Mozart was walking past a bird seller when he heard a starling singing a line from the Concerto No. 17 in G that he had recently composed. Delighted, he took the bird home where it became an intimate part of his family.
This vignette is the beginning of Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Intrigued by the story, Haupt used it as a starting point to explore starlings, Mozart, 18th century Vienna, music theory, physics, and even linguistics. Whew! Although the book is meticulously researched and full of information, it is not scholarly in tone, but an enjoyable, easy read.
The song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.
To educate herself, Haupt procured and kept a pet starling which flew free in her home. She united this new firsthand knowledge with research to create stories of possibilities. About Mozart’s mysterious piece, A Musical Joke, she has an idea. The Magic Flute? Another theory. She riffs on the nature of time. Does it pass differently for short lived animals who have a faster heart rate? For the musically trained, there is a chapter comparing music’s structural technicalities with bird vocalizations. But mostly, this is a charming upbeat story comparing her life with starling Carmen, to Mozart’s life with starling Star.
I especially liked Haupt’s openness to wondering about the unity of nature, and her thoughts on creativity:
Mozart’s truest elegy to… the commonest of birds who could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we inhabit; …
To say that another culture sees the world differently is to state the obvious. To take a reader by the hand and little by little make her enter that culture, immerse her in it, so that she looks at the world with its eyes is a whole other thing. This is what Paula Gunn Allen accomplished in Pocahontas.
The world of the Native Americans of 16th century Virginia was ruled by the manito aki, the spiritual underpinning of the world we think of as real. Pocahontas, its priestess, represents that world. This fascinating book is a well-researched nonfiction study of a culture that knew its time was at an end. It is also a story of birth as the Indian holy woman and her European wizard alchemist husband (John Rolfe) are brought together by the manito aki to bring forth the new world order that we live in.
This formidable book requires at least a little openness to alternate realities. An interest in the history of Jamestown and the infighting of English religious factions is not enough to get a person through this tome as the emphasis is on an alternate way of seeing. At the beginning of the book, my American 21st century world view made some of this a little hard to swallow; at the end? Well…I will think about it.
Allen’s sometimes droll tone and abundance of interesting facts make this scholarly book fun (albeit in small doses). She instructs us in the similarity of the English view of witches, magic, and fairies to the Native view of the gods and shows us that the Indians changed the English as well as the other way round. We learn that John Rolfe was shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda and this was the basis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The story that Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life because she was in love with him was just the English version, reflective of the times. (There are two Johns – Smith and Rolfe.)
Paula Gunn Allen was a professor of English and American Indian studies at UCLA. She received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Oregon and PhD from University of New Mexico. Born of mixed race/cultures, she identified with her mother’s people, the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. She wrote fiction, poetry, essays and books that centered on the roles of women in Native American cultures.
As I read her book, I pictured her as a young very au-courant woman, so was very surprised when I learned that she died in 2008 at the age of 68.
Last time, I wrote about learning the new word arborglyph and immediately seeing it in a second place (Pocahontas). The word has appeared again. In Boise, touring the Basque Museum, we saw a large display about arborglyphs. Sheepherders carved names, dates, hometowns, and pictures in the soft skinned aspens. As the carvings hardened into permanent scars, these men left records of their lives.
Later, having dinner at Wallowa Lake Lodge, we were pleasantly surprised to be entertained by a decades old musician playing the piano, and impressed that much of the time, she played without music. Show tunes, Debussy, the Beatles, ragtime – she was terrific. Gail Swart, of Music with Gail, definitely qualifies as the “More” part in Old Ladies Read and More. Our waiter told us that she had been his music teacher in kindergarten.
My sister reader who is part of our threesome book group had a special birthday this year. Happy 90th Pam.
This could be the first time Mozart and Pocohontas have shared a stage! It makes me want to read both books, with special attention to alternative realities ((^\*))
And congrats to your 90 year old book buddy; reading has obviously kept her young!
I am. Always impressed by you attention to the details that capture the books you review so well. Congratulations on another winner episode
Thank you again, Diane, for your inspiring book reviews. Like Susan, I’m inspired to want to read two of the books, and I actually hope our book club can do that. Mozart meets Pocahontas.