From Ants to Zebra Finches. Music with Animals and Animal Sounds since the 1950s

• Applicant: Susanne Heiter
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457789113

Starting from a collection of approx. 150 compositions, improvisations, sound installations, happenings, and performances, this theses investigates music with animals and animal sounds since the 1950s from both analytical and historical perspectives. It is evident that these pieces revolve around two central themes: First, the concept of music is constantly challenged when even animal sounds are termed as such – explicitly or by framing them with human sound worlds, compositions or performance practices. Secondly, the mental capacities necessary to create music are called into question, and whether or not animals do possess some of these capacities.However, neither is the concept of music universal nor can the musical capacities of animals be entirely investigated. Both fields contain a certain degree of fuzziness, opening up a room for speculation which is the common frame for musical works with animals and animal sounds. This constellation offers the possibility for artists to pose hypotheses that can neither be proved nor rejected. Instead, productive discussions are initiated.The first part of this theses investigates approx. thirty works analytically and shows the conditions necessary to work with living animals, recorded animal sounds, or instrumentally or vocally imitated animal sounds. Thus, it is possible to extract the prevailing concepts of „music“ and „animal“ in each piece of music.The second part of this theses aims at the historical and sociological contextualization of the same pieces. Here, a significant change can be detected in the importance of the two questions described above, which is shown in three historical periods: First, the focus is on the 1950s and 60s, when concepts of music were widely challenged within the avant-garde scene. Whether or not certain sounds, electronics for example, could be called „music“ was openly debated and animal sounds were one of several sources for new compositional material. Secondly, the role of musical works with animals within the social change initiated in the 1960s is discussed. A special focus is directed on the environmental movement that influenced the general perception of animals and animal sounds. Since the millennium, contemporary musicians are much more interested in animals as individuals, whose musical capacities can be practically investigated or demonstrated by art works.Animal sounds – like any sound of the environment – are generally accepted as compositional material today and the question is now, whether or not the sounds and songs produced by certain animal species could be called music and art in itself. Thus, a question re-emerges that has been debated in various contexts throughout the 20th century. These developments in the history of sciences are reconstructed, in order to interpret the new musical works with animals as contributions to an interdisciplinary discourse at the interface of ornithology, bioacoustics, musicology and musical composition/performance.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants