FIGURE 1.4 Henry Oldys, comparison of the structure of Stephen Foster’s popular song “Swanee River” with the song of the wood pewee. Oldys, “The Rhythmical Song of the Wood Pewee.”
AVIAN LISTENERS
The debate about animal aesthetics had surprisingly high stakes. Intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed tremendous interest in the music-making abilities of birds, mice, tigers, and other creatures. On the surface, these writers responded to Darwin’s and Spencer’s opposed theories of music’s origins. But in practice, authors were often less interested in the details of evolutionary selective processes than in whether animals were capable of aesthetic creativity. The implications of animal aesthetics were huge, for music had a special place in social evolutionary theory at the borderline between human and animal nature. If animals made music, they were due the rights, status, and dignity that evolutionists like Spencer and Morgan attributed only to the most developed beings. Indeed, the holistic nature of social evolutionism meant that even one unexpected music-making creature might unravel all of evolutionism’s social order, disrupting its tidy taxonomies of masculinity, breeding, and human uniqueness.
I conclude this chapter with a turn toward questions about whether birds were listeners, and the way those questions exemplified this disruptive potential. Music was the “language of the soul” for the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century evolutionists found themselves asking if animals who understood this language had souls. In the natural history of the early twentieth century, these broad moralistic questions were succeeded by more detailed discussions about what it meant for a bird to listen. Songbirds in the writings of early twentieth-century naturalists are increasingly treated as beings with conscious feelings, goals, intentions, and self-reflection. In many ways, animal musicality had become about whether some birds were a new class of people, less privileged than idealized forms of European masculinity, but more respected than some of nature’s other denizens.
Nineteenth-century debates about the place of songbirds in social evolution sometimes turned directly to the language of morality and the human soul. Writing in 1879, James Sully described the stakes of animal aesthetics as the stakes of moral status: “the new doctrine of Evolution … has naturally tended to raise the intellectual and moral status of animals by suggesting that in them are to be found the germs of mental qualities previously supposed to be man’s exclusive possession. Among the attributes which science is thus attributing to the lower animals is the artistic impulse.”103 Darwin’s opponents had often used the word “soul” to describe the moral status of aesthetics, rallying around a psychic dividing line between human and nonhuman musicality. German biologist August Weismann called the nonhuman animal “soul-deaf” in 1890, adding that “the same differences [between human and nonhuman] … must prevail in the different stages of the development of the human soul.”104 A medical doctor of the period used the same language to argue that the “material ear of the body” had to be distinguished from the “spiritual ear of the mind,” the latter ensuring that “the intelligent comprehension of music, even by the higher animals, will always be more or less imperfect, because their soul is of a lower order.”105 Richard Wallaschek claimed, like Weismann, that it was “these peculiar qualities of ‘soul’ which have to be examined, and not a certain condition in the sense of hearing” in order to understand the shortcomings of birdsong.106 Music scholar William Wallace even turned the accusation of soul-deafness against Darwin in 1908, calling him “psychically deaf” for not recognizing the spiritual properties that made human music unique.107
Those spiritual ears, thoughts, and emotions summed up in the word “soul” entered naturalists’ writings in the early twentieth century through more focused questions about what it was like for birds to listen. Naturalists wondered what those nonhuman ears heard, and what beauty meant to them. “We must not forget,” wrote Robert Moore in 1913, “that what is beautiful to our ears, may not be to a bird’s,” as he pondered the way the fox sparrow seemed to determine its own song only after carefully listening to those around it.108 Several years later, another naturalist pointed out that the crow seemed to enjoy its harsh voice in the way an artist might. “Is he [the crow] not, in a limited way, a true artist, a composer as well as a performer? I ask it in all seriousness.”109 And in 1922, naturalist Richard Hunt wrote to The Condor to criticize Morgan’s canon, arguing that the mockingbird could hardly be explained as a tiny machine, for he “not only takes a ‘pleasurable satisfaction’ in the results of his vocal efforts, but he does so because he dwells upon those results with pardonable satisfaction … I believe that the bird’s interest in his own mimicry is ‘artistic.’”110
Nowhere was the link between music and personhood more clear than in the contested sphere of the female’s capacity to listen. Darwinian sexual selection and Spencerian social evolutionism located aesthetic capacity in the virility of men.111 In the United States and Europe, theories of evolution that often represented women’s primary role as reproductive coincided with polarized public debates about women’s suffrage, rights, and roles outside the home.112
In a revealing episode, American ornithologist Chauncey Hawkins outraged his peers in 1918 with an article whose subtexts—published while Congress was attempting to ratify women’s right to vote in the United States—reflected human politics a bit too clearly.113 Claiming that song’s primary function was to frighten rival males and break down the female’s resistance to sex, Hawkins argued that sexual selection assumed an animal consciousness that could more easily be explained by the lively hormones of males. Males and females did not relate through musical aesthetics, he wrote, but through the brutal persistence and force that males needed to break down the “coy” reluctance of the female, a coyness he believed was nature’s necessary counterbalance to the female’s otherwise uncontrollable sexual impulses.114 Song, he argued, wasn’t about beauty or pleasure but about the fundamental differences between the sexes. “The male sings more vigorously because he is a male,” he wrote, explaining that vigor was part of the male’s necessary world.115
Although the article made some salient points about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theory, its mechanistic approach and gender politics drew a rapid response. Aretas Saunders quickly wrote to The Auk to criticize Hawkins for his inability to tell calls from songs, as well as for Hawkins’s claim that instances of female birdsong were aberrations caused by a hormonal imbalance, while Francis Allen mocked Hawkins for his naïve assumptions about “female constancy” and his inability to attribute agency to either gender.116 “Shall we deny an equal appreciation of [song] to the female?” asked Allen, adding, “and if the female appreciates the beauty of the male’s song, why should she not discriminate between the songs she hears and succumb most readily to the ardor of the finest singer?”117
Saunders, for his part, left his readers with a particularly striking description of courtship that represented male and female alike as sensitive and considerate listeners: “The Robin (Planestictus migratorius), in the late days of April when mating is in progress, may be found singing with its bill closed, the notes hardly audible for more than a hundred feet. At such times its mate is nearly always to be found in the same tree, evidently listening with pleasure to this whispered song, which is apparently sung for its benefit only.”118 It was a sound, he said, that he had heard frequently, and in both eastern and western robins; but neither in print nor in anecdote had he ever heard his experience corroborated, though birders today call this the “whisper song” and, just like Saunders, look for the listening female when they hear it.119
The listening robin, and her attentive mate, brought the questions of