OK, so maybe something a little bit lighter and--
not intensely lighter, but a little bit lighter,
and at least musical.
This is the essay that Caleb talked about a little bit
in his fine introduction.
I wish there was more flavor filling in it.
But maybe we could maybe we can listen
to some more of the essay and put this postulate
to the test-- was this starling really
the Flavor Flav of one of the greatest composers
in the Western canon, right?
OK, so this sort of recorded moment in animal history
is one of my favorite ones that I encountered.
We don't know very much about Mozart, believe it or not.
We kind of think we do because of that movie with F. Murray
Abraham in it.
And it turns out a lot of the stuff that they believed--
that Peter Shaffer who wrote the play
about that believed-- about the character of Mozart
was actually incorrect.
But some things do sort of seem to be
a part of what we understand about him-- that he
was kind of very light-hearted, very interested
in pranksterism.
He loved a good butt joke.
He really did.
So he has a song called "Leck mich im Arsch,"
or "Lick Me in My Butt," that he composed at the same time
that he composed Don Giovanni.
[LAUGHTER] It's true.
And while he composed this-- which by the way,
the song, which Insane Clown Posse covered a little while
ago-- if you can't sleep tonight, well,
don't watch that because you'll never sleep again, but anyway--
but while he was writing such ditties as "Lick Me in My Butt"
or whatever, he had a pet starling.
And we know it because he wrote in his expense book,
the day that he bought it, that he bought a starling.
And then he drew this little line of music
under the note of purchase.
And most people think it's because he whistled something
in the pet store, or whatever the store was
in Vienna, to the starling and the starling whistled it back.
Which is for me, you know, like, we
don't have to do anything else.
Like, I think we're done.
That and the Voyager Space probe are
kind of the two greatest things that we've ever done as humans.
I mean I guess it's pretty cool that planes can stay up,
but you know.
So I won't read the whole essay because I think I've
taken up all this time anyway.
But I will read maybe the first like seven minutes of it, OK?
Whistle a little Mozart to a starling in a cage.
If it knows humans as creatures that sing and are sung to,
the bird will shut its beak.
It will arch its starling neck, bending
toward your puckered lips.
It might bob its dark head back and forth at the Mozart line
you've sent out-- the dotted pops of "Papageno, Papagena"
or the crystalline shards of the Rondo for Glass Harmonica.
And though a caged starling is chatty during the day
and downright garrulous at night,
at the moment it locks in on your Mozartean whistle
the little bird will only blink, aiming its entire soundless
self toward the music coming from you.
Note how it nods along with your tuneful body
as if to say, "Yes, yes, I have it."
But a starling is no parrot.
Do not expect that when you whistle
"Twinkle, twinkle" you'll immediately
hear a "little star" in return.
You're going to have to come back whistling for a day or 12,
confirming the sound's place in the world
where the bird perches.
And when it does spit back whatever Mozart you've fed it,
it will be on a starling's zany terms--
the theme from the "Haffner" Symphony
punctuated with guttural warbles, or the famous Adagio
from his Clarinet Concerto mixed into an uncanny impression
of your dishwasher.
The "Queen of the Night" aria sung in a screech worthy
of a Bee Gee.
A few days after that, your line of Mozart
will come from the birdcage as a barely recognizable string
of filched sounds, all sung together
in a line so arrhythmic it's catchy.
You'll hear Mozart, your own voice, the white noise
of the house you live in, plus the recesses
of starling instinct.
It goes a little something like this--
"TWINKLE-- bizeet!
TWINKLE-- hi, how are you?--
Doorbell-- --KL-- chackerchackerchackerchacker--
LITTLE bweet!
Bweet!
Purrup!-- LITTLE-- clanging smoke alarm--
LIT-- hi!
How are you?
--TLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE-- that Bee Gee screech again--
STAR!
This will then be repeated with a maddening obsessiveness
of an EDM concert.
And we're not sure why starlings engage in such behavior,
but we think it's because this breed is hardwired
to sing to its tribes.
There are many in a starling's life--
the little tribe of the monogamous pair,
that of the clutch family, the flock in the field,
the mob coming home from the neighboring fields
to roost together overnight.
And all these tribes are sonic.
This sonic sense of the tribal might explain why,
when we see a trilling mob of 10,000 starlings--
each bird watching its seven closest neighbors
for the slightest change of speed or angle,
dodging hawks en masse with shrieks and chips,
beak beats and hard whistles-- we find ourselves calling that
group not a flock or a swarm or a drove,
but a collective noun that's drenched in sound--
a murmuration.
So what kind of murmur began that spring day in Vienna
when a 28-year-old Mozart, jaunty and his garnet coat
and gold-rimmed cap, strolled into a shop
to whistle at a starling in a cage?
We know that bird must have zeroed in on Mozart's mouth,
as the man whistled the 17 note opening
phrase from his recent piano concerto--
And I have to pause here.
Alison made me eat chocolate cake which
is terrible for your whistler, so I'm just
going to have to sing.
I don't think my whistler is in good shape right now.
It's totally not the salty Margarita that I drank.
So here's the bird zeroing in on Mozart's mouth
as the man whistled the 17 note open opening
phrase from his recent piano concerto--
[VOCALIZING]
Mozart's melody riffs in G on a simple line heard
in many a Volkslieder, so the starling
might have been hearing similar tunes from other shoppers
that whole month.
Or perhaps Mozart himself had been in a few times
and had whistled his line enough for the bird to learn it.
But no matter how the starling got the song, on May 27, 1784,
it spat that tune right back at the tunesmith--
but not without taking some liberties first.
The little songbird unslurred the quarter notes and added
a dramatic fermata at the end of the first full measure;
we can only guess how long it held that warbly G.
At the next bar, it lengthened Mozart's staccato attack
and replaced his effete grace notes with two
pairs of bold crotchets.
And then the starling had the audacity
to sharp the two Gs of the second measure, when
any Viennese composer worth his wig would keep them natural
and in line with the key.
And those bird-born G-sharps take the steady folk tune
into a much more harmonically complex place,
ignoring the fermata-ed natural G of the earlier measure
and pushing the next note in the phrase-- an A--
which builds a lifted E-major chord.
And Mozart apparently loved this edit,
because he bought that bird on sight.
For good measure, he drew a little treble staff
in his expense book and scored the starling's tweaks
under the note of purchase--
Vogel Staar 34 kreutzer--
[VOCALIZING]
And under the last measure, an acclamation,
scribbled in the maestro's quick hand--
Das war schön!
There is no other live-animal purchase in Mozart's expense
book, and no more handwritten melodies;
there are no other additional transactions praised
as "schön!"
This is one of the very few things we even know
about his purchasing habits.
He'd only begun tracking his spending that year,
and by late summer, Mozart had abandoned the practice
and only used that notebook to magpie
random phrases of English.
So this note of purchase is special among the extant scraps
from his life.
He also bought the bird at a critical point
for the classical period.
At the end of the 18th century, tunes
were never more sparkling or more kept,
their composer's obsessive over the rhetoric of sonata form--
a four-part structure that permeated
classical symphony, sonata, and concerto.
By 1784, sonata form had imprinted itself
on the listening culture enough to feel like instinct;
Vienna audiences could rest comfortably
in the run of classical forms as familiar-- and thus
enjoyable-- narratives.
And nobody played this cagey game more giddily than Mozart.
Of all the things Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart brought to human sound, the most important
might be his sense of surprise.
His compositions, while almost always law-abiding,
are full of trickery-- leading tones that drop away
from roots, accidentals that jar the listening
mind from its diverted stupor, minuets
too syncopated to dance to.
And these caprices, though stuck inside the pinfold
of common practice, are what made him a star.
As the old German saying goes, the music of Bach
gave us God's word, Beethoven gave us God's fire,
but Mozart gave God's laughter to the world.
Mozart found the accidents in song that reminded music
to glorify the playful, the mischievous,
the "pop" that sends Jack exploding from the box
after so much measured cranking.
So the starling's playful G-sharp--
it must have felt more than "schön" to the maestro,
and worth more to him than 34 damn kreutzer.
I mean, think of it--
he'd whistled a tune steeped in Vienna's golden algebra
to a thing with feathers, and then
the animal bobbed its little head and whistled back to him
a glorious, deviant, Mozartean wink.
This wasn't just "schön."
This was game recognizing game.
It's difficult to imagine a more priceless moment--
one of the greatest thinkers in history bonding
with a bird brain.
And I'll stop there for that one.
[APPLAUSE]
Where do you think [? time ?] is?
Do you think we have time for one more?