> Jerry:
> Birds don't make music -- they use sound for function.
to wh. me:
> Music has no function?
to wh. D. Fenton:
Logical misdirection.
Sounds can have function without being music.
Yes, and?...
Animals don't make music, though they do make sounds.
Leaving aside the by no means trivial observation that, um, people are animals, and make music; whether other critters can be said to make music depends a lot on how music is defined. I'm not at all sure that wolves don't howl at the moon for the same reasons (both psychologically and socially) that people make music. I don't claim that they do, mind, simply that the situation is non-obvious.
>Bird song is not produced for joy but for vigilance.
You are making the common error of confusing the function of a behavior with the subjective experience of the one behaving. . . .
Birds don't make or appreciate music.
So you say.
. . . If you accept that birdsong is a conscious act, then birds do it because they enjoy doing so. . . .
Ah, so you have the brain of a bird, and that's how you know this?
Sigh. Every conscious thing we do, every single one, is done either because we enjoy it or because we are constrained by circumstance so to do. The same can be said of any conscious behavior by any being--that's what consciousness *is*. If a bird is conscious when it sings, then it is excercising its will to do so: that is, it *prefers* singing, at that time and place, to not singing. If you want to argue that birdsong is unconscious, fine, but I posited otherwise in the statement to which you have taken exception.
Remarkable what you've accomplished in life with such a small amount of gray matter, then.
There you go again (see our other exchange). What incisive debating skills.
. . . This has the *effect* of attracting a mate or warning off rivals or alarming the flock or alerting them to a food supply (far more than mere vigilance, NB), but the bird does not consciously sing *for those purposes.* . . .
Nor does the bird sing for esthetic purposes (i.e., music).
You keep asserting this, and it may be true. Or not. Partly depends, once again, on definitions, this time of "esthetic."
It's like the difference between prose and poetry.
Huh?
If the pentatonic scale were important in the way that the biological determinists seem to want it to be, then why would any culture create music that is nothing but pentatonic?
Watch out, it's another straw man!
To those who assert that music is a purely cultural phenomenon, I would point out that this idea has been put to the test, quite rigorously, by John Cage, who insisted that any sounds or combination of sounds could be construed as music if one merely had the will to do so, and spent 40 years of his life composing music on precisely that principle. Was this music as successful (moving, exciting, attractive) as other musics? Could other music, composed on the same principle, be more successful?
No, and no.
You have scientific proof that Cage was wrong?
Ipse dixit.
I actually don't think much of Cage's work as music per se, but he had a lot of good ideas.
Yes he did. I believe his ultimate reputation will be rather like that of Rousseau.
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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