This chapter draws on the author’s experience as a musicologist, philosopher, and ornithologist to examine different perspectives on birdsong in Messiaen, including verisimilitude, ecology, and Messiaen’s practice of notation. It places Messiaen’s birdsong in the context of his thought and examines the meaning of this important formant and creative source in Messiaen’s work.

Berlioz takes his protagonist to countryside that was surely inspired by the region of his birth in the Dauphiné: a plain, farmland (home to the quail whose call is, perhaps, imitated), and a distant prospect of mountains. The scene is prepared by a stylized ‘cattle-call’, known as ranz des vaches, played on another instrument rarely used up to this time in a symphony orchestra, the cor anglais (Berlioz did not risk ridicule by introducing an actual alphorn). The serene pastoral reverie that follows is disturbed by the idée fixe, arousing memories of the protagonist’s hopes and fears: could she love him? But now he is alone, and his isolation is emphasized when the ranz des vaches on cor anglais, formerly answered by an offstage oboe (another innovation!), is now heard amid the threat of distant thunder.

The chapter examines the work of a composer Jean-Louis Florentz, whose work has perhaps a greater affinity to that of Messiaen than works by the more well-known triumvirate of spectralists (Grisey, Murail, and Levinas). Florentz’s works are distinguished by their originality and are notable for their use of world music, in particular Ethiopian liturgical music. The study evaluates the connections between the two men, the proximity and distance of their techniques, their musical aesthetics, and the spiritual approaches of these composers.

Messiaen’s cahiers de notations des chants d’oiseaux tell us a great deal about how he fashioned works such as Oiseaux exotiques and Catalogue d’oiseaux from birdsong notations made in the wild and from recordings. Of what benefit can they be to performers? This chapter shows how insights the cahiers give into Messiaen’s imaginative world can influence performers’ approaches, offering perspectives on Messiaen’s perceptions of the ‘artistry’ of the birds, which are not always apparent from the published scores.

This chapter highlights passages from Darwin’s early writings that explore phonetics and phonology in the natural world, illuminating how sound lies at the heart of Darwin’s observational methodology. Darwin’s handwritten notes and early manuscripts, for example, demonstrate that his writing process relies upon experiencing the sonic texture and physiological dimension of nature. In order to communicate this sonic texture, Darwin uses elaborate metaphors and descriptions to recreate his own auditory experience within the mind’s eye (or ear) of his readers, in a process of auditory ekphrasis. Darwin’s attempts to represent birdsong, as well as his admittedly imperfect attempts to compare the sounds of a variety of animals, informed his understanding of the boundaries that differentiated species from each other. Ultimately, Darwin’s approaches to labeling sound at the intersection of different physiological, behavioral, and cultural registers exemplify the productive nature of a sound studies methodology in Victorian studies and beyond.

Chapter two delineates ‘the science of language’ as it developed from the philosophical speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder to the establishment of the ‘New Philology’ in the 1860s. Even as philosophers recognised significant continuities between birdsong, speech and poetry, they also, however, increasingly turned their attention to the internal, mental faculties as the distinguishing marks of an evolved and uniquely human language. This chapter examines the wider implications of a developing equation of language and thought in the long nineteenth century. The apparent absence of language in animals was widely seen to reflect a lack of intelligence, reason or even consciousness. Since language reflected the unique faculties of the human mind, philosophers of all stripes raced to discover an intrinsic set of principles common to all human languages throughout time and across continents. According to this same principle, however, differences between languages were also seen to reflect or even determine differences in the minds of their speakers. As they responded to these larger debates, scientists and poets throughout this period, from William Wordsworth to Charles Darwin, reflected on their personal experiences and the notorious difficulty they habitually encountered in attempting to translate their own thoughts into words.

