Two American birdsong experts, the wife-and-husband team Meredith West and Andrew King, explain the joy of keeping pet starlings at length in an article entitled "Mozart's Starling," (1990). They also provide an analysis of how these birds flexibly combine and recombine song phrases, adding whistles and typical starling squeals to tunes that were once sung to them. They fracture the phrases, sing them off-key, and delete parts that seem absolutely critical to the human ear. For example, one bird would whistle the notes corresponding to "Way Down Upon the Swa-," never, despite thousands of promptings, adding the notes to "-nee River."
In describing the peculiarities of starling mimetics, the authors try to throw light on Mozart's fascination with his bird. He entered the purchase of his starling in his diary and added the transcription of a song it whistled, commenting Das War Schon! ("that was beautiful"). It was a familiar tune, almost identical to a theme in the final movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major. But how could the bird have sung this tune on the date it was bought, May 27, 1784, when Mozart had catalogued his concerto as finished on April 12 of the same year? Speculations hinge on the possibility that Mozart, like many animal lovers, had visited the pet shop in the weeks preceding the purchase, and had transmitted the tune to the bird. The composer was known to whistle a lot, and starlings don't need to hear a melody many times to copy it. Who knows, the composer may have bought the bird out of delight over its mimicry.
Others have speculated about transmission in the opposite direction, that is, from the bird to the composer. To some Mozart fans this may sound sacrilegious, but the alternative is perhaps even worse: independent genius!
With ears trained quite differently from those of musicologists, West and King also listened to Mozart's A Musical joke, the first piece he wrote following the death of both his father and the starling. This piece is commonly interpreted as a parody of the popular music of Mozart's day, or else as a commentary on the father-son relationship. But Mozart's relationship with his father surely didn't deserve this kind of mocking commemoration. Instead, the two bird experts note the piece's starling-like qualities. Consider the following description of K. 522 from a record jacket:
In the first movement we hear the awkward, unproportioned, and illogical piecing together of uninspired material.... [Later] the andante cantabile contains a grotesque cadenza which goes on far too long and pretentiously and ends with a comical deep pizzicato note . . . and by the concluding presto, our "amateur composer" has lost all control of his incongruous mixture. I I I
West and King comment:
Is the piece a musical joke? Perhaps. Does it bear the vocal autograph of a starling? To our ears, yes. The "illogical piecing together" is in keeping with the starlings' intertwining of whistle tunes. The "awkwardness" could be due to the starlings' tendencies to whistle off-key or to fracture musical phrases at unexpected points. The presence of drawn-out, wandering phrases of uncertain structure also is characteristic of starling soliloquies. Finally, the abrupt end, as if the instruments had simply ceased to work, has the signature of starlings written all over it.112
Baptista adds to this analysis by noting the final cadence in A Musical Joke, which is written in two voices in counterpoint. Funny? Perhaps, but birds produce sounds with a syrinx that has two vocal cords, which can act independently, allowing a two-voice phenomenon that would make Bach proud. Baptista agrees, therefore, that the composition must have been Mozart's final farewell to his four-penny bird. In this light, many of the jargon-laden analyses that I have read be come truly amusing. Almost all musicologists assume either that Mozart got lost in his own music (calling this particular composition superficial, and devoid of significance) or that he spoofed contemporary colleagues who had trouble composing. But they all miss the real joke! One Czech colleague, Leopold Kozeluch, is even said to have attacked Mozart on a visit to Prague because he felt parodied.
It has come to light that A Musical Joke was composed in fragments during exactly the three-year period that Mozart owned his darling starling. Its completion a week after the bird's death suggests that it was a requiem for his avian friend. People who share Mozart's love for birds (he also kept canaries), and who know the naughty and endearing qualities of the starling, have no trouble believing he felt a great loss. Birds develop strong attachments, showing a tender and happy side to those they love and trust. They may gently nibble at their owner's ear, for example, making soft sounds of contentment, where they might peck someone else's. We people have a natural tendency to reciprocate when we notice how much we mean to another being. In Mozart's case, this special bond was enriched by mutual inspiration between the professional composer and his feathered amateur colleague.
