A Sweet, Wild Note by Richard Smyth

Author:Richard Smyth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783963157
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

Any respectable medieval musicologist, fished from the grave to address one of the most vexed questions in birdsong study, would tell you definitively that birdsong is not music. In the Middle Ages, this wasn’t a question of personal opinion; it practically amounted to a logical syllogism. Music is a product of the rational mind; birds do not have rational minds; therefore, birds cannot make music.

This idea was applied to human singers, too. The human voice, after all, was a pipe on which pretty much anyone could play a tune; far better – far more sophisticated, and therefore far more human – to master the sackbut, or the gittern, or the harpsichord.

In her book Sung Birds, Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach makes the point that, to the musicologists of the Middle Ages, comparisons between human singers and songbirds as masters of ‘virtuoso, spontaneous, naturally talented vocal production’ weren’t invalid, exactly – they just had an unfortunate whiff of degradation about them. Song of this kind was, by implication, subhuman, ‘and therefore perhaps morally suspect’. ‘The singer’s skill was being denigrated,’ she explained to me. ‘The singer has been turned into a sort of unthinking machine – or an unthinking bird.’

The response of the singers was to double down: they began to deliberately incorporate the impulsive, untutored rhythms of birdsong into the songs they sang. It was a plain message to snotty composers: transcribe that, if you can.

But the idea had taken hold. Wild music could be beautiful, but human music was simply, by definition, better. Birdsong and human music share the same seven notes, the eighteenth-century musician Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart admitted – ‘but what man has done with them!’

Walter Garstang describes the blackbird as ‘the Beethoven of the birds’: an irresistible virtuoso. It’s unlikely that the compliment would mean much to the average blackbird, but Beethoven himself might have appreciated it. His 1808 Symphony No.6 in F major, commonly known as the ‘Pastoral’, incorporates the calls of the quail, the cuckoo and the nightingale in its musical representation of a day in the countryside – except, of course, that it really does no such thing, but instead uses a flute, an oboe and two clarinets to create approximations of these noises. It’s human music, Beethoven’s music; it’s wonderful, like a mechanical nightingale is wonderful, but it isn’t birdsong.

Even more obliquely avian is the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.2 in D major. Some listeners say that they can hear the rhythm of a Cetti’s warbler’s song in the movement’s animated opening notes; who knows, it may even be that Beethoven intended them to. (The writer David Turner has speculated that the phantom warbler in this symphony lies ‘somewhere in the twilight zone between chance and conscious imitation’; an ornithologist’s reading, made with a well-thumbed breeding-bird atlas to hand, might be that the Cetti’s warbler, Cettia cetti, wasn’t known to breed in Beethoven’s German homeland until the 1970s, so it seems unlikely that the young maestro heard one singing its ear-splitting song in between recitals in Bonn or Vienna.

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