Skeuomorph
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| - | Came long before men gathered together to sing<br> | ||
| - | Fine polished carols to delight the ear.<br> | ||
| - | And the winds whistling in the hollow of reeds<br> | ||
| - | Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe.<br> | ||
| - | Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints<br> | ||
| - | That the pipe pours forth at the fingering-pulse of the players<br> | ||
| - | Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells. --''[[On the Nature of Things]]'' | ||
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| - | "[[Some instances of 'ornithomorphism' in 18th- and 19th-century music]]" (2011) is an essay by [[Rodney Stenning Edgecombe]]. | ||
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| - | :"These 'chant melodies are melismatically embellished and frequently amplified by ''kratemata'' (independent melodic units made up of ''[[teretismata]]''), resulting in a rhapsodic assemblage of melodic fragments linked sequentially' — which brings us." | ||
| - | ==Notes== | ||
| - | Cites [[Richard Wyatt Hutchinson]]'s book ''[[Prehistoric Crete]]'' (1962) and its comments on prehistoric art as abstract art: | ||
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| - | IN [[Prehistoric Crete|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.' | ||
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| - | 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 call]]s that anticipated human singing and then suffused both its own history and that of its instrumental derivatives. | ||
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| - | There have been many extravagant [[aetiologies]] of music, amongst them Ovid 's, based on erotic myth ('The god was enchanted by this new device and by the sweetness of the music. "You and I shall always talk together so!" he cried; then he took reeds of unequal length, and fastened them together with wax'2), and, at the other extreme, this Judeo-Christian fiction: 'Angels [...] were instruments of divine revelation, and they transmitted to the first inhabitants of earth the means through which they could sing God 's praises.'3 The theory adduced by Lucretius is refreshingly empirical by contrast and, for that reason, doesn't deserve an out-and-out rejection, belong though it might in the realm of what Kant called '[[conjectural history]]':4 | ||
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| - | And echoing the liquid warble of birds | ||
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| - | Came long before men gathered together to sing | ||
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| - | Fine polished carols to delight the ear. | ||
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| - | And the winds whisding in the hollow of reeds | ||
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| - | Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe. | ||
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| - | Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints | ||
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| - | That the pipe pours fordi at the fingering-pulse ot the players | ||
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| - | Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells.5 | ||
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| - | Lucretius doesn't claim that birdsong issued in any crudely reflective mimesis, but rather that the sound of wind in hollow reeds inspired a mechanism for making music. He also opens up a gap ? centuries long perhaps - between the 'liquid warble' and the human music that it prompted, for by characterising die subsequent carols as 'polished' ? 'levia' in the original Latin ? he indicates that while birds supplied a paradigm, their 'imitators' produced an art more complex and finely wrought, recreating the former's effortlessness in a context of regulation. | ||
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| - | In distinguishing between a sylvan original and an implicitly 'urbane' copy ? the Latin for 'city' is 'urbs' ? Lucretius set up an antithesis which crops up as late as Milton's 'L'allegro'. The 'native Wood-notes wild'6 there attributed to Shakespeare derive from the same opposition of 'selvatichezza', the etymon of which lies in 'silva' (the Latin for 'a wood') and 'civilt?', which springs from 'civis' (a citizen). Milton regards birds as rhapsodic composers in a 'savage' space, disregarding the rules that, in time, would create the gulf between 'scientific' and popular music. Henry Carey, antiHandelian, assumed just such a contrast when he set the nonce-'scatting' of English folksong ('Toll, loll, loll') against tonic sol-fa: | ||
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| - | There's Madam Faustina, Catso! | ||
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| - | And eke Madame Catsoni; | ||
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| - | Likewise Signior Senesino, | ||
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| - | Are tutti Abbandonni; | ||
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| - | Ha, ha, ha, ha; Do, re, mi, fa. | ||
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| - | Are now but Farce and Folly, | ||
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| - | We're ravisfi'd all, with Toll, loll, loll. | ||
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| - | And pretty! Pretty POLLY.7 | ||
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| - | 'Toll, loll, loll' represents a lack of regulation and restraint, and goes back at least as far as the (somewhat metallic!) birdsong vocalise in As you like it: 'When birds do sing, hey ding a ding a ding' (5. | ||
| + | A '''skeuomorph''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|s|k|juː|ə|ˌ|m|ɔːr|f|,_|ˈ|s|k|juː|oʊ|-}}){{refn|{{OxfordDictionaries.com|accessdate=2016-01-22|Skeuomorph}}}}{{refn|{{Dictionary.com|accessdate=2016-01-22|Skeuomorph}}}} is a derivative object that retains ornamental [[design]] cues (attributes) from structures that are inherent to the original. Examples include [[pottery]] embellished with imitation [[rivet]]s reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the [[Visual appearance|appearance]] of binding on a paper desk calendar. | ||
| - | ==See also== | + | == See also == |
| - | [[Ornithomorphism]] | + | * [[Trompe-l'œil]], 2D artwork using realistic optical illusions to simulate three dimensions |
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Revision as of 19:29, 23 December 2018
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A skeuomorph (Template:IPAc-en)Template:RefnTemplate:Refn is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that are inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
See also
- Trompe-l'œil, 2D artwork using realistic optical illusions to simulate three dimensions
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Skeuomorph" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
