Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 211, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1911 — Bird Music?. Bah! [ARTICLE]

Bird Music?. Bah!

Lying on the soft grass before his tent, a camper sipped a tin cup of coffee and listened to the birds. “You’d think from all this pure melody,” he-said, “that birds were musical —that, like the New York critics, they loved the best and only the best. But, as a matter of fact, they have a degraded taste. The thrush and the lark are as wrong in their musical ideas as Puccini and Leoncavalla are said to be. “I have tested the thrush. I have set him to learning the notes of the nightingale. But he doesn’t care for the nightingale’s divine music. He will have none of it. The sparrow’s ugly twitter, on the other hand, he masters with delight. “The finch and-the mockingbird are the same. They won’t learn fine music, the music of. Beethoven or Chopin or Wagner, but they take to rag-time and jigs like a pig to hog-wash. “Hark to that burst of melody from the plfie copse! You’d think the singers Inspired. But if thrush or lark or mockingbird went to New York, the critics would say their music was as rotten as that of Thais of Tosca.