I happened upon a tape with a lot of “fledgling feed-me’s” on it. This must have been years ago when my indoor population explosion was just getting underway. I had zebra finches and budgies reproducing. The zebra finches tended to build nests anywhere and I caught them double-clutching a couple times early on before I figured out how to discourage such behavior, so that might explain why the zebra finch children are so loud, there must have been a lot of them. They are at what you might call full-fledged volume (sorry), the decibels having increased with age. When they start out as hatchlings, they sound like someone is quietly shaking a box of pins.
Zebra Finch Hen on Nest
The budgie begging is somehow not quite as raucous, it’s rather pleasant. It’s hard to tell what effect my tortured reading through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier had on the birds’ future vocalizations.
Recording of Zebra Finch and Budgie Fledglings Begging in Key
On the recording, the zebra finch fledglings have just started in after I finished practicing the C# major fugue (they came in earlier but I decided to spare you), right before the C# minor prelude. Then shortly after they subside you can hear a little trilling chorus of budgie babes.
Little's parents allopreening, or maybe how it all started...
Recording of “Little” begging in key with Mozart
Before hatchlings, nestlings and fledglings start talking (calling) or singing (generally, if they’re males), their only vocalization is to beg for food. This starts immediately upon hatching as a faint whimper, but builds to crescendos as the bird grows.
Attached is a brief recording of the only Spice Finch child produced in my house, begging for food. I named her “Little,” not knowing whether she would turn out to be a boy or a girl. Those strong little musical “peeps” you hear belonged to Little. As for the Mozart, I was trying to learn the Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, the one with the Elvira Madigan theme for the adagio, after hearing Stephen Hough play it so wonderfully with the Chicago Symphony. I didn’t have an orchestra to play with, unfortunately, only a recording of a nameless orchestra that was at its own tempo and, because I could not hear the canned orchestra over the piano unless I drowned out the birds, I gave up eventually. If I ever attempt this again, I will have to write my own cadenzas because the ones that come with the sheet music are dreadful, sounding more like Schumann than Mozart.
Long before she fledged, Little fell out of the nest onto the floor. I picked her up and put her back, urging her parents to feed her. At that time she was no more than pencil eraser. I don’t know what made her parents listen to me but they continued to feed her and she fledged, however awkwardly.
Parent with Little
Although I decided somewhere along the line that she was female, she didn’t live long enough for me to really find out. It wasn’t until she stopped begging and started getting around on her own that I realized she was physically impaired. She was missing her right foot, so whenever she landed it was difficult for her to sit without leaning over. It occurred to me this might have been why her parents kicked her out of the nest. They begrudgingly took over parenting of Little and she lived longer, perhaps, than she should have. But I think what did her in was her inability to fit in with all the adults. If she’d had siblings she might have had a better life, at least for a while, but I think she died of a broken heart. Once her parents stopped feeding her, they ignored her totally.
Recording of Elvis and Bach 5-part Fugue in C# Minor
Attached is a recording of my old buddy Elvis cawing along to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, the C# minor fugue. He sang along with the prelude very nicely too but here he came in quite strong, and then managed to carry on somewhere where there was an echo, creating his own “reverb.” How ingenious of him. In any event, I was pleased to discover this recording because he has a lovely voice, unlike any other crow I have heard since, and I suspect if I was really paying attention all along I might be able to discern certain crows by their voices.
In the park I had a crow friend I called Sam–should he turn out to be Samantha–who is probably by now paired up with someone else of his own species, but we became good friends soon after he had fledged. I remember his first spring after leaving the nest, he was hanging out with other crows when a young Cooper’s Hawk decided to threaten him. When he just barely evaded attack, the Cooper’s must have made an impression on him because he memorized the Cooper’s Hawk’s call perfectly, and for quite a while afterward almost every time he saw me, Sam would imitate the Cooper’s Hawk. It soon became a little joke we shared with each other. In fact I had become so used to Sam imitating the Cooper’s Hawk that a year or so later I did not pay attention in the company of crows when I heard a Cooper’s Hawk, only to look above my head and suddenly realize it was an actual Cooper’s Hawk and not Sam imitating one!
The park crows do have a special call when they see me, it’s usually CAW-caw-caw, which I like to imagine is “Lisa’s here.” But they also do one that is more “CAW caw, CAW caw” which could be “hot dogs, hot dogs.” I hope as the crow numbers increase I will be able to hear and distinguish more vocalizations.
Anyway, my apologies to Bach for this somewhat feeble early rendition of his fugue.
Recording of Scarlatti C Major Sonata with Budgies
Attached is part of a Haydn sonata I was apparently reading through (please accept my apologies, although I warned you in the beginning this was NOT about my playing), with my budgies carrying on constantly. It reminds me of their “cocktail hour,” which is something they used to do with regularity in the early evening: just break out into constant commentary. Also attached is part of a Scarlatti sonata which was part of the same session; they’ve calmed down quite a bit, but I included it because it’s pretty music that I’d forgotten about and was delighted to find.
One talks, the other listens
Budgies carrying on while I play piano may sound noisy. In some respects, they are. But compared to the vast array of human-created noises (including my piano), they barely contribute to the pollution of the aural airspace.
Listening to birds made me more aware of my hearing and what I was and was not listening to. As I strove to hear more birds, I wanted to hear less and less of the human noise that drowns them out. That I live in a suburban area and work in an urban environment doesn’t help.
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to go on a naturalist tour of the Burren in Ireland, and I can remember waking up mornings thinking the bird song was incredible. Nobody considers Ireland a top destination for birds and so this may be hard to imagine, but by comparison to where I live, with traffic noise constant, whether loud or a low murmur, planes flying overhead, not to mention booming car stereos, lawn mowers or snow plows–depending on the season–leaf blowers, what-have-you, a rural town in Ireland is a very quiet place, so you get to hear the birds sing in the morning. And realize what you’ve been missing the rest of your life.
I work downtown and the noise is deafening. At any moment a car horn can blast in your ear or an emergency vehicle siren ricocheting off the concrete canyons can make your ears hurt, if your ears are still able to feel and not permanently dulled from hearing loss. Here I had discovered birds late in life and I want to hear them, but if I continue to subject myself to the urban noise, I wouldn’t be able to hear at all. I had to do something, not always having hands free to plug up my ears with my fingers (which is by far most effective). So I started wearing earplugs, fashion be damned, from the moment I get on the train in the morning, because the train too is noisy, and when you get off in the station it’s a whole other experience of idling engines spitting, arriving trains clanging their bells and screeching their brakes, not to mention the distorted, ear-splitting announcements over the PA system that are still too loud even if I press my fingers against my ears. Earplugs cushion your ears against harm but you can still hear, and if it’s too loud, the earplugs are only making the decibels a little less detrimental. Conversely it’s quite possible to go to a rock concert or a hockey game with your earplugs and be able to hear everything just fine, including your un-earplugged friends yelling to you over the noise.
There have been plenty of studies about how all this noise pollution is dehumanizing us, affecting our health, contributing to our demise. But nobody seems to think about it. I cannot recall seeing one other person with earplugs. Occasionally I will see someone’s hands go up to their ears, but for the most part, people walk through the city stopping only their conversation as ear-blasting noise like a fire truck or ambulance approaches and drives by.
The best antidote to all this damage, of course, is getting back to nature. The birds remind me of this all the time. My birds at home will never be so tame that they’ll allow me to watch TV with the sound on. Not that I am much of a TV watcher anyway, but the budgies shout over it in their “noise” voice, the same one they use to communicate or to try to drown out the vacuum cleaner, which is probably the worst noisy appliance I subject them to (the blender and food processors are short-lived noises, so it must be the droning-on that gets them). Yes, believe it or not, their “noise” voice is harsher than their “rap” that goes along with the piano.
Something about the tinny sound of the TV just drives the budgies crazy and they immediately have to drown it out. So I have learned to live with closed captioning, although I don’t know how anyone who cannot hear makes sense of it since half the interpretations are phonetic and the words often come out completely unrelated to the subject at hand. Only if there’s something I really want to watch do I go to another part of the house where the birds don’t hang out. But I don’t feel deprived. I don’t miss TV, and I’m glad, because now there are studies saying the more we watch TV, the more years we take off our lives.
The birds taught me how to listen to them and a lot of other things I used to blot out along with noise. I don’t want to be incapable of hearing them, or anything else I want to listen to. Hearing loss is not a necessary result of aging. It’s due to noise pollution.
In the beginning, when I was still fascinated by the fact that I had found my true co-conspirators in birds, almost anyone I talked to about it, this idea of playing music for birds, told me I should write about my experiences. I was fortunate enough to find a place to publish what I eventually wrote in Ted Rust’s Music For The Love Of Itwhich he published online and also by subscription mailing for several years. The journal was primarily dedicated to the creation of chamber music, and Ted was an avid chamber musician and composer. His instrument was oboe, one of the birds in the orchestra. Although he has stopped publishing, Ted has been good enough to keep his archives alive and the link goes to the issue that carried my first published article.