Pigeons and Impressionists
Of all paintings by famous artists on the market and in museums, ten to forty percent are estimated to be fakes-perfectly good paintings, but by different artists than is claimed for them. But with art experts staking their reputations on existing classifications, it is hard to change opinions. When forger Han van Meegeren claimed that he was behind some of the bestknown works attributed to Jan Vermeer, no one wanted to believe him. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, he was arrested for selling the enemy a painting by the Dutch master. The only way for him to prove that he himself had produced the art-a lesser offense than collaboration-was to paint one more "Vermeer" while in prison.
This is why we need more pigeons, the only experts unfazed by big names, astronomical prices, and paper authentication. Near a sports field at Japan's oldest and most prestigious university, Keio University in Tokyo, Shigeru Watanabe runs a modest but crowded laboratory in which students and collaborators are constantly placing birds and other animals in test chambers to measure one perceptual ability after another, such as whether pigeons can detect the difference between healthy and sick members of their species, between Schonberg and Bach, or between a Monet and a Picasso. To the astonishment of the art world, which considered discrimination among painters an acquired taste attainable only by one aesthetically sensitive species, Watanabe's pigeons have no trouble with the latter task.
One group of pigeons was rewarded for pecking at pictures of Monet's paintings, and another for pecking at Picasso's. After the training was over, the same birds were presented with new paintings, never seen before, but by the same artists. They gen eralized from the pictures on which they had been trained to the unfamiliar set. So, a pigeon trained on Picasso's Girls in Avignon and Nude Woman with a Comb would also peck at Woman Looking at the Glass and Natura Morta Spagnola by the same artist. Similarly, birds trained on Monet would generalize from one set of paintings by this artist to another. Since we don't assume that the pigeons see two-dimensional images as representations of the real world, it is unlikely that their distinctions were based on objects recognizable to us (women versus fruit, for example). One might therefore conclude that the cue must be the color scheme, together with the presence or absence of sharp edges. However, when Watanabe modified the paintings by presenting them in black and white or with blurred lines, the birds were still able to make the discriminations.
There is more. When the same birds were asked to peck at paintings by other artists of the same period, the Monettrained birds preferred other impressionists, such as Renoir, whereas the Picasso-trained birds preferred other cubists, such as Braque. So, pigeons can pick out not only individual styles, but entire schools of visual art. Watanabe thinks his pigeons make complex visual distinctions in the same way we do, using multiple cues all at once. The fact is, they distinguish painters better than many a visitor to the Louvre.113
But what about the production of visual art? Although animal art is on the market, some of it really doesn't qualify because it is randomly produced. There is, for example, the case of the orangutan at a major zoo who would search for a rock, then bang it against the glass wall of his enclosure with such superhuman force that it would shatter and he could escape. Despite the zoo's efforts to remove all rocks, h
e kept finding them, or digging them up. The wall-shattering became such a predictable event that the zoo paid for its regular purchases of expensive bulletproof glass by setting up a small business. The fractured slabs of glass were successfully sold as orangutanproduced tabletops, making, no doubt, for excellent conversation pieces.
Such unintentional animal "art" is widespread. One of the classic examples is the way the Japanese artist Hokusai won the favor of his shogun, in 1806, by unrolling a lengthy piece of paper on the ground and covering it with big blue loops. He then took a cock, its feet dripping with red paint, and made it walk across the paper. To the Japanese eye, the result looked immediately like a river with floating red maple leaves.
The animal-as-paint-tool was exploited more recently by dipping cats' paws in paint so that they put colorful marks all over the place. This led to a tongue-in-cheek photo book (perhaps to be placed on the orangutan coffee table) that included touching portraits of the artists, complete with personal traumas and van-Gogh-like transformations:
When Charlie was six months old, he was inadvertently shut inside a refrigerator for five hours. Somehow, that event seems to have been a turning point in his life-transforming him virtually overnight into a prolific painter.
