Essays

Maribeth Clark is Associate Professor of Music at New College of Florida. Her essays on dance in early-nineteenth-century Paris have appeared in Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Musical Quarterly and several edited volumes; she is currently writing a book on the cultural history of whistling in the United States from the emergence of black-face minstrelsy through the age of Disney.

During the nineteenth century it might have been as common for birders to transcribe the utterances of birds as it was for composers to collect folk songs, in both instances securing something of the ‘natural’ with their pen. In a time before reliable sound recording technology, bird enthusiasts used Western musical notation to capture scientific and measurable dimensions of the sound – pitch, rhythm, duration and articulation through the use of syllables; yet they also represented the songs as music. In special cases, the authors viewed birds as musicians of an artistic status comparable to that of human beings. One such example is the hermit thrush. Through a discussion focused on this bird known for its transcendent song, I begin to examine the shifting relationship between birdsong as music and bird utterance as science in the United States, considering the implications of the relationship for our understanding of American music that incorporates the sounds of birds. For its admirers, the hermit thrush’s song articulates an aspect of the deep woods of New England during summertime that was considered both spiritual and sublime, an aesthetic that resonates with contemporaneous accounts of instrumental music’s sublimity. At the same time, these admirers also attribute a special ‘American’ quality to this extraordinary performer.

 

Singing New England: The Song of the Hermit Thrush

Although I learned to identify the song of the hermit thrush through recordings, I first heard the bird sing live one summer on a treacherous drive over an eroded mountain road in southwestern Vermont. So isolated was the location that a group of Carthusian monks, an order known for its austerity, chose the locale for their monastery. The weather was pleasant, and we had our windows down as much for the refreshing air as to hear anything. As we passed near the monastery, the distinctive song of a bird rang out under the canopy of hardwoods. Its source was difficult to locate in the reverberation the forest canopy encouraged, but it clearly belonged to the hermit thrush. Before this moment I had little understanding of the awe that the hermit thrush has inspired in the many authors who have described its unusual voice and ranked it as the singing bird par excellence of New England, if not the globe. It wasn’t just the voice in this case, but the isolated environment and its unusual acoustical effect on the sound. It began with a relatively low first held note followed by an ascending flourish of rising and falling, almost physically swirling tones. The bird then provided another liquid phrase at a different tonal level, the timbre both metallic in the richness of overtones and flute-like in its range.

            Although during the summer months the bird can be found across Canada and the western United States as well as the northeast, residents of New England have historically identified with this bird. And while hermit thrushes tend to winter in many southeastern states, including my home state of Florida, we rarely if ever hear their song because they are relatively silent during their sojourn. But even if they happened to sing, most of the spaces they inhabit in the South lack the resonating potential of Vermont’s sylvan mountains. The aesthetic of the hermit thrush is thus contingent upon its austere New England environment, besides the spiritual isolation that the woods provide, which no doubt drew the Carthusians to the same place. The song of the hermit thrush indexes this social and ecological niche, a space inhabited by those seeking solitude and isolation, Henry David Thoreau’s experience at Walden providing the classic example.

            Classically-trained musicians have also identified strongly with the hermit thrush. For some, the song’s musical features suggest melodic contours, harmonic movement and a fluid arrhythmic quality that offer alternatives to conventional tonality and its typical rhythmic-metric structures. But the song is not mere musical substrate bereft of expressive or extra-musical resonance. Comments about the hermit thrush’s song resonate with nationalist American musical agendas, those seeking to differentiate the music of the United States from that produced in Europe. Three figures in particular have contributed to my understanding of the hermit thrush’s song in this context: naturalists Simeon Pease Cheney (1818–1890) and F. Schuyler Mathews (1854–1938), and composer Amy Beach (1867–1944). Their relationships to the bird not only demonstrate the skill needed to capture and reproduce its song. They also clearly identify the hermit thrush as a fellow American musician, albeit of a different species.

            Cheney, a music teacher from Vermont who admired the hermit as the greatest singing bird of New England, was one of the first musicians to transcribe its song in Western musical notation. The transcription is found in his posthumously published Wood Notes Wild, a collection of songs he gathered over thirty years to educate his young music students on the music of nature in all its forms, animate and inanimate. Cheney found music worthy of contemplation and preservation in the squeak of a door, the neigh of a horse as well as the chirps, ululations and full-throated songs of his feathered friends. Although all these sounds, to him, merited notating, some were clearly superior to others. The song of the hermit thrush stood at the pinnacle of his collection.

