Hollis Taylor | |
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| Born | United States |
| Alma mater | Washington University in St. Louis, University of Western Sydney |
| Occupation(s) | Zoomusicologist, musician, composer |
| Employer | Macquarie University |
| Known for | Arguing that birdsong is music |
| Notable work | Absolute Bird , Is Birdsong Music? |
| Partner | Jon Rose |
Hollis Taylor is an American-born Australian zoomusicologist and composer and a violinist and fiddler. She has argued that birdsong should be approached as music.
Taylor was born in the United States. [1] She graduated from West Linn High School in West Linn, Oregon. [2] She graduated from Webster University in St. Louis with a bachelor's degree in violin performance. [2] In 2009 she received a PhD from the University of Western Sydney School of Communication Arts with a concentration in musicology, ornithology, and composition. [1] [2]
Taylor played with the Oregon Symphony while still a teenager. [3] [4] She was the 1982 Oregon Old Time Fiddle Champion. [5] During the 1980s and 1990s she headed the Hollis Taylor Band, an acoustic country trio, and was a member of other groups. [5] [6] [7] She became concertmaster at Wolf Trap. [4]
Since 2005, Taylor has recorded the song of the pied butcherbird, an Australian songbird known for its unusually complex and beautiful singing, and used it to compose Absolute Bird: Concerto for Recorder and Orchestra, which was performed in 2017 by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. [8] [9] She co-composed with Jon Rose Bitter Springs Creek 2014, which featured butcherbird songs she recorded in the MacDonnell Ranges in 2014 [10]
In 2017, she produced a double album, Absolute Bird, which featured birdsong, cane toad, and other field recordings. [11] [12]
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Taylor "established that not only is it possible to identify individual birds by their calls but that those calls evolve over time." [10] She has argued that birdsong is music; traditional musicology excludes anything not created by humans. [12] Taylor argues that the song of the pied butcherbird, in addition to being a form of communication, has an aesthetic character, with technique and inventiveness similar to human compositions, and that along with behavioral evidence supports the conclusion that birds have an aesthetic sensibility which may be analogous to that of humans. [12] [13]
In 2019, Taylor was appointed an Australia Research Council Future Fellow at Macquarie University. [2]
Taylor has lived in Sydney since 2002. [1] She has both US and Australian citizenship. [2] Her partner is Jon Rose. [15] [16]
A songbird is a bird belonging to the suborder Passeri of the perching birds (Passeriformes). Another name that is sometimes seen as the scientific or vernacular name is Oscines, from Latin oscen, "songbird". The Passeriformes contains 5,000 or so species found all over the world, in which the vocal organ typically is developed in such a way as to produce a diverse and elaborate bird song.
The Australian magpie is a black and white passerine bird native to Australia and southern New Guinea, and introduced to New Zealand. Although once considered to be three separate species, it is now considered to be one, with nine recognised subspecies. A member of the Artamidae, the Australian magpie is placed in its own genus Gymnorhina and is most closely related to the black butcherbird. It is not closely related to the European magpie, which is a corvid.
Currawongs are three species of medium-sized passerine birds belonging to the genus Strepera in the family Artamidae native to Australia. These are the grey currawong, pied currawong, and black currawong. The common name comes from the call of the familiar pied currawong of eastern Australia and is onomatopoeic. They were formerly known as crow-shrikes or bell-magpies. Despite their resemblance to crows and ravens, they are only distantly related to the corvidae, instead belonging to an Afro-Asian radiation of birds of superfamily Malaconotoidea.
The pied currawong is a black passerine bird native to eastern Australia and Lord Howe Island. One of three currawong species in the genus Strepera, it is closely related to the butcherbirds and Australian magpie of the family Artamidae. Six subspecies are recognised. It is a robust crowlike bird averaging around 48 cm (19 in) in length, black or sooty grey-black in plumage with white undertail and wing patches, yellow irises, and a heavy bill. The male and female are similar in appearance. Known for its melodious calls, the species' name currawong is believed to be of indigenous origin.
Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs are distinguished by function from calls.
Absolute music is music that is not explicitly "about" anything; in contrast to program music, it is non-representational. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Zoomusicology is the study of the musical aspects of sound and communication as produced and perceived by animals. It is a field of musicology and zoology, and is a type of zoosemiotics. Zoomusicology as a field dates to François-Bernard Mâche's 1983 book Music, Myth, and Nature, or the Dolphins of Arion, and has been developed more recently by scholars such as Dario Martinelli, David Rothenberg, Hollis Taylor, David Teie, and Emily Doolittle.
