I found this article in the NYT today about a man, David Rothenberg, who plays music with the birds.  He is a clarinetist and he goes out in the field, plays and the birds, he says, sing with him.  He has even made a CD of his playing with the birds.  What is interesting here is that his musical interactions with birds push against the received scientific wisdom:

I’d always been told they had their set song and they just sang it. But with him, I played some notes and he’d join in. If my note changed, his did, too. Wow! I was jamming with a laughing thrush!

     Now, I am not going to get into a fight with the biologists who might take exception to Rothenberg’s claims.  But it does remind me of two passages from Chuang Tzu.  The first has to do with Chuang Tzu’s general skepticism about our ability to stand apart from nature and take it apart analytically:

People think we’re different from baby birds cheeping, but are we saying any more than they are? (21)

    I think Chuang Tzu would agree with Rothenberg that we can learn something from directly experiencing the music of birds, and that we should be more humble about our abstract, theoretical interpretations of nature.

     The other quote has more to do with music in general.  Rothenberg says:

I believe there is music in nature. Song and melody may very well have evolved before words and language.

    Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy.  I don’t know if he works with the Chinese classics, but his statement has very much of a Chuang Tzu ring to it, as suggested by this excerpt from the Inner Chapters:

"This mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and that breath is called wind," [said] Adept Piebald.  "Everything is fine so long as as it’s still.  But when it blows, the ten thousand holes cry and moan.  Haven’t you heard them wailing on and on?  In the awesome beauty of mountain forests, it’s all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they’re full of wailing hollows and holes – like noses, like mouths, likes ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers…" (17)

    The passage continues and ends with one of my favorite lines:

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone – who could make such music? (18)