            

            Cheney describes the hermit as if it were a composer of classical instrumental music, music that inspires transcendental rather than emotional responses: ‘He never indulges in mere merriment, nor is his music sad; it is clear, ringing, spiritual, full of sublimity.’ Cheney links this transcendental power to the harmonic sophistication of orchestral music:

The hermit’s constant and apparently indiscriminate modulations or changes of tonic lend a leading charm to his performances. Start from what point he may, it always proves the right one. When he moves off with [a phrase] and then returning, steps up a degree and follows it with a similar strain – it is like listening to the opening of a grand overture.[1]

While Cheney alludes to the spiritual aspect of instrumental music in connection with the hermit’s song, he also understands the importance of its origins in nature, and describes its modulation as fresh and wild, leading to an ‘enchanting effect’ that comes from the music’s raw sonic force.[2]

            Cheney further demonstrates his conception of the hermit song through his basic musical description, something that leads him to contemplate his ultimate failure to capture the quality of the sound through either verbal exegesis or musical notation. He begins by carefully outlining the structure of the performance, describing how the hermit, ‘after striking his first low, long and firm tone, startling the listener with an electric thrill, bounds upwards by thirds, fourths and fifths, and sometimes a whole octave, gurgling out his triplets with every upward movement’.[3] This verbal description, which proceeds the final two songs that Cheney notated, becomes increasingly impressionistic as the author attempts to recall the song once it rises in pitch beyond the compass of the keyboard. Cheney ends by associating the song with the image of an aural firework, ‘a rocket’ that fills the air with ‘silver tones’.[4] As way of introduction for his final transcriptions, he derides himself for trying to capture the quality of any thrush, given the skill and beauty of their singing, realizing that the notes on the page only provide a mere trace of the experience. In the transcriptions that close the section on the hermit in his book, he provides a description of the setting in which he heard the bird over the staff, ‘in a deep, still forest’, pointing to the contribution the natural environment made to his perception of the song.

            Despite Cheney’s association of the hermit thrush with the artist or musician, his son, poet John Vance Cheney, who completed the task of editing and publishing his father’s collection posthumously, encouraged scientific analogies, seemingly incompatible with music. In the ‘Editor’s Preface’, John brings notice to his father’s isolation from current scientific literature, emphasizing his modest status as a singing-master for whom music, not science, was the standard by which the world was measured. Clearly, John found it a weakness that his father was familiar with only four texts on birds and, worse, that this familiarity came late in the process of gathering the transcriptions. Perhaps because he felt his father’s book to be scientifically deficient, he provided an appendix to the collection that includes descriptions of the same songs that his father transcribed from an assortment of scientific sources.[5] Despite the academic origins of these other texts, however, their descriptions either agree with Cheney’s or pale in the face of his detailed and nuanced observations. Rather than impeach Cheney, the appendix provides evidence of his keen eye and ear, as well as the scientifically useful quality of his work, given the fact that no more accurate technology for capturing the music of the birds than transcription in Western music existed at the time.

            F. Schuyler Mathews shared with Simeon Pease Cheney an enthusiasm for birds as musicians, and published a guide to their music entitled Fieldbook of Wild Birds and Their Music, which first appeared in 1904, a quarter of a century after Cheney’s death. In contrast to Cheney, whose text he knew, Mathews claims the scientific character of his studies in the preface, leaning heavily on the accuracy with which musical notation can capture pitches (in the process ignoring micro-tones). Despite the importance he places on accuracy, however, his presentation of the songs is often imaginatively elaborated beyond what we might think of as scientific necessity. This elaboration takes several different forms. For the most mundane bird utterances he provides texts to accompany the melodies he notates, which serve as reminders of the song, and occasionally its timbral quality or its articulation. For example, he notates the song of the yellow-breasted chat as a repeated A above middle C, beginning five quarter notes, one over each syllable of the ‘Gr-r-r-r-rolp', then moving to eighth notes with the utterances 'cowlp, cowlp, owlp, olp, olp' marked ritardando. He then provides the following verbal description: ‘[the chat’s utterance] begins with a series of gurgling sounds which rapidly merge into one another, and then runs down in a slower and slower succession of syllables.’[6] The melody remains an unaccompanied solo in this case; however, in many others instances, Mathews harmonizes the melodies. Finding these melodies incomplete because they lack closure on the tonic, he takes such lack of finish as an invitation to complete the songs himself. In the most extreme cases, he goes beyond harmonization, demonstrating the similarity between birdsongs and select operatic arias or melodies from symphonies and piano sonatas. (My favourite is his comparison of the song sparrow’s melody to Verdi’s ‘Di Provenza il mar’ from La Traviata and ‘La donn’e mobile’ from Rigoletto.) The treatment that Mathews gives a song thus suggests its placement within some sort of creative hierarchy: words and a simple unaccompanied melody for the lesser birds-cum-musicians, while the most ornate harmonizations and grandiose comparisons are bestowed on the most skilled and musically dexterous.[7]