As soon as Minnie left Lyon and went to live at the little vineyard in Aix-en-Provence, her paintings changed dramatically, and so did the reviews. 114
']'his book mocks the very idea of animal art by grossly overstating the case for it. It has a make-believe bibliography to show how seriously the authors studied their topic, with titles such as Paws for Thought: The Magic 0, Meaning of Litter Tray Relief Patterns and Why Dogs Don't Paint. The final chapter analyzes destruction of upholstery as a form of artistic expression.
There are, however, serious studies of intentional visual art by animals. Some of these are being conducted in the field, such as the observation of bowerbirds mentioned earlier. Others have used a rather anthropocentric approach by handing our closest relatives the tools of the painter.
Apes with an Oeuvre
First there was the ancient Roman myth of Dibutade, who did the next best thing to taking a Polaroid: before her lover left on a long journey, she recorded his face by tracing his profile on the wall. But in 1942, in a letter to Nature, Julian Huxley gave us the contemporary origins-of-art story. He had observed a gorilla at the London zoo carefully track the outline of his own shadow on the wall. The gorilla did so thrice, and Huxley recognized "a relationship to the possible origins of human graphic art."115
Nadie Kohts watches her young chimpanzee, Yoni, draw with pencil on paper, in Moscow, 1913. (Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press).
It is only logical that the quest for the origin of the artistic impulse brought us to the ape. Others had made similar observations before Huxley. In the 1920s, in Moscow, Nadie Ladygina-Kohts studied the perception of shape and color in her young chimpanzee, Yoni, and watched him enthusiastically draw with pencils on paper. Experiments on ape art were also conducted in the 1940s at the Yerkes Laboratories by Paul Schiller, who pioneered a simple test: he marked pieces of paper with lines or shapes and gave them to a chimpanzee, Alpha, to see what she would do with them. Alpha didn't simply splash paint randomly, but carefully heeded the markings, incorporating them in the end product. If Schiller put marks in three of a paper's corners, for example, Alpha would invariably scribble another mark in the fourth.' 16 Yet the full extent of ape art became known only after an artist/ethologist began to pay attention, in the 1950s.
Desmond Morris, author of the all-time popular-science best-seller The Naked Ape (1967), as well as of many other works, has been a pioneer of the burgeoning genre of literature-of which the present book is an example-that compares human and animal behavior. He has proposed many provocative ideas, for instance, that human talk serves the same function as primate grooming, and that the invention of marriage was a necessary step when our forebears began to hunt in groups because it helped regulate male competition. Perhaps because some scientists consider him a mere vulgarizer, they have elevated some of his ideas to theory without so much as a nod to the author who inspired them. Morris started his career as a serious and respected ethologist, however, training at Oxford University under Niko Tinbergen.
Morris is also a surrealist painter in a style reminiscent of Miro. Art may even be his first love, and his paintings have been featured in several illustrated hooks and at major exhibitions. It was his sensitivity to art, combined with his opportunity as a zoologist to interact with Congo, a young chimpanzee, that provided Morris with rare insights into the nature of the artistic impulse.
Congo became a regular guest on Morris's television show, Zootime, and reached fame with an exhibition of his work in 1957. His paintings were not merely a curiosity: they were widely recognized as beautiful. Congo had a refreshingly energetic style, and he seemed to strive for symmetrical coverage, rhythmical variations, and eye-catching color contrasts.
Complex fan-pattern painting by Congo, a chimpanzee widely recognized for his excellent taste in color and sense of balance. Like other painting apes, Congo showed great concentration on the job, and was visibly annoyed if anyone tried to remove his work before he was done. (Photographs by Desmond Morris, both reproduced with his kind permission).
