Skeuomorph
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Came long before men gathered together to sing |
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"Some instances of 'ornithomorphism' in 18th- and 19th-century music" (2011) is an essay by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe.
Excerpt:
- "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:
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.'
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.
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
And echoing the liquid warble of birds
Came long before men gathered together to sing
Fine polished carols to delight the ear.
And the winds whisding in the hollow of reeds
Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe.
Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints
That the pipe pours fordi at the fingering-pulse ot the players
Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells.5
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.
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:
There's Madam Faustina, Catso!
And eke Madame Catsoni;
Likewise Signior Senesino,
Are tutti Abbandonni;
Ha, ha, ha, ha; Do, re, mi, fa.
Are now but Farce and Folly,
We're ravisfi'd all, with Toll, loll, loll.
And pretty! Pretty POLLY.7
'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.
See also