            Mathews, like Cheney, places the hermit thrush at the top of this hierarchy, a songster he believed to rival the nightingale in England. His comparison of the hermit with the nightingale can be read as an attempt to assert the musical superiority of ‘wild’ American music over that found in Europe, whose art music dominated performances in the United States. To Mathews, the nightingale’s song is simpler than the hermit’s, who in contrast ‘is brilliant in execution beyond description, as versatile in melody as a genius, and as pure in his tones as refined silver'. Referring to the flow or liquidity of the song, he writes that ‘dots and dashes could never represent the rhythm of his song. The mechanical rhythm is completely overshadowed by the wonderful way in which the singer delivers his sustained tonic and then embroiders it with a rapid and brilliant cadenza.' The hermit is also distinguished by his long, loud, liquid first note, something that, according to Mathews, the nightingale could never imitate.

 

            In addition to the hermit’s somewhat nationalist superiority, Mathews supports the transcendental reading of the song proposed by Cheney. Although he observes the potential for the songs to produce emotional responses, stating that ‘some are plaintive, others are joyous, all are melodious’, he also recognizes a spiritual element that remains difficult to articulate. Speaking somewhat generally, he writes that:

it must be remembered [. . .] that bird songs are most ethereal things, a great deal like the wonderful tinting and delicate spiral weaving in Venetian glass; one must see the color or hear the melody in order to fully appreciate its subtile [sic] beauty; the song is charming because of its spirituality of tone and its depth of expression; how can the meagre outlines of music notation convey such truths! Who can justly report the Hermit’s song![8]

He, it seems. For attempt to convey such truths Mathews does, not only through notation, but through comparison with musical moments from well-known masterpieces such as the brilliant and scintillating quality of the finale of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. In trying to capture the character of the bird and its song, Mathews also draws a comparison with the opera singer, providing the reader with a much more embodied and material sense of the bird than Cheney ever does. In fact, Mathews anthropomorphizes the bird to the extent that he talks to himself, demonstrating the cutthroat competitive edge of the diva:

The thrush is a transcendentalist, he climbs higher than his voice will carry, and like many another aspiring songster, makes a ludicrous failure of the highest notes. After one or two bad breaks, which apparently threaten the woodland symphony with the ignominy of disaster, the Hermit – who sings the prima donna’s part in the score – seems to say to himself, after a short pause, “See here, my fine fellow, this will never do, that portamento was out of place, and the high note sounded like the whetting of a scythe! Try a lower key and silence that ‘Swainson’ over yonder mouthing his zigzag notes as though he were trying to make them creep upstairs! Shucks! Show him how to soar!” And the bird is at it again entirely oblivious of the fact that he steadily climbs in keys until he goes to pieces again somewhere around G sharp, twenty octaves higher than the limit of the piano! Such is the character of the singer and his song.[9]

Mathews does not stop with a description of the hermit as an operatic diva: also like Cheney, he continues to express a respect for him as a composer in his own right. More specifically, he compares the hermit’s song with that composed by Richard Wagner for the bird that addresses Siegfried, as well as a theme written by Richard Strauss in his Symphonia Domestica. According to Mathews, though to this reader it seems unlikely, both German composers took their themes from the native American bird.

            In addition to comparing the hermit thrush with prominent European composers, Mathews’ treatment of the song demonstrates how he hears it within a framework of the tradition of Western art music, which further contributes to his sense of the bird as a preeminent musician. His transcriptions provide a regular time signature that eliminates the rhythmic freedom Cheney maintained by omitting any metrical framework. In addition, Mathews represents the hermit thrush’s song as tonally complete or closed, the bird ending the song on a pitch harmonized as the tonic as if it were acquainted with basic music theory.

            Both Cheney and Mathews preserved the hermit’s song in collections of birdsong transcriptions created to educate people about birds. Although Amy Beach was known more as a composer and a performer than a naturalist, she shared with Cheney and Mathews a similar respect for the hermit thrush, whose song she transcribed and used as the basis of two of her most well-known works, ‘The Hermit Thrush at Eve’ and ‘The Hermit Thrush at Morn’, op. 92, no. 1 and 2. It might be said that Beach’s compositions preserve and present the hermit’s song with greater accuracy than either Cheney or Mathews, and also reflect Beach’s ties to New England. Born in New Hampshire, Beach grew up in Boston, and resided there as a young woman, returning to New Hampshire for regular residencies at the MacDowell colony in Peterborough starting in 1921, when she was 53. And, like Cheney and Mathews, she regularly transcribed birdsong. Beach’s biographer, Adrienne Fried Block, relates Beach’s experience of transcribing the hermit’s song soon after her arrival in Peterborough:

I took the songs down at the bird’s dictation, and oh, how hard I worked! [. . .] Even the most expert stenographer would have had difficulty keeping up with him! I took them exactly, even as to key (except for a few intervals too small to be transcribed) and rewrote and corrected as he sang them over and over. Then I played them back to him and he would answer.[10]

Block explains that bird songs in general provided Beach with models for new musical directions at a time when she viewed the work of Varèse, Stravinsky and Schoenberg as extreme. Unlike Mathews, however, who demonstrated the underlying stable tonality of the thrush’s phrases, Beach’s use of the tunes of the hermit allowed for the introduction of chromaticism into the fabric of her composition.

            Block asserts that the song of the hermit thrush served Beach as a metaphor for the MacDowell Colony, a retreat for artists and musicians that provided a quiet and supportive environment for creativity; however, viewed in the context of Cheney and Mathews, it becomes possible to see that Beach may have conceptualized the hermit thrush in many other ways as well.[11] As an epigraph to the thrush pieces, she quoted poetry by John Vance Cheney, coincidentally the son and editor of Simeon Pease Cheney’s Wood Notes Wild. His phrases make explicit the connection of the hermit’s song with the sublime and transcendental qualities discussed by Cheney and Mathews. More telling, however, is Beach’s musical treatment of the song. Rather than absorbing the thrush’s musical structures into her style, as some might say Stravinsky did with his Russian folk songs, she sets it in her piano pieces much like a rare gem, attempting to display it with the utmost clarity, to place it in the spotlight through her musical setting. She respects it as a voice of the forest worthy of preservation, which for her involves acknowledgment of its chromatic possibilities, its rhythmic freedom and its lack of conformity to metrical structures. Like Beach, the hermit was an American composer, and Beach treated it as a musical equal.

 

            Beach published her hermit thrush pieces in 1922, before the development of devices that could capture the high frequency of birds. By the end of the 1930s, however, recording technology had improved enough to make the creation of commercial bird recordings possible. People no longer needed to imitate or transcribe birdsong since sound equipment captured it for them.[12] Alongside this ability to record and reproduce birdsong mechanically, naturalists developed new systems of notation related only tangentially to musical notation. The work of naturalist Aretas Saunders serves as one example. He developed a graphic system of representing birdsong that he employed in publications dating from 1929 to 1951 (See Figure 1.)[13] Although he provides a sense of the octave range of the hermit’s song, in place of a staff and detailed musical notation, he draws ascending and descending lines and provides text underlay that suggest the articulation of the sounds and aural space they occupy over time. But these figures, with their kinship to graphs, appear more scientific than musical.

  Figure 1: Graphic representation of the hermit thrush song by Aretas Sanders from A Guide to Bird Songs (New York: D. Appleton Century Co., 1941), 140.

            By the late twentieth century, standardized spectrograms of bird sounds and songs eclipsed Sanders’ graphs. Today, the rare musician-naturalist transcribes birdsong into musical notation without the assistance of a recording device. Although the technology has changed, the fascination with the song of the bird reflects many of the same issues that the work of Cheney, Mathews and Beach raise. North American composers Daniel Goode (b. 1936) and Emily Doolittle (b. 1972) have both based compositions for solo instruments on the hermit thrush’s song. Unlike Beach, who transcribed the thrush’s songs from her direct experience of hearing it, sound recordings mediate the relationships between composer and bird.

