Musical Vitalities

Does it make sense to refer to bird song-a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate-as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest?Redefining music as the art of possibly animate things, Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.