Twinkle, Twinkle, Vogel Staar On Mozart's Feathered Collaborator By Elena Passarello (/people/elena-passarello) ISSUE: Summer 2016 (/issues/92/3/summer-2016) / Illustration by Claire Scully 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 line you’ve sent out—the dotted pops of “Papagena, Papageno” or the crystalline shards of the Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica. Though a caged starling is chatty during the day and downright garrulous at night, 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 hear a “little star” immediately in return. You’ll have to come back whistling for a day or a week, 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: a theme from the “Haffner” Symphony punctuated with guttural warbles, or the famous Adagio from his Clarinet Concerto mixed into an uncanny interpretation 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: TWINK-LE—bizeeet!—TWINK—“hi! how are you!”—[doorbell]—chackerchackerchackerchacker—LIT-TLE—bweet! bweet! Purrrup!—LIT-TLE—[clanging smoke alarm]—LIT—“hi! how are you”—TLE, TWIN- KLE, LIT-TLE—[that Bee Gee screech]—STAAAAAAR! This will then be repeated with the maddening obsessiveness of an electronica concert. / 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. All these tribes are sonic. The male starling sings his long coupling song to his mate while she pecks for food. A young starling sends mad chatter to her close-by kin to feel where the safe world starts and stops. A wizened starling finds his place in the mob by singing long runs of mashed-up noise that prove his vast experience. This sonic sense of the tribal might explain why, when we see a trilling cloud 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 twenty-eight-year- old Mozart, jaunty in his garnet coat and gold-rimmed cap, strolled into a shop to whistle at a starling in a cage? That bird must have zeroed in on Mozart’s mouth, drinking-in the whistled seventeen-note opening phrase from his recent piano concerto: Mozart’s melody riffs in G on a simple line heard in many a volkslied, 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 imprint it. No matter how the starling learned 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 un-slurred 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 first warbly G. In the next bar, it lengthened Mozart’s staccato attack and replaced his effete grace notes with two pairs of bold crotchets. And 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. Those bird-born G-sharps take the steady folk tune into a more harmonically complex place, ignoring the fermata-ed natural G that / comes just two notes earlier and pushing toward the next note in the phrase—an A— creating a lifted E-major chord. 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: And under the last measure, an acclamation—“Das war schön!” (“That was wonderful!”)—scribbled in the maestro’s quick hand. There is no other live-animal purchase in Mozart’s expense book, and no more handwritten melodies; no additional transactions were 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 steal random phrases of English. So this note of sale is special among the extant scraps from his life. The purchase of this bird, Mozart’s “Vogel Staar,” marks a critical point for the classical period. At the end the of eighteenth century, tunes were never more sparkling or more kept, their composers obsessive over the rhetoric of sonata form: first establishing a theme, then creating tension through a new theme and key, then stretching it into a dizzying search for resolution, and finally finding the resolve in a rollicking coda. The formal understanding of this four-part structure 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 Johannes 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. His beloved Piano Concerto in D minor begins not with a sturdy melody, but an anti-tune of the same repeated notes bouncing about the orchestra. Songs from his early operas confounded audiences with their false endings. He reveled in keys like G minor, with its air of turmoil and instability. / 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. He 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-sharps must have felt more than “wonderful” to the maestro. 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 was game recognizing game! What a priceless moment: one of the greatest thinkers in history bonding with a bird brain. We still know very little about the starling brain, really. Our science is only just catching up to the species’ complex body and behavior, some 225 years after Mozart’s death. Among our recent discoveries is a sturdy musical form inside one type of starling song. Though the structure allows enough variation for one starling to sound nothing like the next bird over, all courting males organize their love songs in a four- part sequence of Whistle, Warble, Click, and Screech. Each bird begins with a set of repeated whistles—a kind of reedy introduction. Next, as the feathers at his throat seethe and puff, he weaves a run of maddening musical snippets—as few as ten or as many as thirty-five—curated into descending tones. Some of these snippets are filched from nearby species (or lawn equipment, or cellular phones). It’s here, in this second movement, that the “Twin-kle Twin-kle” meets the chackerchackerchacker, the smoke alarm, and the Bee Gees. Without stopping, he then slams into the third section, that of the percussive click solo. Syncopated and note-less rattles shoot from his beak at presto speed, as many as fifteen clicks per second. And then he ends with a fortissimo finale of loud, exclamatory shrieks, enough to wake the neighbors. It can take him a full minute to sing through all four movements, and then the starling is silent for a moment.