You might have noticed I have become fixated on starling murmurations of late. I make no apologies, they are far too extraordinary to ignore and soon enough it will be spring and their displays will stop. However, I was beginning to think I was running out of stories to accompany my photographs, until I came across this today:

“Mozart recorded the purchase of his starling in a diary of expenses, along with a transcription of a melody whistled by the bird and a compliment (Fig. 3). … The theme whistled by the starling must have fascinated Mozart for several reasons. The tune was certainly familiar, as it closely resembles a theme that occurs in the final movement of the piano concerto in G major, K. 453. Mozart recorded the completion of this work in his catalogue on 12 April in the same year. As far as we know, just a few people had heard the concerto by 27 May, perhaps only the pupil for whom it was written, who performed it in public for the first time at a concert on 13 June. Mozart had expressed deep concern that the score of this and three other concertos might be stolen by unscrupulous copyists in Vienna. Thus, he sent the music to his father in Salzburg, emphasizing that the only way it could “fall into other hands is by that kind of cheating”. The letter to his father is dated 26 May 1784, one day before the entry in his diary about the starling.

Mozart’s relationship with the starling thus begins on a tantalizing note. How did the bird acquire Mozart’s music? Our research suggests that the melody was certainly within the bird’s capabilities, but how had it been transmitted? Given that our observation that whistled tunes are altered and incorporated into mixed themes, we assume that the melody was new to the bird because it was so close a copy of the original. Thus, we entertain the possibility that Mozart, like other animal lovers, had already visited the shop and interacted with the starling before 27 May. Mozart was known to hum and whistle a good deal. Why should he refrain in the presence of a bird that seems to elicit such behaviour so easily?

A starling in May would be either quite young, given typical spring hatching times, or at most a year old, still young enough to acquire new material but already an accomplished whistler. Because it seems unlikely to us that a very young bird could imitate a melody so precisely, we envision the older bird. The theme in question from K. 453 has often been likened to a German folk tune and may have been similar to other popular tunes already known to the starling, analogous to the highly familiar tunes our caregivers used. But to be whistled to by Mozart! Surely the bird would have adopted its listening posture, thereby rewarding the potential buyer with “silent applause.”

Given that whistles were learned quite rapidly by the starlings we studied, it is not implausible that the Vienna starling could have performed the melody shortly after hearing it for the first time. Of course, we cannot rule out a role for a shopkeeper, who could have repeated Mozart’s tune from its creator or from the starling. In any case, we imagine that Mozart returned to the shop and purchased the bird, recording the expense out of appreciation for the bird’s mimicry. Some biographers suggest an opposite course of transmission – from the starling to Mozart to the concerto – but the completion date of K. 453 on 12 April makes this an unlikely, although not impossible, sequence of events.”

Text and music score from: West, M.J. and King, A.P: ‘Mozart’s Starling’, in American Scientist Vol 78 (March-April 1990) Pp 111-112