A music professor I had in grad school once remarked that chickadees know music theory because their songs sound like ‘re-do’ and therefore imply an authentic cadence.
For those not familiar with Western tonal music theory, the point was that the song of the chickadee has a sense of completion and resolution, as opposed to being incomplete and unresolved. Those two pitches back-to-back (re-do, or supertonic and tonic, or if you’ve got an instrument near you, any note followed by a note exactly one whole step lower) are, perhaps, one of the most fundamental melodic sequences in Western tonal music.
I’ve never liked this idea, the one about black-capped chickadees that is. It isn’t the projection of human culture onto the chickadee that I am against, but that specific interpretation of its song, and what it assumes.
There are other interpretations of those pitches. The pitches are, roughly, a whole step apart from each other. And while re-do fits the bill, so does literally every other combination of pitches (mi-do, la-sol, sol-fa, etc.) as long as the beginning pitch and ending pitch are two semitones apart. Personally, I hear the chickadee song, depending on my mood, as alternatively mi-re (scale degree 3-2), or la-sol (scale degree 6-5). Both of those do not imply authentic cadences, but instead suggest what is called a half cadence, generally interpreted as unresolved and incomplete, creating a sense of expectation rather than finality.
If you hear the two pitches as ‘re-do’ that says less about the chickadees than it does about you. Why might you hear it that way and not a different, equally valid, way?
We, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.
Thoreau, Journal, 20 March 1858
And this is why, I’ve realized, after listening to chickadee songs and mimicking them back for years, I take issue with this interpretation: it assumes there is only one chickadee singing. A chickadee in isolation doesn’t make much sense to me. There is no such thing as a chickadee, rather, there are chickadees-in-relation, chickadees as part of a system of relations. Personally, I’ve very rarely witnessed or heard only one chickadee. And this fact changes, or should change, how you hear their song.
If there is only one chickadee singing it would make some sense to interpret their song as being final and complete—the only thing being said, the only song being sung. But more often than not, I hear chickadees singing to and responding to each other. It’s not a solo, it’s a duet. Instead of being final and complete, the first strain is often left open, incomplete and expectant.
What I commonly hear is closer to mi-re; re-do. I’ve even heard the pitches change, perhaps in response to some chickadee grief I don’t know, to a minor mode, with the first interval a semitone or half step: me-re; re-do. But the important part is, even when, uncommonly, I do hear only one chickadee, my interpretation of what they’re singing is guided by their reality of their relationality all other times. A lone chickadee singing isn’t singing a complete melody but is calling out for another to respond and finish the tune.