From Sacred Heart College's 1951 yearbook.

From West Virginia Wesleyan's 1912 yearbook.

From The Cat's Whiskers (1923).

"Those Was the Days."  From Toike Oike, 1989.

Perhaps this puts a lump in your throat, too.  Usually, one finds musical birds on the lines of a music staff, as if they're perching on telephone wires.  But here's what happened to the birds.  From Lenoir-Rhyne's 1915 yearbook.

From Monmouth's 1910 yearbook.

It's common to see birds perching upon wires like notes on sheet music, but this is our first encounter with birds perching upon an edge of sheet music.  From Winthrop's 1899 yearbook.

"Let the lower lights be burning!  Send a gleam."  From Fort Wayne's 1932 yearbook.

"The Black Cat," rendered into English.  From Wide Awake, 1884.

From Concordia's 1921 yearbook.

You've heard of "sight reading" music, but here's "Braille reading."  From Fliegende Blätter, 1926.

From Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1898.

This is our sheet music and recording of "Clockwork Punctuation: [Andy Warhol's] a, A Novel as Beat Poetry," in answer to a call by Derek Beaulieu (Poet Laureate of Calgary and Banff) to set to music his erasure of Warhol's 1968 novel, in which Beaulieu leaves only the punctuation.  We fed the punctuation from page 2 into our one-of-a-kind, persnickety clockwork contraption, assigning the exclamation points to the voice of the cuckoo clock bird and other symbols to different chimes and mechanisms.  (Before the invention of MIDI, programmed music required meticulously timed Grandfather clocks, and every performance ticked at 60 bpm.  In the tradition of the original "old school," this clockwork recording features vintage timepieces.)  Here's a link to the mp3: