Notes to Hartshorne's Born to Sing - Preface, Ornitomuzikológia

Preface

Primary aim: advance what Szőke called biomusicology (Ornitomuzikológia): study of music in singing animals generally (not just man). Hartshorne admits "the deficiency I feel most painfully is in music." (p. xii)

Complements Thorpe (1961, experimental) and Armstrong (1963, fieldwork literature), adding a global perspective:

  • Both are Britain-based; Hartshorne observed across the U.S., Australia, Japan, India, Nepal, and many other countries.
  • Recording access: Cornell Lab, Echo, commercial records, and his own (inadequate equipment). (p. xii)

Global coverage for two reasons:

  • Scientific: Darwin and Wallace discovered natural selection by studying tropical species, not just British ones. Each continent has distinctive features. (p. xii-xiii)
  • Recreational: global travel era; Fiji example: arid landing zone has little song, wetter forest has "an utterly exquisite song, like a simplified Hermit Thrush" within minutes. People are taught to open their eyes but close their ears. (p. xiii)

Territorial function:

  • Popularized by Ardrey and Huxley.
  • "Territory" alone cannot explain the range of bird music, nor how the bird experiences its song: "birds are not ornithologists, and what singing is for them, in their scarcely imaginable naivete, has yet to be dealt with." (p. xii)

Guiding ideas of Hartshorne's studies in this book (three roots, p. xiii-xiv):

  • Explore further two possibilities for evolutionary theory concerning the musical sensibility and capability characterizing man
    • it is entirely unique to human life; or, there are precedents or analogies in the older forms of animal life
    • Natural phenomena fall into certain regularities. At least statistical regularities, there is chance and disorder as well. He believes that the recognition of randomness by physicists is reasonable and that the limitations to causal order are greater than quantum physics allows.
  • Seek the general order of nonhuman singing, guess and then test additional general truths about animal music, especially bird song.
  • Personal fascination: enjoys the songs of birds, frogs, insects, the concrete details.

Aesthetic analogy question: "Do birds express an aesthetic sense in their songs? Or, has the analogy between bird music and human music any biological significance?" He draws on philosophical/psychological aesthetics and facts of bird life. (p. xiii)

Forerunners regarding biomusicology aesthetics:

Scope (p. xiv-xv):

  • Songbirds = Oscines/Passeres: not all sing, but all have well-developed syrinxes; majority of singing species.
  • Non-Songbird species largely ignored except Ch 7 D-E and 11 (exceptions: lyrebirds).
  • Glossary and Abbreviations in Ch 9A.

Evolutionary theory (p. xiv-xv):

  • Offers no opinions on technical issues.
  • Holds a religious view of nature but calls neo-Darwinism "one of the greatest achievements of human intelligence"; attacking it is a poor way to recommend religion.
  • Cosmic order is assumed by science but not explained by it; best understood in religious terms. But what order obtains is a scientific question. He deals only with aspects bearing on facts of animal music.

Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), observing and reading about singing birds for over fifty years (longer than philosophy). (p. xiii-xiv)

The first philosopher since Aristotle expert in both metaphysics and ornithology (Dombrowski 2024).

Fieldwork (p. xiv):

  • Core: eastern, southern, far western US (~40 states, incl. Hawaii)
  • Australia
  • Japan, India, Nepal
  • Also: England, Europe, Middle & South America, Jamaica, Uganda, Kenya, New Zealand, Fiji, Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, Taiwan
  • Biggest gap: Siberia and mainland China

Bibliography for naming birds (p. xiv):

Themes:

  • Philosophy:
    • Chap 1, The Aesthetic Analogy as Scientific Hypothesis
    • Chap 12, Some Conclusions and Unsolved Problems
  • Speculative:
    • Chap 6, Measuring Song
    • Chap 8, Song-Development and Amount of Singing
  • Ornithology:
    • Chap 7, Monotony-Threshold and the Correlation of Continuity with Immediate Variety
    • Chap 9, The Well-Equipped Singers (Oscines)
    • Chap 10, Highly Developed or "Superior" Songs
    • Chap 11, The Less Well-Equipped Singers