What is music for? Is it the same in a Haydn symphony, the jazz fusion of Jaco Pastorius, a raga by Ravi Shankar, and an improvised song of grief in Papua New Guinea? This extremely concise book offers an opinionated and example-filled survey of some fundamental and longstanding debates about the nature of music. The central arguments and ideas are presented with the goal of making them as accessible as possible to general readers who have no background...

"Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the role that art and culture play in nature and the evolutionary process. Taking his inspiration from Charles Darwin's observation that birds have a natural aesthetic sense, Rothenberg dives into the mysteries of why we create art, and why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty.Sexual selection may explain why animals desire, but it says very little about what...

The Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Sedona red rocks have long filled humans with wonder about nature. Nowhere else in the world is the link between earth and sky so powerful. Lago witnesses a solar eclipse over the Grand Canyon, climbs primeval volcanoes, and sees the universe in tree rings. Through ageless Native American ceremonies, modern telescopes, and even dreams of flying saucers, Lago, who is not only a poet but a true philosopher of science,...

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of...