Landscape and Ecology

Abstract

Images of landscape lie at the heart of nineteenth-century musical thought. From frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for immersion, gothic horror, and the Romantic sublime. As Raymond Williams observed, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed an unforeseen transformation of artistic responses to landscape, which paralleled the social and cultural transformation of the country and the city under processes of intense industrialization and economic development. This chapter attends to several musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian “Pastoral” to Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy.