Music and Nature

Gustav Mahler Research Centre Study Group

The historical-cultural topos of nature has long been of central importance in the history of Western music, particularly as it relates to the categories of genre, poetics, and musical style. From vocal and dramatic to instrumental music, references to nature have long been pursued consciously and programmatically, while in other cases they may be implicit and therefore revealed only through careful analysis. This dimension has received increasing attention in musicological scholarship in the context of the recent eco-critical turn in the humanities. From this perspective, it is necessary to move beyond the descriptive and the analytical in order to embrace a more transdisciplinary framework, one that will allow us to identify the cultural paradigms from which given composers have been inspired, or to consider ‘environmental’ relation between human beings and nature.

This study group hopes to contribute to this inquiry by serving as a meeting point for scholars and graduate students across the globe who are conducting research on the theme of music and nature, both in the field of musicology and beyond. Given the scope of this theme, the activities of the group will initially be focused on the period of music history from the end of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century and in a way that implies the revisitation of established critical and historiographic categories. During this period a crucial moment was doubtless Mahler’s complex engagement with the legacy of musical Romanticism, both as it relates to the concept of Naturlaut and in terms of the numerous references to the idea of landscape in his symphonies. During the twentieth century, this theme assumes increasing importance within the breaking of tonal norms through a 'spatializing' conception of musical material.

Among the perspectives from which this theme will be considered include:

• Historical Musicology

• Musical Analysis

• Cultural Geography

• Literary Theory

• Acoustics and Sound Studies

• Music and Visual Culture

• Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism

In July 2023, the group organized the international conference Nature in Musical Modernism Since Mahler (Dobbiaco/Toblach), featuring contributions from leading scholars and addressing the relationship between musical modernism and environmental thought (see: https://mahler-centre.net/events/int-conf-nature). The conference resulted in the open-access edited volume Nature in Musical Modernism Since Mahler, edited by Angelo Pinto and Thomas Peattie and published by Innsbruck University Press (2025) (see: https://www.uibk.ac.at/iup/buecher/9783991061694.html).

The study group has developed and continues to pursue the following outputs:

• consolidation of thematic research strands within the group’s broader area
• publication of collective volumes (including Nature in Musical Modernism Since Mahler, Innsbruck University Press, 2025)
• meetings and conferences (including events in Dobbiaco/Toblach within the Settimane Musicali Gustav Mahler / Gustav Mahler Musikwochen)

Founder and chair: Angelo Pinto, Gustav Mahler Research Centre (Austria-Italy)

Members:

Thomas Peattie (deputy chair), University of Mississippi (USA)

Daniel Grimley, University of Oxford (UK)

Sherry Lee, University of Toronto (Canada)

Rachel Mundy, Rutgers University, Newark (USA)

Kirsten Paige, North Carolina State University (USA)

Carlo Serra, Università della Calabria and Torino (Italy)

Paolo Somigli, Libera Università di Bolzano (Italy)

Marcus Zagorski, Università Comenius, Bratislava (Slovakia)