Conference Agenda

The eighteenth century witnessed a burgeoning interest in popular writing about local avian populations. This was a departure from earlier treatises, such as Giovanni Pietro Olina’s Uccelliera, overo, Discorso della natura e proprietà di diversi uccille (Rome 1622), which focused primarily on songbirds kept and bred in captivity (this volume in particular is celebrated for containing the first published illustration of a canary). In other words, early ornithology was closely bound up with colonial travel and the import of birds extracted in the course of these travels. During the eighteenth century, however, guides to local birds became more commonplace. Cornelis Nozeman’s sumptuous five-volume Nederlandsche Vogelen (1770), is famous as the first comprehensive guide to birds in the Netherlands while Johann Matthäus Bechstein, Gemeinnützige Naturgeschichte Deutschlands nach allen drey Reichen (1789-1795) turned to the birds of Thuringia. Notably, Olina’s 1622 treatise had included recipes for feeding nightingales; later treatises began to include information on catching birds, which went hand in hand with descriptions of different birds’ songs as well as the appropriate call or lure for catching birds. Sometimes these lures were to be improvised on the spot (using, for example, a leaf); other times, the lures were petite sound making devices. This paper places these calls and lures in the broader contexts of bird-focused toys and devices and Enlightenment-era fowling, seeking to elucidate the ecological consequences of associating birds with a world of juvenile playing.

A focus on birds invites us to reconsider the eighteenth-century French harpsichord as a technology of synthesis. This perspective reveals the instrument as a site of entanglement that unsettles the distinction between musical tool and natural resource. While French soundboards displayed images of the exotic parrots and macaws circulating within colonial networks, the instrument’s voice depended on the local extraction of crow and raven feathers fashioned into plectra. At the same time, the harpsichord’s repertoire obsessively encoded indigenous birds—nightingales, cuckoos, hens—through musical imitation. My paper intervenes in the discourse on the material foundations of sound production by shifting focus from global supply chains to the quill’s stubborn locality (Gribensky et al. 2025). Building on Kyle Devine’s imperative to scrutinize sound’s substrates, I resist his call for a musical “deflation”—downplaying music’s exceptional status—arguing instead that avian materiality cannot be reduced to the logic of interchangeable commodities (Devine 2015, 2019). Instead, I frame the act of cutting the feather as a medial operation—a cultural technique (Siegert 2015) that formats animal matter into either inscription (the writing quill) or actuation (the sounding plectrum). I argue that the eighteenth-century French harpsichord constitutes a recursive avian media ecology in which the bird is simultaneously material, medium, and message. The instrument stages a paradox of simulation: it uses the severed body of the bird to produce a rationalized imitation of birdsong that cannot resemble the living voice. In avian pièces by Couperin, Rameau, and Daquin, imitation unfolds through contour and rhythm rather than timbre. Trills and mordents function as mechanical prostheses, rapidly restriking the quill to simulate vocal sustain. What emerges is not the bird’s voice but a cipher—an encoded abstraction generated through discrete, decaying attacks. Juxtaposing workshop manuals, writing treatises, and organological sources (Paillasson, Baurenfeind, Adlung) with pedagogical and aesthetic texts (Saint-Lambert, Couperin, Rousseau), I show how the same anatomical object is disciplined to store symbolic code and to release kinetic energy. Rather than dematerializing music, the French harpsichord intensifies material recursion: the bird is cut, coded, sounded, and reassembled within a recursive loop.

The seventh movement of Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, op. 82 (“Vogel als Prophet,” or “Bird as Prophet”), raises a question rarely broached: who is the listener? More precisely, who does Schumann imagine is hearing bird song as a prophetic utterance? The composer’s inclusion of an oracular bird in his forest scenery suggests that for nineteenth-century listeners, birds and bird song were more than just visual and aural signatures of the countryside. My paper seeks to expand the semiotic potential of Romanticism’s musical birds by determining which species of ornithomancy—defined by Carl Ferdinand Leischner as “Wahrsagung aus dem Gesang und Flug der Vögel” (prophecy from the song and flight of birds) in his 1831 book Die Zauberkunst aller Zeiten und Nationen (Magical Practices of All Times and Nations)—could have been known to Schumann, his literate peers, and later composers such as Gustav Mahler. While the notion of birds as bearers of spiritual meaning would have been familiar primarily from the Bible, I weigh additional possibilities drawn from a wide range of wisdom traditions, including Greek oracles, Roman augury, medieval Norse poetry, Islamic mysticism, and everyday divination practices. Building on classic religious studies (Corbin 1954, Eliade 1978-85), ancient and medieval authors such as Cicero and Avicenna, and more recent research on folk magic in Central Europe (Doering-Manteuffel 2004, Bever 2008), I argue that musical bird calls memorialize ways of listening that treat nonhuman beings and phenomena as vital participants in the circulation of practical and mystical knowledge, an epistemological attitude opposed to the separation of subject and object favored by both Enlightenment thinking and nineteenth-century science. I close with an exercise in the “divinatory criticism” of Friedrich Schlegel (1798) by placing the broader legacy of ornithomancy in dialogue with the oracular birds of Gustav Mahler’s First and Third symphonies—music that, as Theodor Adorno once wrote (1960), keeps faith with the human yearning for something “in the sky” to become real. I show how listening to Mahler’s music points toward a “wild hearing” of worldly sounds that refuses the choice between superstition and disenchantment.