astronomy

Hollis Taylor

Hollis Taylor is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hollis Taylor rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Hollis Taylor belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hollis Taylor to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hollis Taylor from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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. In 2025 Taylor and her partner, Jon Rose, were recipients of the Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music.

Early life and education Taylor was born in the United States. She graduated from West Linn High School in West Linn, Oregon. She graduated from Webster University in St. Louis with a bachelor's degree in violin performance. In 2009 she received a PhD from the University of Western Sydney School of Communication Arts with a concentration in musicology, ornithology, and composition.

Work

Composition and performance Taylor played with the Oregon Symphony while still a teenager. She was the 1982 Oregon Old Time Fiddle Champion. During the 1980s and 1990s she headed the Hollis Taylor Band, an acoustic country trio, and was a member of other groups. She became concertmaster at Wolf Trap.

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. She co-composed with Jon Rose Bitter Springs Creek 2014, which featured butcherbird songs she recorded in the MacDonnell Ranges in 2014 In 2017, she produced a double album, Absolute Bird, which featured birdsong, cane toad, and other field recordings.

Academic research 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." She has argued that birdsong is music; traditional musicology excludes anything not created by humans. 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. In 2019, Taylor was appointed an Australia Research Council Future Fellow at Macquarie University.

Books Is Birdsong Music? (2017). Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-02666-8

Recognition In 2025 Taylor and her partner, Jon Rose, were awarded the Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music by the Australasian Performing Arts Association and the Australian Music Centre.

Personal life Taylor has lived in Sydney since 2002. She has both US and Australian citizenship. Her partner is Jon Rose.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hollis Taylor

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hollis Taylor claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hollis Taylor before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hollis Taylor ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hollis Taylor

In research: Hollis Taylor appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hollis Taylor in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hollis Taylor is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century American musicologists, 20th-century Australian musicologists, 21st-century American composers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hollis Taylor outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hollis Taylor in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hollis Taylor means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hollis Taylor out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hollis Taylor in simple terms?

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.

Why does Hollis Taylor matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hollis Taylor?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hollis Taylor.