Some instances of 'ornithomorphism' in 18th- and 19th-century music
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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And echoing the liquid warble of birds |
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"Some instances of 'ornithomorphism' in 18th- and 19th-century music" (2011) is an essay on the etiology of music by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe. It was orignally published in The Musical Times, vol.152 no.1915 (Summer 2011), pp.71–94.
Edgecombe cites Richard Wyatt Hutchinson's book Prehistoric Crete (1962) and its comments on prehistoric art as abstract art:
- "IN his book on ancient Crete, RW Hutchinson observes that neolithic art was 'non-representational and severely abstract in the main. If men, animals, birds, fishes, or flowers were represented at all they quickly became patterns. Features that originally had a structural use on vases were also turned into patterns, which are termed by the archaeologist "skeuomorphic" designs, because they had derived their morphe or shape from the skeuos or household article on which they had originally performed a practical function.'"
Edgecombe sets out to find a similar phenomenon in music:
- "In this essay I shall focus on similarly vestigial patterns (some of them conscious, some of them probably not) in the heritage of western music, patterns that originate not in stitches and rivets, as in the case of neolithic pottery, but rather in the bird calls that anticipated human singing and then suffused both its own history and that of its instrumental derivatives."
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