Mark O'Connor is an American fiddle player and composer whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical. A three-time Grammy Award winner, he has won six Country Music Association Musician Of The Year awards and, was a member of three influential musical ensembles; the David Grisman Quintet, The Dregs, and Strength in Numbers.
The pied butcherbird is a songbird native to Australia. Described by John Gould in 1837, it is a black and white bird 28 to 32 cm long with a long hooked bill. Its head and throat are black, making a distinctive hood; the mantle and much of the tail and wings are also black. The neck, underparts and outer wing feathers are white. The juvenile and immature birds are predominantly brown and white. As they mature their brown feathers are replaced by black feathers. There are two recognised subspecies of pied butcherbird.
The grey butcherbird is a widely distributed species endemic to Australia. It occurs in a range of different habitats including arid, semi-arid and temperate zones. It is found across southern Australia, but is absent from the deserts of central Australia and the monsoon tropics of northern Australia. It has a characteristic rollicking birdsong. It appears to be adapting well to city living, and can be encountered in the suburbs of many Australian cities including Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The grey butcherbird preys on small vertebrates including other birds.
Alasdair Fraser is a Scottish fiddler, composer, performer, and recording artist.
Jonathan Anthony Rose is an Australian violinist, cellist, composer, and multimedia artist. Rose's work is centered in the experimental music known as free improvisation, where he has created large environmental multimedia works, built experimental musical instruments, and improvised violin concertos with accompanying orchestra. He has been described by Tony Mitchell as "undoubtedly the most exploratory, imaginative and iconoclastic violin player who has lived in Australia".
April Verch is a Canadian fiddler, singer, and step dancer raised in the community of Rankin, Ontario, located approximately 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) southwest from Pembroke, Ontario. The youngest daughter of Ralph and Muriel Verch, April began step dancing at age three with her first step dance teachers, Buster and Pauline Brown, and began learning fiddle at age six from Pembroke fiddler Rob Dagenais, shortly after receiving her first violin as a birthday present. Throughout her childhood, April played both old time fiddle and classical violin, having competed and having won awards at fiddle contests inside and outside Ontario, as well as regularly performing with the Deep River Symphony Orchestra over that period. She also competed and won numerous awards for her step dancing in that time frame as well.
The black-backed butcherbird is a species of bird in the family Artamidae. It is found in southern New Guinea and Cape York Peninsula.
Hanneke Jewel Cassel is an American folk violinist. She was raised in Oregon and graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance at Berklee College of Music in 2000. Hanneke is the 1997 United States National Scottish Fiddle Champion, and she has performed and taught across the United States, Scotland, Sweden, China, New Zealand, France, England, and Australia.
Artamidae is a family of passerine birds found in Australia, the Indo-Pacific region, and Southern Asia. It includes 24 extant species in six genera and three subfamilies: Peltopsinae, Artaminae and Cracticinae. Artamids used to be monotypic, containing only the woodswallows, but it was expanded to include the family Cracticidae in 1994. Some authors, however, still treat the two as separate families. Some species in this family are known for their beautiful song. Their feeding habits vary from nectar sucking (woodswallows) to predation on small birds.
Kurrartapu johnnguyeni is an extinct species of bird in the Australian magpie and butcherbird family. It was described from Early Miocene material found at Riversleigh in north-western Queensland, Australia. It is the first Tertiary record of a cracticid from Australia. The size of the fossil material indicates that it was similar in size to the living black butcherbird. The generic name is a Kalkatungu language term for the Australian magpie. The specific epithet honours John Nguyen, the father of the senior describer.
Birdsong has played a role in Western classical music since at least the 14th century, when composers such as Jean Vaillant quoted birdsong in some of their compositions. Among the birds whose song is most often used in music are the nightingale and the cuckoo.
Rachel Baiman is an American singer-songwriter and fiddler based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Laura Weber White, also known as Laura White, Laura Weber, Laura Cash, and Laura Weber Cash is an American country fiddler, singer, songwriter, and guitar player. White has worked as a session musician on many albums and toured with several artists, including the late Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. She has released two solo albums: Among My Souvenirs in 2003 and Awake But Dreaming in 2010. Both were recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio. White became known as a fine stage fiddler after winning both state and National Fiddler contests in Oregon and Idaho. She is an artist on 16 Cash family albums from 2003 to 2014.
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