            In an essay called ‘Phrases about the Hermit Thrush’, Goode reflects on his use of the hermit thrush song in his compositions. He shares his awareness of how recording the bird changed his relationship to it, telling of how the taped sound became almost more real than the experience of hearing the bird outside, the ‘song’ framed by Goode’s appearance and the bird’s departure.[14] As Goode wrote, ‘what was on tape took precedence over some future experience of this sound, its living pattern in time. As if to say there has to be a disengagement from the physical experience in order to have it.’[15] In other words, the tape turned the bird’s song into a timeless and placeless sound object. Goode’s analysis of the song led to his imitating the bird melodies as recorded at half speed on his clarinet, and his first composition, ‘Phrases of the Hermit Thrush’ (1975) for solo clarinet. Using the tape over decades, he interrogated the depths of the hermit thrush’s song. Writing in a blog post in 2011, he explained how he was ‘more faithful to the bird-form than the bird song, in which [he] had to alter register, approximate ‘micro-tones’ from tempered, and decide in many cases to avoid a lot of the noise elements in the songs’.[16] Through his performance of the hermit thrush’s song, he discarded much of that which Western musical notation could not capture: the sounds between diatonic pitches and other ‘noise elements’, and moved from birdsong to his own abstracted composition. Goode made choices that shaped his perception of the song, but that, in valuing form and sound object, ignored complicated subjectivity of the bird-as-performer that captured the imagination of Cheney, Mathews, and Beach.[17]

            If Goode in a sense obfuscates the bird-as-composer in favour of the isolated sound object, Emily Doolittle does just the opposite: using the scientific method, she and her collaborators again invest the bird with human music-making qualities. Much like Goode, Doolittle wrote ‘Utah, 1996’ (2009) for solo cello in imitation of a recording of a hermit thrush’s song; however, as a so-called zoo-musicologist, her interest is in the bird itself, and the choices that the bird seems to make in regard to its performance. The resulting study suggests that the hermit thrush makes diatonic choices related to the overtone series, demonstrating a preference for small-integer ratio intervals such as perfect fifths and fourths, major and minor thirds and seconds.[18] In so doing, the bird demonstrates its musical affinity with people, who, across the globe, tend to make similar choices. The article concludes that ‘a number of perceptual and motor mechanisms providing the biological bases for human music may be shared with some other species’. Cheney and Mathews may have been right after all: humans and birds – especially hermit thrushes – have more in common than one would have thought.

 

[1] Simeon Pease Cheney, Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music, ed. John Vance Cheney (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892), 60. Carl Dahlhaus has explored at length the conditions under which purely instrumental music, of which a ‘grand overture’ is one example, rose to the status of the transcendental during the nineteenth century. And although Simeon Pease Cheney resided in a rural part of New Hampshire, he no doubt heard such works performed by community bands and orchestras that were common during those times.

[2] Ibid., 60.

[3] Ibid., 59–60.

[4] Ibid., 60.

[5] He also included transcriptions of animals and sounds that his father might have included had he lived long enough, such as the utterances of barnyard animals such as horses and sheep.

[6] F. Schuyler Mathews, Fieldbook of Wild Birds and Their Music (New York: Putnam, 1904), 16.

[7] Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg also recognizes Mathews’ transcriptions as occupying a space between science and music. See Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 49–54.

[8] Mathews, Fieldbook of Wild Birds, 240.

[9] Ibid,, 241.

[10] Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian (Oxford University Press, 1998), 221.

[11] Denise Von Glahn views Beach’s thrush pieces as nature essays in which she responds to nature ‘close to home’, and in so doing reflects the ‘circumscribed natural sphere’ of the upper-middle-class American woman. See Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 43.

[12] See Craig Eley, ‘“A Birdlike Act”: Sound Recording, Nature Imitation, and Performance Whistling’, The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television, 74 (2014), 4–15.

[13] A Guide to Bird Songs (New York: D. Appleton Century Co., 1936; second edition New York: Doubleday and Co., 1951).

[14] Daniel Goode, ‘Phrases about the Hermit Thrush’, Musicworks, 50 (Summer 1991), 12–19.

[15] Ibid., 14.

[16] ‘How I made the thrush pieces – letter to Maayan,’ email from Danial Good to Maayan Tsadka, 27 October 2011; see https://danielgoode.com/2011/11/20/how-i-made-the-thrush-pieces-letter-to-maayan/.

[17] Goode also wrote “Five Thrushes’ (1978) for two fiddles and piano, combining the song of the hermit thrush with Cape Breton fiddle tunes, folk music from the region, and suggesting the connection between birdsong and folksong that began this paper.

[18] Emily L. Doolittle, Bruno Gingras, Dominik M. Endres and W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music’, PNAS, 111/46 (18 November 2014): 16616–16621.

 

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