Animals, Music, Mimesis.

The relationship between music and animal noises like meow, quack, oink, roar, woof, buzz, neigh, and moo is, I think, profounder than first appears. Jotting down a number of composers inspired by birdsong alone, the list just goes on: Beethoven, Berlioz, Rossini, Prokoviev, Saint-Saens, Mahler, Messiaen… They couldn’t get enough of the stuff, particularly Olivier Messiaen. He didn’t just borrow birdsong for Catalogue d’Oiseaux or Oiseaux Exotique; he transcribed their calls into precise musical notation for the ornithological record, like a maniac. For all his precision though, and for as often as birds are quoted or mimicked in the canon, the birdsong isn’t so much serving as found or readymade melody. In terms of “melody” as a meaningful sequence of pitched notes or abstract musical “values,” to use Pierre Schaeffer’s words, birdsong is basically just random sound-vomit — or more accurately, repeated random sound-vomit (which in the end, does make a huge difference). The draw of birdsong derives instead from powers more musically primal or elemental, more “proto-musical,” than either just melody or the reproduction of any animal’s signature sound-vomit.

Here’s what I mean. Listen to the birds in beloved compositions like Saints-Saens’ The Carnival of Animals, Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, or Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf. The musical figuration in these compositions is more an analogy or isomorphism of movements than it is sounds. Saint-Saen’s Le Cygne depicts a swan gliding upon water, not a squawk. Rossini’s magpie is kind of screwing around, hopping; not necessarily singing. And we recognize Prokoviev’s bird as a bird both because of the bird-like instrumentation (a flute) and because Prokoviev’s bird-melody flitters, seemingly around shoulder height. These birds are recognized more by a mimesis in what I’d call the “principle of action” than they are the “principle of voice.” This bias gets even more pronounced in the soundtracks of cartoons, like those composed for Looney Tunes by Carl Stalling. Bugs and Daffy can already talk and sing for themselves; they don’t need that to be re-articulated through an orchestra. This frees up foley and instrumentation for the mimesis of both movement and mood. Michel Chion informs us that, in the industry, this figuration of movement is called “mickeymousing.” It consists of “following the visual action in synchrony with musical trajectories (rising, falling, zigzagging) and instrumental punctuations of action (blows, falls, doors closing),” (Audio-Vision, 121) and Chion links this to the studies of Francois Delalande and Bernadette Celeste on the children’s vocal foley that accompanies the action of their toys:

“Such representation is not so much in line with a strategy of literal reproduction, as in terms of a ‘mechanical and even mainly kinematic (movement-oriented) symbolism.’ The point is not to imitate the noise produced by the thing, but to evoke the thing’s movement by means of isomorphism, that is, by ‘a similarity of movement between the sound and the movement it represents.’” (121)

But whether music draws from animal life for its “principle of voice” or its “principle of action” — and it does plenty of both — those principles are not structured as they normally are in our music, as respectively, melody and traditional metered rhythm. Rather than scales or measures, the proto-musicality of animal life appears in a wide variety of highly plastic shapes, in the whistle of birds, the gallop of horses, the prowl of wolves, the brays of elephants, or the flight of the bumblebee. These animal sound-shapes fit nowhere in the pages of Rameau’s Treaty of Harmony, but for all that, seem no less intuitively recognized as music. Which compels us to wonder why (well, it may be obvious to you, but since I write for self-clarification, you’ll have to bear with me). What are we — we intuitive music-recognizers — picking up here? What is it about animal sounds (and even animal movements and moods) that makes them register more easily or immediately as musical in comparison to other sounds?

I have some leads. Sound itself is already inherently more kinetic than other senses. It is by necessity created by physical movement — or at least it was until the invention of electronic synthesis. “Die Welt klingt,” and against this moving background of the sonic, the musical has to distinguish itself with an even greater liveliness, complexity, willfulness, and autonomy. If sound is always kinetic, at least intuitively, then we might say that music tends to be intuitively animate. Which explains the animals. At least somewhat. Their wild, willed sounds and movements supply this animation, even in the absence of the larger language-like structures that organize most conventional music. They effortlessly achieve the musical while flaunting every one of its written rules. Little wonder composers envy them.

I’m not crazy about the term “animate,” or its root “anima” — too fuzzy, vitalist, spiritual, or something — but suffice it to say that we begin to distinguish music from sound where we detect the first croak or twitch of the for-itself, even if in the least living of things. That is, music, in so far as it is recognized or cognized as music, immediately oversteps the distinction between subject and object. Music is never, in either a philosophical or everyday sense, a mere object or thing, nor even a mere “musical object” in Pierre Schaeffer’s sense. Music epitomizes what Adorno says of all artworks, that they are “things that tend to slough off their reity,” their thinginess. It’s difficult for us to imagine a musical still life, for example. Schaeffer himself proclaims something similar about sound in general: “Every sound is born, lives, and dies.” Here, Schaeffer’s actually making a point about envelopes, but it means more than it means, and this surplus meaning impinges somewhat on Schaeffer’s own project of “reduced listening” — to listening freed from concern with either the sound’s meaning on the one side or its production on the other. This may work well and fine for his “objets sonores,” sound objects of this-or-that morphology, but it turns cold if brought to bear on the musicality of these sounds, which is inherently understood through tensions with and between production and meaning (that being said, I’m definitely not closed off to the possibilities of “cold music.”)

Musical mimesis isn’t a mimesis of any directly empirical quality or form discernible to the ear alone, but equally of some power, meaning and purposiveness understood through a longer, lived experience of the greater world. So that however “reduced” or “disinterested” our listening becomes, the “musical object” cannot fully shed this power, meaning, and purposiveness and still be readily recognized or cognized as music. It thrives on them, even. This is why it’s almost a matter of indifference whether the musical mimesis of animals is of their actual noises, their movements, or their mood; its mimesis isn’t reducible to the manifold of the five senses, even while projected through or upon it. It is “trans-sensorial” (Chion’s term), but as in running perpendicular to the senses, not just across them. Or put more simply: music is never just “about sound,” in the sense of what is given to the ear.