John Clare’s transcription of the nightingale’s song has been praised as ‘the most accurate rendering in words of any bird’s voice for nearly a century’. But the so-called ‘peasant poet’ was not naïve. Chapter four argues that Clare’s educational background and multifarious interests in poetry, science and natural history made him singly alert to the difficulties inherent within his own attempt to ‘syllable the sounds’ of the nightingale. The chapter places Clare’s writing in a pivotal, though pre-Darwinian, stage of the ‘science of birdsong’: a period in which all kinds of ‘facts’ about birdsong were being collected, compared and vigorously disputed. Watching the bird closely as it inwardly mutters its undersong, or stammers or hurries over ill-remembered passages, Clare witnessed the kind of behaviour which would ultimately challenge the ‘foolish lyes’ uttered by both poets and philosophers regarding how and why birds sing. By exploring the deep connections which Clare draws between the ‘muttering’ of the bird while practising its songs and his own processes of composition, the chapter seeks to challenge and break down some of the binary distinctions which have framed responses to the writings of this so-called ‘peasant-poet’: ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, ‘instinctive’ and ‘learned’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘premeditated’ art.

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s approach to renderings of birdsong in poems. It addresses recent studies which have emphasised the dangers of anthropomorphism and the poet’s consequent propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale | Of his own sorrow’ (‘The Nightingale’, 1796). As the ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has argued, however, this scholarly obsession with anthropomorphism all too frequently slides into a form of what he terms ‘anthropodenial’: ‘the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals’ which ‘denotes wilful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves’ and ‘reflects a pre-Darwinian antipathy to the profound similarities between human and animal behaviour (e.g. maternal care, sexual behaviour, power seeking) noticed by anyone with an open mind’ (‘Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial’, 2009). While de Waal has called for a more open-minded approach to the study of our nearest relatives, the primates, this book sketches out a long history of ‘wilful blindness’ towards birdsong as an everyday example of the agency, skill and artfulness possessed by other creatures.

Chapter three explores how Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings responded to and engaged with larger questions surrounding birdsong, speech and poetry. While Coleridge throughout his life brooded over metaphysical arguments regarding ‘the one life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’, 1795), Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are filled with close, detailed descriptions of birds and their songs that are neither assimilated to nor inhibited by any overarching theory regarding the sentience of other creatures and our human relation to them. As he responded to his sister’s lively observations and the philosophical arguments in which he found his friend so deeply embroiled, William Wordsworth was led into larger discussions about what may be going on inside the heads of various human and non-human others. Drawing on his own experiences of composing and ‘muttering’ over his poems in daily walks with his sister, Wordsworth hints at a subvocal language of thought that is patterned and shaped, though not always or exactly worded. Out of a deep personal recognition of a grave disjuncture between thinking and saying, Wordsworth throughout his writing explores the inner lives of others in ways that would prove crucial to Clare, Hardy and other poets writing in the following centuries.

Since birds have been trained to sing for centuries, the scientific studies of birdsong examined in chapter one drew from an old and deep well of popular knowledge and experience. Naturalists relied on a mass of supporting evidence from an ancient and evidently lucrative trade in singing birds. The chapter examines records of bird-catching from eighteenth-century training manuals to Henry Mayhew’s extended discussion of the metropolitan ‘bird-trade’ in London Labour and The London Poor (1851) and the eventual decline of the London chaffinch-fanciers as recounted in W. H. Hudson’s Birds in London (1898). It then assesses the importance of this popular and highly competitive sport to an emerging scientific method based on practical experience, direct observation and controlled experiment. While Daines Barrington and Gilbert White observed apposite similarities between birdsong and human speech, the chapter observes an irregularity in how their studies were received: Barrington’s findings were relegated to the footnotes and appendices of natural history throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes by showing how this wealth of material was excavated from the footnotes and explicitly used to identify birdsong as ‘the nearest analogy’ to human speech in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871).

The motor thalamus is interconnected with the brainstem, cortex, and basal ganglia and plays major roles in planning, sequencing, and executing action. In this chapter, I highlight roles of input-defined thalamic circuits in motor sequence production and learning. Brainstem–motor thalamic pathways carry efference copy signals important for the production of both innate and learned motor sequences, for example, during saccades, grooming, and birdsong. Basal ganglia thalamocortical loops implement aspects of reinforcement learning, including the generation of motor exploration during vocal babbling. Classic "gating" models of basal ganglia–thalamic transmission fail to explain thalamic discharge during behavior, which instead appears strongly driven by cortical inputs. A challenge going forward is to determine if there are conserved principles of thalamic function across diverse motor thalamic subregions.