Somewhere in those endless Google searches for “birds and music” I discovered Beatrice Harrison, a renowned British cellist whose recordings of playing her cello for the nightingales in her garden were broadcast over the BBC, which became known as The Cello and the Nightingales sessions.
I would have loved to have had a conversation with Luis Baptista, the famed ornithologist who had an ear for music and suggested that Mozart’s “Musical Joke” was inspired by his starling. Alas Dr. Baptista died in 2000, just when I was beginning to make my own connections between bird song and the music I was playing. You can listen to an interview with Dr. Baptista on Pulse of the Planet.
David Rothenberg has written the beautiful book, Why Birds Sing, in which he has thoroughly researched the connections between bird song and human music. He was inspired by his experiences of playing his clarinet with birds responding. And if you want to know more about bird song, there is no better introduction than The Singing Life of Birdsby Donald Kroodsma, whose writing I first encountered in Living Bird, the quarterly magazine from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He wrote with such eloquence about the song of the Winter Wren I had chills down my spine.
I also had a brief correspondence years ago with John Baily, who studied ethnomusicology in Afghanistan for years. He wrote me the Afghans like to bring their caged birds to live music events for the birds to sing along, and that they believe that the birds are singing the many names of God.
As much as I am dismayed by how very few humans pay attention to birds, I am reminded that until I discovered birds personally, I did not acknowledge their existence either in the real world. But there is a lot of information out there, and now that bird intelligence is finally recognized (I suspect the idea of “birdbrain” was perpetuated by some humans who felt outwitted by birds), studies increasingly suggest we have far more in common with the avians than we thought. It was Fernando Nottebohm’s study of canaries and how they change their songs from year to year that caused scientists to reconsider their ideas about the human brain and cell regeneration.
Birds got me to think a lot more about music and how it all started, and how it is that we can share so well the indescribable experience that only music represents. I hear more music now that I’m listening to birds than I ever heard before, and I thought I was a musician. Birds have also taught me a lot about humans, not just by bird-human interactions, but by observing birds behaving among themselves: I am all too often reminded of our own “animal” instincts. But here I go again, straying off topic. I must go back to exploring the tape library where more hidden gems await transference into mp3 files.
I have found recordings over the last few days of some of my zebra finch’s songs. When I heard my first zebra finch, Fabrizio, sing, it didn’t sound like much of a song to me and I thought to myself, how do those who research zebra finch song stand the sound of a zebra finch? It’s nasal, sharp and somewhat tinny. My thought was researchers could find better sounding candidates. But now that I’ve been through several generations, I see the advantage to studying zebra finches: they’re incredibly prolific.
Indeed the intricacies of Fabrizio’s song and its legacy for subsequent generations did not surface until long after he and Serafina started reproducing. His first male offspring, Facondo, did not have a very memorable song and I was still not prepared to listen. But subsequent males began to intrigue me, and then I began to keep track of each bird’s song. To memorize the song and put the right song with the right bird, I gave each bird an Italian name that fit his song.
An interesting thing about zebra finch song, once you get used to the sound of it, is it’s syncopation. The rhythms they produce are pronounced and intricate.
So I learned to appreciate Fabrizio’s song through his progeny. I wrote down their songs as each one matured. Then one day I realized I had never written down Fabrizio’s song. I was sitting on the couch with my staff paper on the coffee table and a pen, and just as I started to write, Fabrizio landed right on the coffee table with an emphatic thump, and started singing loudly. He wanted to get my attention, and to remind me that I always got the first phrase of his song incorrectly (as I sometimes sing a bird’s song after he does, as I’m wandering through the house). I thanked Fabrizio for the correction and wrote his song down as he sang it, and tried to never make that mistake again.
So here’s Fabrizio singing his own song (the picture below is Fabrizio in his prime), and I’ve also added Adolfo and Vincenzo. The recordings are excerpts with the birds singing and the other links are to their songs written out as music. Enjoy! More to come in future posts.
I suspect if I had not lost and regained my inner soundtrack, I never would have given it much thought. But maybe it’s true to that you don’t know what you have until you lose it. For instance, going back to playing piano alone after so many years was so much more than just starting over again. After I got past being disappointed that I had no technique, I became very aware of the rusty connection between my fingers and my brain. It was as if the neurons were all reconnecting with new wires, where the old ones were frayed and disintegrated, and I was sitting there watching it happen. Then as I learned to play a few things again, I realized that my fingers themselves had memory stored in them. Like a dancer whose body memorizes the movements of a dance, my fingers started to memorize the choreography involved in playing a piece, and I slowly began to rebuild an inner music library.
