Let's kick off June's theme of "Music and Art" with a couple of books looking at animals! Why not?
Mikki reviews a book which looks at the way members of a certain species (let's call them "humans") like to decorate themselves.... and everything else. Sharon reviewed a book about cats that became a musical about cats.
Mikki Rhoides read The Aesthetic Animal, by Henrik Hogh-Olesen.
This book looks at the investment of time and resources spent by humankind on aesthetic activities such as art, music, song, dance, personal adornment, and narrative fiction. It questions the biological and evolutionary function of these activities: how can a species afford focused energy on things seemingly unrelated to survival and reproduction?
Written from a scientific perspective with a lively and entertaining tone, the book synthesizes data from archeology, anthropology, biology, ethnology, and evolutionary psychology to examine the concept of ‘impulse’ as an internal behavioural incentive. If aesthetic impulse is an inherent part of human nature, it very well may have an evolutionary role as an individual fitness indicator, a unifying social group marker, or an individual status marker.
Appealing colour illustrations accompany the text which considers a wide range of aesthetic behaviours including cave art, graffiti, tattoos, piercings, design, music, song and dance. Hogh-Oleson’s approach is commonsensical yet critical and questions the placement of aesthetics…does it belong in humanities or behavioural sciences? He ultimately suggests a synthesizing model in which aesthetics can be understood from an interdisciplinary analysis.
Author I haven't read before, Non-fiction, eBook (DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190927929.001.0001)
Sharon Bryan read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Eliot.
Mikki reviews a book which looks at the way members of a certain species (let's call them "humans") like to decorate themselves.... and everything else. Sharon reviewed a book about cats that became a musical about cats.
Mikki Rhoides read The Aesthetic Animal, by Henrik Hogh-Olesen.
Written from a scientific perspective with a lively and entertaining tone, the book synthesizes data from archeology, anthropology, biology, ethnology, and evolutionary psychology to examine the concept of ‘impulse’ as an internal behavioural incentive. If aesthetic impulse is an inherent part of human nature, it very well may have an evolutionary role as an individual fitness indicator, a unifying social group marker, or an individual status marker.
Appealing colour illustrations accompany the text which considers a wide range of aesthetic behaviours including cave art, graffiti, tattoos, piercings, design, music, song and dance. Hogh-Oleson’s approach is commonsensical yet critical and questions the placement of aesthetics…does it belong in humanities or behavioural sciences? He ultimately suggests a synthesizing model in which aesthetics can be understood from an interdisciplinary analysis.
Author I haven't read before, Non-fiction, eBook (DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190927929.001.0001)
Sharon Bryan read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Eliot.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter
It isn’t just one of your holiday games
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT
NAMES
I’ll tell you who is
as mad as a hatter. Andrew Lloyd Webber, that’s who. It’s all well and good to
try to put some of your favourite poems to music. I’m sure we’ve all come up
with a tune for something that didn’t previously have a tune at some point in
our lives – especially if it already happens to rhyme and have a nice rhythm to
it. Some of my favourite poems have been put to music over the years, and the
right tune can make a poem positively sing (if you’ll pardon the pun).
But taking an entire
book of poetry about cats and turning it into a musical? That’s nuts.
Completely and utterly nuts. Granted, it was also highly successful – but still
certifiably insane.
Reading over the
original poems (which were written in the 1930s, so be warned that you’ll
stumble across some surprise casual racism), it’s easy to see that T.S. Eliot
had caught a kind of lightening in a bottle. The book is a little gem, and
reinforces my opinion that you should always take the opportunity to read poems
in their original settings, if you can. There’s something in they way they
flow together as a work that’s lost when you encounter the poems separately in
an anthology.
Good luck trying to
read them without humming Lloyd Webber’s tunes in your head, though.
Fiction, 820 ELI(T) 1C OLD (video recording of the musical held at 782.14 LLO, sound recording at 782.14 LLO CD3 in the CDs collection)
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