Preface to Born to Sing
Charles Hartshorne
The primary aim of this book is to advance what P. Szöke has well called biomusicology, the study of music not just in man but in musical or singing animals generally. Szöke reasonably holds that to work in this field one should be expert both in musicology and in the appropriate branches of biology, especially ornithology. Few persons can altogether meet these requirements. The deficiency I feel most painfully is in music.
Robert Ardrey and Aldous Huxley have made the territorial function of songs known to many besides specialists. But we face an enormous range of degrees and kinds of bird music. To understand something of the meaning of this variety we need more than the single idea of territory, which itself has many forms. Also, while songs do help to make territorial spacing possible, this scarcely tells us how the bird experiences its songs. Copulation enables a species to persist, but no one supposes that a copulating animal is aiming at that result. Cause and effect are less obscurely connected in the territorial case. Still, birds are not ornithologists, and what singing is for them, in their scarcely imaginable naiveté, has yet to be dealt with in the light even of the data now available. I have been investigating this difficult matter during most of a long lifetime.
The two expert modem studies of bird song, those by William H. Thorpe (1961) and Edward A. Armstrong (1963), as Thorpe says, do not so much compete with as complement each other, the one giving a lucid account of experimental work in the subject, and the other summarizing with great learning the results of fieldwork done by observers all over the world. My book, I hope, will play a further complementary role. For one thing, though these works are free from provincialism, their authors have done most of their observing in Britain, whereas I have done much of mine in various widely separated parts of the United States, and have spent over seven years all told in many other countries. Also, I have had access to numerous recordings, including some scores that I made myself (with inadequate equipment and skill) of otherwise unrecorded species.
I have tried, first of all, to cover bird song globally, to reckon seriously with the totality of songs by the 5,000 or more species that could, without stretching the term to the utmost, be said to “sing.” Taken without qualification, the project is of course an impossibility. Until recently it could not seriously be entertained. But with the aid of planes, tape recorders, audiospectrographs, the constantly growing international literature, and the Fulbright program, an attempt of this kind, granted its limitations, seems worth risking.
There are both scientific and recreational reasons for attempting global coverage. To take an unduly exalted precedent, natural selection was discovered, not by considering British animals only but chiefly by looking at tropical species—by Darwin, especially in the Americas, and by Wallace in Asia. Life is much more abundant in tropical areas, and things may become obvious there which are more difficult to see in Europe. Also, each continent has distinctive features. Some generalizations about song, as about many other things, are less plausible when viewed in global perspective.
As for the recreational reasons—the day is approaching when the other side of the world will be accessible between breakfast and dinner. Men on various missions are already speeding in a day or less from one zoological region to a radically different one. So long as the impression prevails that the musical songsters are largely confined to the northern parts of the world, so long will even that minority of persons with some feeling for nature be likely to race through other areas, especially the tropics, without bothering to stroll about quietly, especially in forest, listening for songs. In the Fijis, to take an example, the planes (not the ships) land in the arid portion of the island Viti Levu. There only insignificant song is to be heard. But take the bus or the local plane to the wetter parts, find a remnant of rain forest (who knows how long there will be any?), and you will hear many interesting and some beautiful sounds. Within a few minutes I myself had heard not only a few raucous (but piquant) bird voices such as one is taught to expect in the tropics, but also an utterly exquisite song, like a simplified Hermit Thrush, and a quite pretty little flycatcher song. Luckily I had read Fuertes on the voices of tropical birds, so I knew that such things are not uncommon in equatorial regions. But many have not known this. They have been taught in effect to open their eyes but close their ears when traveling to such places.
Many writers, including Thorpe and Armstrong, have dealt intelligently with the question: Do birds express an aesthetic sense in their songs? Or, has the analogy between bird music and human music any biological significance? In exploring this analogy I have drawn upon some results of philosophical and psychological aesthetics and whatever I could find in the facts of bird life that seemed relevant.
A guiding idea of my studies has been the following. There are just two possibilities for evolutionary theory concerning the musical sensibility and capability characterizing man: Either it is entirely unique to human life, or there are precedents or analogies in the older forms of animal life. The search for evidence bearing upon this question is one root of the present book. Another is this: Natural phenomena fall into certain regularities. Nature is not a junk heap of facts. Chance, disorder, there may be, and I believe that the recognition of randomness by physicists is reasonable and that the limitations to causal order are even greater than quantum physics allows. Still, there are at least statistical regularities. So we may ask, what general aspects of order are present in nonhuman singing, that is, the production of musical or music-like sounds? That these sounds rather generally serve to advertise territory and to aid mating and (in birds) cooperation between mates caring for young was made fairly clear long ago. My aim has been to guess and then test additional general truths about animal music, especially bird song. This is the second root of this book. The point here was not to prove this or that generalization rather than any other, but to find some order that obtained comprehensively. Here I was doing what every ornithological researcher does.
The third root of my effort has been the fascination which the concrete details of animal music have had for me. Whatever causal order does or does not obtain in song behavior, I enjoy the songs of birds, and indeed, of frogs and insects. Anyone who shares this feeling may find something to his taste in these chapters, whether or not he agrees with the theories I propose.
