Field Book of Wild Birds and their Music

Abstract

THIS is a very pretty little book, with many charming illustrations of American singing-birds, and numerous attempts to represent their songs in our musical notation. It would seem as if the songs of American birds lent themselves more readily than those ot our European species to such notation, for this is by no means the first attempt of this kind which has recently been made on the other side of the water. The present reviewer is under the disadvantage ol not having heard these birds in their native land, and is quite ready to believe that Mr. Mathews's musical notations may give an American some vague idea of what his birds sing; at the same time, as one whose knowledge of music is even older than his knowledge of birds, he must cmphatically express a hope that British ornithologists will not imitate their American brethren in trying to render our familiar songs on this system. Our music is a highly artificial product, subject to strict limitations which have gradually been placed upon it as the art has developed in the course of many centuries; and to attempt to catch and (so to speak) to tame the songs of wild birds, bringing them forcibly under conditions which entirely deprive them of their natural freedom in regard-to pitch, scale, time, and rhythm, is in almost all cases to do them cruel violence. A very few of our birds—the cuckoo, for example, and the song-thrush-have vocal utterances which can be expressed on our musical scale; but by far the greater number can only be represented in the amusing way in which Mr. Mathews has noted the song of the bobolink on pp. 50 and 51 by a cloudy jumble of notes and lines above the stave, which suggests a flute-player gone mad. Field Book of Wild Birds and their Music. By F. Schuyler Mathews. Pp. xxxv + 262. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.) Price 2 dollars.