Green Dog: Misunderstood

Music is a concept that everyone in the western world comes across with. Whether this is on the radio, in the background of a television show, at a party, or during personal time, music is inescapable. Despite its omnipresence in our lives, there is debate as to what music is. This is fine and completely normal, for music is completely reliant on human perception. Ergo, the answer this the titled question is that music is whatever one perceives it to be. This may be a difficult concept to grasp at first glance, or possibly grossly simple. This is not to say that all sounds are music. There has to be a human hand organizing that sound in order for it to be eligible for consideration in the first place. Once that organization has happened,
There is a piece I’ve performed called Green Dog by Herbert Kingsley. This piece, at first glance, seems to be a silly and bizarre piece, starting with the lyrics, “if my dog were green,” and ending with, “no matter what you’ve heard the facts are consistently absurd, for my dog isn’t green… I haven’t any dog.” One could interpret this piece as a mad woman’s rambling about her love of the color green. Alternatively, this piece could be seen as satirical commentary about the culture of the 1920’s (the era when the song was written) and how fake and posh everyone wanted to seem, with their enormous feathers and monotoned outfits. Either way, the song remains music with an emotion attached. The only difference in these interpretations is the experience with the
This may sound harsh, but this answer is much more straightforward than it appears. Belinda has observed that the sounds have musical qualities. This observation is well and good, as all music is sound. All sound, however, is not music, and while they may have certain musical qualities- rhythm, pitch, timbre, etc- they lack an important quality, and that is organization. It is unlikely that the construction workers got together at any point and orchestrated the timing of their movements to fit this requirement. The sounds of a construction site are, at best, randomly