtieth key. Mozart flies into the room, fresh from dressing, with his hairstylist trailing behind him. The Friseur still holds the end of the maestro’s wig-braid, like the owner of a spastic dog.

  The bird stirs as Mozart kicks back the bench and stands over the ebonies. He needs to tease out this theme that’s been flitting around in his head for days. He finds the tonic, a sprightly G, and then dances between it and the fourth below. Then he reverses the melody’s course and skips it upward, bouncing to the dominant fifth in an arpeggio that smacks the next octave with a Mannheim Rocket exclamation point:

  Mozart can barely keep up with his pen; he’s writing with one hand and playing the melody on the keys with the other. As the notes of the exposition zoom onto his staff paper—flapping merrily along as the form intended—a jalopy-fart of notes comes from the cage, countering the pristine run of the keys: BUM—bweet! bom BUM—chackerchacker! Bom bum-bom-bizeet?—brrrrp?—LECK MICH IM ARSCH—BAAUGH!!

  Mozart turns to the bird, which moves closer to the front of the cage and stares. Starlings are more responsive to human eye contact than most mammalian pets; they know when they’re being watched and aren’t afraid to hold a gaze. It’s one of the primary traits—along with a high touch response—that allows deep bonding between starlings and humans, as we love eye contact, too. One ornithologist called the starling “the poor man’s dog” for its ability to connect and demonstrate loyalty. And sound assists this connection; what better way to bond than in a duet?

  Mozart opens the cage and the bird flits to his arm, screeching that same derailment (bom-bum-bom—bizeet?—brrrrp?—LECK MICH IM ARSCH!) as it hops up his sleeve. The man sighs, keeps writing, and the bird keeps yukking and sucking and mucking it up.

  And now, two centuries later, not a day goes by without someone on the planet playing the result: the opening movement of the Serenade no. 13 for strings, often called Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Notice how, after the exposition, the tune dips treacherously into D minor before moving forward in a new major key. It sounds as if, for a quick measure, a little devil has whispered something shocking into the melody’s ear.

  Notice, too, the wicked work of Mozart’s A Musical Joke, which was written nearly in tandem with the perfect Eine kleine, most likely on that same keyboard. Though smarter and not as vulgar as “Leck mich im Arsch,” the divertimento is doubly excruciating, a relentless twenty-three-minute parody of Classical music’s traps. Notes run up and down the scale like Keystone Cops. Developments flop like punch lines you can see coming from miles away. And in each of the four painful movements is a hilarious breakdown—a rusty, unrefined disturbance that explodes the Joke’s mundane torture. These breakdowns play out like lines of starling talk: they are the G-sharps the bird whistled back in the shop, elevated to virtuosic silliness.

  In the Minuet, the horns repeat a theme at misplaced half steps, like howling dogs. In the Adagio, the violas trill their scales at double time—whistling teakettles gone rogue. The best starling breakdown comes in the last movement, when the same skipping chirps come again and again, moving like a dare toward forever, until the listener begs for it to end. When Mozart finds the finale (thank God), he ends not by perching at the tonic, but by crashing the ensemble together, screeching the movement to a halt. This might be the least Classical ending in the entire Classical period. For the final measure, the instruments play three block chords in three different keys! The result sounds like the string players throwing their fiddles out the window:

  There, in that mangled vertical line of wrong notes, you can almost hear the starling on Mozart’s shoulder, bobbing his head, maybe even taking a crap, and chattering: “das war—bizeet!—LECK MICH—chackerchacker bom-ba-ba-BAAH!—schön!!!”

  In 1787, Mozart’s luxe apartment finally became too dear, and the family moved to a place on the Hauptstrasse with rent one-tenth as expensive. Even though they were paring down, Mozart took the bird with them. We know this because he made such a fuss over the starling when it died a few months later.

  On that day in early June, the new Mozart home welcomed a dozen mourners in elaborate, costumey garb—giant plumes and feather fans, or maybe black masks with beaks. The guests were first treated to a dirge (arranged by Mozart) for chamber ensemble, and then the maestro recited a short elegy he’d written to his Vogel Staar.

  In the poem, Mozart imagines the “little fool,” unaware that it is dead, looking down at Mozart and whistling fondly. Now up in heaven, the songbird sings for free, as has always been its custom. By the last stanza, the bird has already sung long enough to forget its keeper and collaborator. And now the maestro is left on Earth to rhyme alone (albeit masterfully, Mozart brags).

 
Who knows why Mozart planned this cuckoo funeral. We have no evidence that he ever mourned this way again. The verse and the dirge and the funeral party could have been a mock solemnity—Mozart rarely passed up the chance for a weird party or a good gag. On the other hand, he could have been somewhat serious, as he was a known animal lover. But why did he publicly mourn a pet starling and not his own father, who died without ceremony in Salzburg just a week before?

  The starling funeral, like its purchase three years prior, is one of the many snippets of Mozart’s life that still confound us. Nearly all Mozart biographers mention it among their mob of questions, which they whistle out into the void, knowing they’ll never hear an answer: Why buy a bird? Why bury it and not your father? Why a red coat? Why the puns? Why so many notes? Why a serenade one day and a butt gag the next? Is it even possible to bond with a creature only by the sound that it makes? We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know.

  For so much is left unanswered when a man falls from heaven and writes Don Giovanni. Or when the wingbeats of countless tiny creatures lift upward and sound like thunder as they block out the sun. When five hundred starlings drop from the sky into shallow ponds without making a sound. When a genius buys a songbird because, despite his noisy life, something is missing.

  And even more remains mysterious when the genius takes to bed in his thirty-fifth year. After two weeks, his hands and feet are swollen—again and again, he blacks out. Though the women around him sob, he can’t stop telling little jokes; he can’t stop singing. Doctors let him for blood, they prod at his flesh, they can only guess as to what’s inside him. Then he sends his pet canary from his room and the women around him weep louder. For when he banishes his bird, they know one thing for sure: he’s letting go.