ABSTRACT

Going from the world of animals to the world of music looks like a large and sudden leap. But perhaps it isn’t that huge. The twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen remarked that, for him, ‘the only real music’ was ‘in the sounds of nature’, especially in the singing of birds (in Griffiths 2012: Ch. 10). That may be an eccentric view, but we could agree that ‘the great animal orchestra of nature’, as one musicologist calls it, is the origin of the music that human beings have come to create and enjoy (Krause 2012). Whether or not, at the end of the day, birdsong is labelled ‘music’ is less important than the fact that it is hard to hear it as being other than musical or music-like. What the blackbird on my roof emits has a rhythm, melody and tone that only someone deficient in musical sense could fail to hear.