Of all these anecdotes of musical creatures, those describing birds were the most compelling. “From the wearisome sameness of a sparrow’s chirp,” wrote the British psychologist James Sully, “up to the elaborate song of the skylark or nightingale, there presents itself something like a complete evolution of vocal melody.”17 The variety that separated simple one-note calls from the long, complex songs of birds like the nightingale seemed to contain the story of music’s development. Music scholars, ornithologists, naturalists, and science writers looked at topics ranging from the evolution of musical taste in birds to comparisons between American birds and American composer Stephen Foster’s songwriting.18 Musical notation in bird guides reinforced the impression that birdsong was a musical artifact, subject to the laws of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Asserting the fundamental musicality of birdsong, ornithologist Francis Allen asked, “how can we escape imputing the origin and development of this beauty in bird-song to an aesthetic sense in the birds themselves?”19 Perhaps most important, birds held a place of honor in Darwin’s claims about music, for he argued that one could “hear daily in the singing of birds” evidence that animals uttered musical notes.20
FIGURE 1.1 Hespie the mouse’s favorite song in the exercise wheel. Lockwood, “A Singing Hesperomys.”
FIGURE 1.2 Axis deer listening to “The Keel Row.” Cornish, Life at the Zoo, 118.
DARWIN AND SPENCER
There are, as is well known, two leading theories with regard to the origin of music—Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Herbert Spencer’s.21
Until the end of the nineteenth century, discussions of music’s natural origins ranged from the mind-bending powers of musical ratios in Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique, completed in 1767. As early as 1650, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described a remarkable sloth singing a diatonic hexachord, as well as a bevy of singing birds that made later appearances in many a discussion of nonhuman musicality.22 Thinkers and philosophers such as Rousseau and Kircher, and the more recently minted names of Schiller, Herder, Wagner, and Helmholtz, added weight and expertise to questions about the origins of music throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. By the end of the nineteenth century, music had become the most prestigious of the fine arts, its unique powers of emotional expression making it, in the words of British social philosopher Herbert Spencer, “one of the characteristics of our age.”23 Music was repeatedly described as the “language of the soul” by intellectuals ranging from Johann Herder to Russian author Andrei Bely.24 But during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music’s spiritual language increasingly took on an evolutionary tone, becoming integral to a growing discourse about biology’s relationship to human culture and identity. Even the fictional detective-violinist Sherlock Holmes became a musical evolutionist, reminding his companion Dr. Watson that daring ideas about music and language were necessary to grasp the breadth of nature’s ways:
“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at.”
“That’s a rather broad idea,” I remarked.
“One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,” he answered.25
By the time Sherlock Holmes was hunting down criminals with his cold British logic, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer had become public voices of modern science, and the two leading figures in musical evolutionism: “the two theories of the origin of music which have claimed the attention of critics are Darwin’s and Spencer’s.”26
Framing these ideas “as broad as Nature” was a much older set of beliefs about the place of language in human identity. In Darwin’s day, it was widely assumed that language demarcated a definitive leap between human and animal psyches, a rupture whose relation to music was uncertain. Eighteenth-century figures such as Rousseau and Herder had popularized theories that language was the seat of human intelligence, emphasizing the rational ties that bound Homo sapiens, the man of reason, into a universal talking brotherhood. Enlightenment theories of language prompted so much speculation over the following century that the Parisian Société de Linguistique issued an ineffectual ban on the topic of language origins in 1866, hoping to control further debate.27 Instead, the topic continued to thrive, fostering guesses about syntax, grammar, and translatability as possible trademarks of the intelligent mind separating human language from animal vocalizations. As Henri Bergson explained in L’Évolution créatrice of 1907, human language hinged on the distinction between instinct and invention: “the instinctive sign [of the animal] is adherent, the intelligent sign [of the human] is mobile”—that is, animal cries had a fixed, instinctive meaning dictated by nature, while human words were a matter of invented convention and, therefore, a mark of superior intelligence.28 Even with the rise of colonialism and a corresponding emphasis on racial distinctions at the turn of the century, Bergson’s contemporaries still believed, as Herder had, that humanity could be universally defined as “the talking animal.”29 Attempts like Richard Garner’s to decode primate language, described by historian of science Gregory Radick, extended this intelligent sign no further than humanity’s closest relatives.30
Music had a very ambiguous relationship to this view of language. The sounds of birdsong and other musical animal vocalizations were not the intelligent signs of language, nor were they the proto-linguistic responses biologists dubbed “calls.” But neither were they innate—some animals had to learn their songs through such arduous study that the idea of animal conservatories with “properly qualified professors” to refine animals’ musical abilities was floated at the turn of the century.31 Though not a mark of reason, song in animals seemed very similar to song in humans. As a result, music occupied an undefined—and potentially contested—territory between animal expression and human linguistic rationality. For evolutionists like Darwin and Spencer, defining this ambiguous territory would mean defining what it meant to be human.
Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, used music and aesthetics to challenge prevailing beliefs about this boundary line between humans and other animals. “The place of song in the life of the bird has since the days of Darwin been a question of dispute between the scientists,” wrote ornithologist Chauncey Hawkins in 1918.32 This “dispute” echoed the broader anxieties about human uniqueness that had surrounded the Origin of Species, but focused on a new question: whether culture, instead of biology, was what set humans apart from the animals. One of the most controversial implications of the Descent was that it did not.
Darwin’s Origin of Species from 1859 had located biological history in a process of natural selection that depended on a species’ successful reproduction. In the Descent, Darwin argued that aesthetics had their origins not in divine providence but in a special kind of selection called “sexual selection,” in which animals chose their mates. Darwin spent nearly a quarter of the Descent on birds and sexual selection, displacing primates in a surprise move that voted with ink in favor of music’s role in human development. He suggested that human aesthetics descended directly from the selective processes that occurred when animals had the power to choose their own mates, arguing that generations of attracting, being chosen, and having offspring had bred a sense and appreciation of beauty in certain animals. For Darwin, these animals had the same capacity for musicality as humans. The British naturalist lauded the musical abilities of spiders, frogs, tortoises, alligators, gibbons, dogs, seals, and even Lockwood’s mouse Hespie, returning throughout his text to the question of music’s origins.33 Passion,