Then there was my soundtrack. Once I started playing again, it was always there. Sometimes it was annoying when I realized that the song my head kept going back to was whatever I was trying so hard to learn. For years I woke up in the morning with a fragment of a very modern piece I played years ago and I have never been able to find it again. But now I woke up with whatever I had been reading through the day before.
I found I could put my soundtrack to good use and practice while walking from the train to work. Never having enough time to practice, this could have been handy. All I had to do was start playing the music in my head and my fingers would follow; I could feel little pulses in my fingertips as they went over the fingering they had memorized. This connection has always been there. Or it was always there until I stopped playing.
Imagine how delighted I was to read of Daniel Margoliash’s study that found zebra finch males likely rehearsing their songs in their sleep. Here was something else I shared with the birds. They had music running around in their heads day and night too!
I had a little zebra finch whose name was Eduardo. He was a “solo” finch because he had no immediate siblings, and he used to sit in the kitchen window and practice his song. I got to listen in on his attempts at songwriting while I was cooking or washing the dishes. He worked on his song for weeks, maybe months. Although he was within earshot of the other males in the dining room and living room, I always felt as if he was called to pay attention to some other source, perhaps inspired by the view of the backyard garden, or just savoring the solitude of having his own special place in the sun to work on his composition. The outcome of all this was that he came up with a very different song than everyone else. Other males who had siblings had inidvidual songs but they had similarities with each other, which indicated there might been a group dynamic at work as well as their learning from their father.
I hadn’t exactly planned to start talking about zebra finch song in detail yet, but when I locate good renditions of all my zebra finches’ songs I will put them all up here. There has been an amazing variety. And by working in Italian names with their songs, I could recognize each and every one of them.
Something else my brain does on music: if there’s a song that goes with a spoken phrase or the appropriate mood, it will start playing it. Don’t ask me how many times the Rolling Stones popped into my head with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” My brain will use a song as an editorial comment. There have been times when I felt as I was assigned a particularly mindless task at work and quite out of my unconscious came the strains of “M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.” I realize this dates me, but those of you who grew up with The Mickey Mouse Club will now hear it playing too.
The birds are listening, and they’re participating, but it’s not about my playing, it’s about the music we’re sharing. It’s not about performance, but about the discovery of the music. And with a few exceptions, I don’t have to worry about their criticism. I won’t say it doesn’t exist. Every once in a while they let me know when they’ve heard enough. If they don’t get loud, they get silent, or sometimes I just get buzzed by somebody who wants to distract me into another mindset. I think they understand the concept of practicing. At least the male songbirds do. I’ve had zebra finch males who worked for months to perfect their individual songs.
The moment I discovered I’d rather be playing music for birds than doing almost anything else felt like coming home. It was a most glorious feeling, one of those epiphanic moments when you realize you’re truly connected. I was playing for wild birds, which was more rewarding in the sense that they had the option to come and go, so if they decided to hang out and listen or sing along it was extra special. My birds fly around in three rooms when I’m home, but the piano’s pretty loud and so they can’t exactly ignore me, although they sometimes do. Usually it’s for good reason. I’m probably bored with what I’m playing too.
But it amazes me that if it hadn’t been for the birds, I wouldn’t have learned a tenth of the music I studied in the last 11 years. I learned to play Bach’s French Suites, the first three Partitas, the Goldberg Variations. I learned all the Mozart sonatas. That was a great experience. I played some Schumann, which was never, ever on my list before. There was Brahms, and Eric Satie, and probably more. The birds quelled the perfectionist in me, and taught me how to play for my own enjoyment for the first time in my life since well, maybe, when I was two and just checking out the piano. Practicing is not always fun, but when I am finally able to play something well enough to experience what the composer had in mind, it is the most fun on earth. Learning all those Mozart sonatas, for instance, gave me great insight. It was like sitting over his shoulder. What glorious music to touch, feel, hear, play.
Recording Aria of Goldberg Variations with Cardinal
Attached is an excerpt of the Aria to Bach’s Goldberg Variations with a Northern Cardinal singing. There’s also a House Finch and a bit of what sounds like a juvenile White-Throated Sparrow in there too, and Chimney Swifts twittering up high.
Birds are not the only creatures attracted to music. You may have a cat or dog that likes to sit under the piano while you play, or at your feet with your guitar or whatever your instrument. You may have figured out your house plants grow better with classical music in the background. Maybe your tropical fish swim like they’re dancing when there’s music playing.
