Mozart’s Starling: A Story of Art, Language, and the Human Relationship with the Natural World

The story sounds apocryphal, but it’s actually true. In the spring of 1784, Mozart found a starling in a Viennese shop mimicking the motif from one of his own concertos, and he took the bird home as a pet. How did it come to pass that the sublime classical composer found inspiration in one of the world’s most ecologically despised species? The answer leads to a beautiful tangle of music theory, linguistics, the nature of creative inspiration, and the human relationship with the wild earth.