Congo stayed within the borders of the paper, never going off the edge, and made rudimentary compositions, such as a heavy dot surrounded by bold circular strokes, or a fan-shaped widening of lines. His art was considered beyond the level of that of a young child in terms of both composition and artistic boldness. The latter may have been due to the fact that chimpanzees are physically stronger and have better motor control than young children. Their paintings immediately strike us as forceful statements, whereas a young child's art tends to look tentative and hesitant.
Picasso hung a Congo on his wall. The paintings of other apes-one of whom was named Pierre Brassou to trick art critics-have been accorded serious, sometimes glowing reviews by experts who, unlike Picasso, thought that the artists were human.
One illustration of the power of ape art is how hard it is to emulate. Thierry Lenain, a Belgian art philosopher, recounts in Monkey Painting how an Austrian painter, Arnulf Rainer, tried to copy each and every body move and brush stroke of a painting chimpanzee. In 1979, Rainer squatted next to the ape, hoping to produce works of the same clarity and intensity. The human painter, however, evidently had the preconceived notion that apes are wild creatures devoid of emotional con trol. As a result, instead of imitating the ape, Rainer acted the way he thought an ape would paint. But he had it all wrong; apes can be as concentrated and controlled as people. As Lenain's account of a filmed session shows, it was the human painter who got too wild for the ape's taste:
We see [Rainer] in the grip of a kind of trance, banging the paper, spitting on it, waving his brush nervously, throwing it down. The chimpanzee by contrast paints peacefully to start with, but is gradually influenced by the agitation of its imitator. It stops drawing, starts jumping about energetically and chases. Rainer across the room.... Painting is not a violent activity for chimpanzees. 117
If the ape's owner had not put an end to the pursuit of Rainer, the painter might have learned that an ape, even a young and relatively small one, has the muscular strength of several grown men bundled into one. Hence, an ape can charge a painting with energy and rhythm with far less effort than a person can.
In addition, ape painters don't seem to follow the rules that human artists do. Instead of worrying about the cumulative impact of an entire series of brush strokes and dabs, apes give the impression of taking a kinesthetic and visual pleasure in each separate action. We don't know the aesthetic secrets of the chimpanzee that Rainer tried to imitate, but the fact is that the human painter failed miserably in his attempt to achieve the same directness and sovereignty of expression. When Lenain examined fifteen works simultaneously produced by ape and human, he concluded that "[t]he chimpanzee's compositions are st
raightforward and clear. The imitations, on the other hand, are fuzzy, tangled webs of lines, completely illegible, almost to the point of hysteria."
The title of the English translation of Lenain's book, Monkey Painting, is unfortunate because, apart from a capuchin monkey named Pablo, all major nonhuman primate artists have been apes.118 But the hook contains an intriguing theory of primate art that is dramatically different from the ideas of Desmond Morris, who emphasized the similarities between ape and human. Lenain stresses the differences, and looks at ape art as a form of visual disruption. He believes that the painting ape disrupts the empty white space in front of him or her, testing and probing, and ultimately destroying what existed before. In contrast, Morris recognized a sense of aesthetic order and balance in the works of apes. 119
Morris's art-as-order hypothesis has major points in its favor. First of all, apes seek a balanced and orderly arrangement in their paintings. Following Schiller's lead, Morris would place a mark off center, say to the left, and give the paper to Congo. Congo would tend to balance the composition by painting on the right side of the paper. He was not simply attracted to the empty space there, because the closer Morris placed his mark to the center of the page, the closer to the center on the other side Congo painted; and the farther to the left Morris put the mark, the farther to the right Congo worked, to keep the painting balanced.
Another indication that apes do not just make disruptive marks comes from the fact that they have a sense of completion of a painting. This is in contrast to what some early observers claimed. They argued that ape paintings are actually a human product: apes happily paint away until the product starts to look like a piece of abstract art to the people around it, who then take it away from the ape and hang it in a gallery. That would mean that the art is all in the human eye, that an ape has no conception of making a finished product.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 13