The reader may feel a need to know what songs I have personally experienced. I have been observing and reading about singing birds for more than fifty years (longer than I have been studying my professional subject, philosophy). My most intensive fieldwork has been done first in eastern, southern, and far western United States (I have listened to birds in about forty states, including Hawaii), then in Australia, and later in Japan, India, and Nepal. I have made less intensive but usually rather extensive observations in England and several other European countries, in Middle and South America, Jamaica, Uganda and Kenya, New Zealand, Fiji, the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. What I have missed above all is Siberia and mainland China.
From many parts of the world (not yet from mainland Asia) there are now good recordings. I possess many of these and have heard many more, thanks to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, the French organization Echo, various friends who have with great kindness given me copies of their tapes, and commercially available phonograph records from many countries.
In naming birds I try to follow Peters’s Check-list of Birds of the World so far as it goes, or standard regional works, e.g., Vaurie’s The Birds of the Palearctic Fauna, Eisenmann’s The Species of Middle American Birds, or Meyer de Schauensee’s Birds of South America with Their Distribution. I do not give the names of those who originally labeled the species, but they can generally be found in these works. Given the diversity of scientific as well as vernacular or substantive names for the same species occurring in the world literature, it has sometimes been difficult to know when two descriptions of a song refer to the same group of birds and when they do not.
Concerning technical issues in evolutionary theory I offer no opinions. If there is any subject in which the amateur is at a disadvantage it is this one. I hold a religious view of nature, but I think that one of the poorest ways to try to recommend this view is to attack neo-Darwinism, one of the greatest achievements of human intelligence. That there can be any cosmic order at all (and that there is some order is assumed but in no way explained by either physics or biology) I believe can best be understood in religious terms. But exactly what cosmic order obtains, out of all the conceivable ones, is a question for science. I deal with those special aspects of this question which can be affected by the facts of “animal music” and bird song.
Chapters 1, A and B, and 12, B and C, are the least ornithological and the most philosophical sections. Parts of some other chapters (e.g., 6, 8) may seem unduly speculative to some scientific readers. Non-ornithological readers may wish to skip some of the details in Chapters 7-11.
Readers who are puzzled by my use of certain words, in some cases standard in ornithology, in some cases more special to my own practice, may find help in the Glossary and in the list of Abbreviations in Chapter 9A. The primary evidences to which I appeal are from studies of what are sometimes called “true Songbirds,” but which I call simply Songbirds, not because they all sing, for many do not, but because they all have well-developed organs (syrinxes) for vocalization and because the suborder (Oscines or Passeres) of the order of perching birds (Passeriformes) which they constitute includes a majority of the species that sing and nearly all of those that sing very well. These are the birds that I know best. The numerous species outside the Songbird suborder which show some degree of singing skill are, with two exceptions (the lyrebirds), largely ignored, except in Chapters 7, D and E, and 11, in which I discuss the evidence they furnish relevant to the questions dealt with in this book.
I am grateful to many persons and institutions, especially to Dr. Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., my first and excellent and virtually sole teacher in ornithology, and to the University of Michigan Biological Station; to Professor R. K. Selander, whose unwavering encouragement and critical—sometimes brilliantly constructive—comments have been highly valuable; to my friend and neighbor, Edgar B. Kincaid, Jr., who carries in his head a seeming infinity of bird facts. My gratitude goes also to many ornithologists and bird watchers who have helped me to identify singers in numerous countries, e.g., in Japan Kasuke Hoshino and Takeo Mizuno, in Australia Hugh Wilson, in East Africa Myles North (the last two, alas, now dead), in Mexico and Panama Ernest P. Edwards, in Panama James Ambrose, in Costa Rica Alexander F. Skutch, in Nepal Robert Fleming; also to Peter Paul Kellogg and the Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. My onetime Chicago neighbor, the sagacious and learned Margaret Morse Nice, a sharp critic but warm encourager of my investigations, should also be mentioned.
I am grateful too, and this may surprise them, to editors of journals who rejected several of my manuscripts, which (though not entirely for the reasons they gave) I have come to see were better not published as they stood. I have, I believe, profited by their criticisms. Certainly I have benefited from Edward A. Armstrong’s reactions to some of my ideas (in his book, and in correspondence and conversation), for they forced me to work on statistical problems, the difficulties of which, I now realize, I had underestimated. I also thank, for their comments on parts of this book, Professors Peter Marler, Jared Verner, and the University of California statistician Dorothy C. Lowry, whose candid criticisms of a version of Chapter 6 were very helpful. Father James A. Mulligan of St. Louis University read a draft (much longer than the present version) of the entire book, and his unsparing and wise analysis of its defects has been invaluable. W. H. Thorpe read a later draft and I deeply appreciate his many wise suggestions. Finally I could not possibly say enough about my debt to Dorothy C. Hartshorne for editing my writings, and for having always encouraged and sagaciously shared my interest in nature, some aspects of which she understands better than I ever could.
C.H.
August, 1971
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Born To Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song, pp. xi-xvi.