Chapter 1 - Forest: On Surrounds

Summary

Yet this idea of “nature” or the “animated world” producing lovely sounds understood by humans as “music” is anything but self-evident. Like Gardiner, we might understand it readily today, but this idea is the fruit both of a long history and of a particular moment in time – a long history of conceptualizing animal and elemental sounds (no matter how pleasant) metaphorically (and metaphorically only) as music, and a particular, very recent, moment of human composers, musicians, and scientists treating birdsongs and other natural sounds as music, even working with them compositionally, rather than representing or suggesting them through human musical means, or treating them as a source of inspiration or an object of intervention for humans.