Birds are the most obviously musical creatures to us. Those that are called songbirds do just that – they sing. But their other vocalizations are often musical to our ears as well. Songbirds don’t hear the same range of tones that we do: they tend to hear higher pitches than we can but they won’t hear lower pitches as well. But it’s hard to imagine our hearing surpassing that of the birds, because they seem to be so acutely aware of every sound.
When I first realized birds were listening to me play, I thought I could relate to them by imagining how they were listening. I remember thinking that if I had been walking by while someone was playing music with the window open on the third floor of an apartment, I would have had to stop and listen. Yet no human being as far as I know ever did. The humans weren’t listening to birds either, though, and until I was made aware of birds I wasn’t listening either. Admittedly something happened to me when I started listening to the birds. I became more aware of all sounds. Noise became noisier to me. And the slightest sounds of wind rustling leaves of trees or the proverbial pin dropping were more noticeable as well.
If everything a songbird utters has a musical tone to it, I’d like to think its orientation to life is like being in a constant opera. Or maybe it’s more like a human tone language in that the meaning depends a lot on the pitch. Either way, I suspect music is a natural state-of-being for a songbird.
Not all music, of course, is going to interest birds in the same way, they have their tastes too. My birds at home are definitely put off by Messiaen, who wrote out the songs of birds and put them into his music. There are two things operating here: first of all, human instruments imitating bird songs don’t sound exactly like birds, and the birds know that. When I imitate one of my birds’ songs by playing it on the piano, I get stone silence. They react more favorably if I sing it or whistle it, much as I can get wild birds to countersing with my incompetent whistles. Also, I have found my birds relate better to baroque or romantic music, anything preceding 20th Century atonal music, I suppose because they like to know what key they’re supposed to be thinking in. Can’t blame them for that. They’ll talk over loud or keyless music but they won’t blend in, harmonize or sing along with it.
So I hope you enjoy the cardinal, he’s singing quite nicely on this recording.
I was going to write about Music: The Great Communicator, or The Universal Language, but then it started pouring over into What Is It Anyway? Where does music come from? Why is it something we all understand? And of course if I slip into the birds’ perspective, they’ve been doing it longer than we have. But should “music” be the word for only the man-made variety, or does it encompass everything else living and breathing? I tend to think music is everywhere and it exists in places and in forms we don’t yet recognize. Since we’ve created our own brand, or our own way of making music, of course this is what the word “music” describes for us, but I suspect the basis for our musics preceded us all. The creators of the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” perhaps acknowledged this when they had the alien spaceship land playing a musical or “universal” greeting.
My very unscientific theory is this: after the Big Bang there was a Big Chord. Whether it was a chorus of vibrations accompanied by Hollywood visuals (something akin to the aurora borealis) or a series of emanations from the vibrations produced by the Bang that descended into a chord structure and made the first music, I have no idea.
The sounds birds make, the “songbirds,” at least or the passerines, were perhaps the first creatures whose vocalizations we recognized as “songs.” Now we know insects and whales sing, and at the same time we are still perplexed because our closest relatives, the apes, don’t. Maybe that has more to do with our definition of what a “song” is. I accept the idea that birds sing, and that they’ve been communicating with their songs and calls far longer than we have been on the planet.
Right about the time I became interested in all this, I discovered a book which was compiled from presentations at the first international workshop produced by the Institute for Biomusicology in Venice, Italy, May of 1997: The Origins of MusicI will return to this in later posts, but I guess I have a chicken-or-egg question: what came first, the flute or the drum? I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to make a connection between the discovery by archeologists of a most ancient flute and a desire to imitate the sounds of birds. But you can’t have music without rhythm, and maybe from the simplest act of tapping on a rock with a stick to producing more complex rhythm instruments with different tonalities that convey messages, percussion instruments evolved.
As I sit here listening to my birds carry on with WFMT in the background, I am reminded of the ceiling fan that used to be in this room which I finally removed, because it was getting to be too hard to clean and I could never turn it on with the birds flying around. There was a pull chain that made a musical sound when it struck against one of the glass light fixtures on the fan. My budgies used to enjoy playing it along with the music. I recall their playing was always in key.
Attached are a couple excerpts from my past of wild birds singing along with the music. Elvis the crow was accompanied by my first two budgies, to whom I was talking briefly, it’s the Bach E major prelude, first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. And the mourning dove has come in at the end of the first movement of a Mozart C Major sonata (I presently forget which one) and sings off and on through the adagio: note how he waits to come in with his song.
