Bird Song and Music
Some musicologists believe that birdsong has had a large influence on the development of music. Although the extent of this influence is impossible to gauge, it is sometimes easy to see some of the specific ways composers have integrated birdsong with music.
There seem to be three general ways musicians or composers can be affected by birdsong: they can be influenced or inspired (consciously or unconsciously) by birdsong, they can include intentional imitations of bird song in a composition, or they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works.
In his book Why Birds Sing, David Rothernberg claims that birds vocalize traditional scales used in human music, such as the pentatonic scale (e.g., Hermit Thrush) and diatonic scale (e.g., Wood Thrush), providing evidence that birdsong not only sounds like music, but is music in the human sense. This claim has been refuted by Sotorrio (Tone Spectra), who has shown that birds are not selecting scale tones from a miriad of tonal possibilities, but are filtering out and reinforcing the available set of overtones from the fundamental tones of their vocal cords. This requires "far less musical intelligence and deliberate appropriation", and in this regard, he suggests birdsong has something in common with Mongolian throat-singing and jaw-harp music. Sotorrio also claims that musicians like Rothernberg are deceived by "a perculiar form of Pareidolia" whereby complex tonal information is reduced to human scale concepts due to a "fixation on music as it is written rather than as it sounds". Rothernberg's claims were expored in the BBC documentary Why Birds Sing.
Read more about this topic: Bird Vocalization
Famous quotes containing the words bird song, bird, song and/or music:
“My faith is the grand drama of my life. I’m a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none.”
—Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
“Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”
—Bible: Hebrew Song of Solomon, 8:6.
“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)