THE MEANING OF BIRD MUSIC 



137 



more elaborate composition of his own. 

 x\nd let me say here that our woods and 

 fields are full of suggestive themes for 

 the enterprising musician who awakens 

 to the fact that man has no monopoly 

 of melody. One, at least, of the fra- 

 ternity recently had his eyes opened to 

 this wealth of musical material, and 

 the result of his discovery is a book of 

 songs about birds in which the melody 

 of each song is made up of themes 

 furnished by the bird to which it re- 

 lates. Some of these songs are very 

 beautiful. 



]\Iore remarkable than the union of 

 related phrases in. sequence by one bird 

 are those performances, occasionally to 

 be met with, in which two related 

 phrases are sung antiphonally by two 

 separate birds. The meadow larks of 

 the eastern half of the United States 

 (SturneUa magna) are especially prone 

 to sing duets of this kind. From forty 

 or more such meadow lark duets that I 

 have noted I here reproduce one sung 

 by two birds on my own place last 

 March : 



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Were the first bird saying, "I love to 

 sing," and the second rejoining, "So I 

 perceive," the effect of phrase and an- 

 swer would not be more marked. 



From such examples of bird music 

 what are we to conclude as to the mean- 

 ing of bird song ? We find some of the 

 birds uttering musical phrases and 

 sequences of phrases that are governed 

 in their construction by rules that 



govern the construction of our own 

 musical compositions — that conform to 

 those constructive principles that are 

 developed by miisical taste in man. 

 Melody, rhythm, harmony, and tonality 

 combine to make them pleasing to our 

 ears in precisely the same way that 

 human music appeals to us. To ac- 

 count for this phenomenon by a theory 

 of chance coincidence requires a degree 

 of credulity that is immense. That a 

 bird should so combine notes as to pro- 

 duce human music accidentally is as 

 incredible as that it should so combine 

 articulate sounds as to form human 

 speech accidentally. To assume that 

 birds are the unconscious instruments 

 of a higher power made to produce such 

 performances as man alone can appre- 

 ciate and enjoy, is to return to the long- 

 abandoned attitude under which the 

 stars were regarded as mere points of 

 light, created for the purpose of reliev- 

 ing man of absolute darkness on moon- 

 less nights. There remains only the 

 idea that birds sing songs of whose 

 musical beauty they are consciously 

 appreciative. This is the simplest and 

 most plausible interpretation of the 

 matter; and if we are brave enough to 

 disregard that bugbear of the average 

 psychologist, anthropomorphism, we 

 shall understand that birds share with 

 man an intelligent appreciation of 

 music, the difference being one of de- 

 gree, not of kind. We may not com- 

 prehend the full philosophical signifi- 

 cance of our own musical emotion, but 

 we may safely rest in the assumption 

 that whatever light we have in this re- 

 spect equally illumines and makes plain 

 the meaning of bird song. 



