Animal Musicalities. Rachel Mundy

1913, Henry Oldys, a biologist working for the US Department of Agriculture, wrote enthusiastically to readers of the nation’s premier journal of bird science, The Auk, “Astonishing and revolutionary as it may seem, there is no escape from the conclusion that the evolution of bird music independently parallels the evolution of human music.”¹ Born in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Oldys was part of a generation exposed to controversial new ideas about the role animals played in human social and cultural development. In the foreground of this controversy were the names of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whose ideas about the animal origins of human song put birdsong on the map of the new science of cultural evolution. Over the course of the next century, thinkers like Oldys increasingly took up the question of how animals, especially birds, were tied to the evolutionary origins of song. As music historian Robert Lach explained, the question “Why do birds sing?” was seen by scholars of culture and science as “the key to the problem of the origin of language and music.”² At its heart, this was a question that meant rethinking the capacity for music, raising surprisingly complex questions not only about animals, but about human beings and just how special their musical abilities really were.

      Why do birds sing? By asking this question at all, intellectuals such as Lach and Oldys imagined a capacity for music that held forth the tantalizing promise of connecting song, still imagined today as deeply human, to a totally alien world of nonhuman experience. The evolutionary discourse that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around Darwin’s and Spencer’s texts debated the relation of these two worlds, struggling to fill the gap between the music of modern civilized humans and the primal sounds of their animal ancestors. The unknown space of this gap contained the key to a biological science of culture, in an era deeply invested in justifying racial hierarchies through science. As evolutionary historian Peter Bowler has explained, “virtually all evolutionists [at this time] accepted the linear image of human origins and used it to justify prevailing racial prejudice.”³ It is a period in which Darwinian evolution coexisted with diverse theories of saltation, orthogenesis, neo-Lamarckism, eugenics, social Darwinism, and other approaches that invited comparison between biology and culture.⁴ Against this backdrop, music emerged as one of the “missing links” that promised to fill the gap between biology and culture in evolution’s story with the sounds of animals’ cries and “primitive” human songs.

      At the center of these debates about music were the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The two men were well known, Darwin for his history of biological evolution in the Origin of Species and Spencer for his studies of human development in works such as The Principles of Sociology. Their theories of music reflected their broader interests: Darwin, the biological historian, argued that music like birdsong affected mate selection and offspring, while Spencer, the social historian, argued that song had to do with the boundary between human reason and emotion.⁵ For Darwin, birdsong and human song were both legitimate forms of music; for Spencer, only humans made true music. As later authors debated music’s place in evolution, the subtleties of Darwin’s and Spencer’s arguments were sometimes lost in accounts of Darwin as the defender of animal musicality, and Spencer as his opponent.

      This discourse took shape across numerous disciplines, sometimes in indirect ways. In this chapter, I reconstruct its main arguments by drawing on voices from a wide range of disciplinary identities and a period spanning several decades, connecting the threads that crossed these disciplinary and temporal divides. The Darwin-Spencer debates about music’s origins mark an initial stage in this discourse, which took place in the late nineteenth century. Its primary contributors were European evolutionists, including the biologists August Weismann and George Romanes, and the British psychologists James Sully and Edmund Gurney. Other voices in these debates, like Lach, were formally trained music scholars from Europe or the United States. They were the first generation of “musicologists,” historians of music who turned away from biographies of great masters like Beethoven and Bach toward a broader-reaching social science inspired by figures such as Spencer.⁶ A third set of voices in musical evolutionism came from the natural and social sciences, where biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists had an interest in connecting animal aesthetics to human development, particularly in Britain and the United States, where Darwinism was on the rise. Finally, the voice of the naturalist had an important role in these debates as well, contributing firsthand experience shaped by hunting, hiking, and observation. This was particularly true for experts in birdsong, a field so new that there was no formal schooling in it—Oldys was a case in point, working as a lawyer and auditor before building his reputation as a biologist with the Department of Agriculture.

      Although many of these men and women operated in separate professional spheres, they were connected by books, pamphlets, and journals. Print was the medium of their discourse, allowing widely flung experts and amateurs to trade ideas. In the pages that follow, I trace the war in print over animal musicality from its initial phase in the Darwin-Spencer debates of the 1870s to later appropriations of their ideas in the early twentieth century. Although Darwin’s and Spencer’s opposed theories of music were not solely about music’s role in determining human uniqueness, the texts inspired by them often returned to this refrain. In tracing this burgeoning science of music to the texts that inspired it, I hope to show how listening to culture and listening to nature merged over a period of several decades to produce a practice of hearing biocultural difference, where song became a measure of other species’ worth. The stakes of this debate were not merely an argument about evolutionary origins. They were about personhood, for to be a musician—human or animal—was to be a person.

       BIRDS IN PRINT

      Though Darwin and Spencer were a touchstone for debates about animal musicality, interest in the topic of animal musicality was already in the air. Scholars of the nineteenth century published anecdotal accounts of dogs, cats, and even horses barking, yowling, and marching in time to human music, hoping to understand where to draw the line between human and nonhuman ability.⁷ In the early twentieth century, psychologists and physiologists published measurements of animals’ pulse rates in response to music, and the salivation of dogs as they recognized melody, harmony, and tempo.⁸ Decades before the arrival of “ecomusicology,” George Herzog was able to ask members of the American Musicological Society, “Do Animals Have Music?” while The Musical Quarterly surveyed the musical taste of a veritable zoo of animals including dogs, cats, birds, snakes, monkeys, mice, cows, horses, chickens, and a flying squirrel.⁹ The possibility that music was a universal capacity remained open well into the twentieth century: as Herzog put it, “there seems to be no criterion for any theoretical separation of the vocal expression of animals from human music.”¹⁰

      Advocates of animal musicality could be quite persuasive.¹¹ In 1871, the year Darwin’s Descent was published, an article by American minister Samuel Lockwood in The American Naturalist sparked a decade-long vogue in mouse music. Lockwood’s essay documented his singing pet mouse Hespie in astounding detail. Describing Hespie’s daily life and singing habits, Lockwood recorded her high-pitched songs using prose descriptions and transcriptions of Western musical notation. Arias like her “Wheel Song,” he argued, were testaments to her musical taste, precision, and baroque sensibility for ornamentation.¹² Interest in Lockwood’s singing mouse spread from Darwin’s Descent to the British journal Nature.¹³ Another symptom of animal music’s popularity was British nature writer Charles Cornish’s Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent’s Park Gardens, published in 1894. The book documented a series of informal experiments in which Cornish engaged a violinist to play for animals at the Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens in London.¹⁴ Cornish, an author of British nature guides, walked around the zoo with his assistant playing popular tunes for selected animals, usually the Scottish reel “The Keel Row.” (Scottish tunes were still considered exotic “natural melodies” free of any preconceived system, and thus might have seemed more appropriate for animal ears.)¹⁵ The results of Cornish’s “experiments” were occasionally absurd—he claimed, for example, that wolves and sheep responded differently to “The Keel Row” because they were natural enemies, and that sheep preferred the “Shepherd’s Call” sequence from