IN RELATION TO MUSIC, the formal
vocabulary that landscape architecture shares with architecture
is less important than the stuff of landscapes: landscapes'
interacting biotic and abiotic elements. In landscapes, sounds
of the ebb and flow of other life, of ecosystem processes, and
of a wide-range of human activities are often inescapable.
Landscapes are spatially and sonically more porous than
buildings; they are pervasive and ubiquitous.
To consider landscape architecture and
music, it is necessary first to consider landscapes and music.
To consider landscapes is to consider changing content more
than frozen form, and any insight into the landscapes found in
music is likely tied to music's historical origins in nature,
that is in the stuff of landscapes. If the places where early
humans dwelled can be considered landscapes, then we can say
the natural elements and nonhuman creatures that belonged to
those landscapes and made sound provided both materials for
musical instruments and examples of sounds other than the human
voice.
However, landscapes exist as ideas and
experiences as well as physical spaces. They exist as settings,
theaters, and images, incorporating literary, dramatic, and
political factors. Landscapes exist as products of human
societies and cultures -- as unfolding spaces known through
travel and motion, as static and shifting images, and as
expressions of idealized ecosystems with portents of
habitability or inhabitability. Any landscape architecture
project might highlight one or more such experiences.
Earlier versions of the word landscape
appear in Old English, perhaps as early as the sixth century,
referring to human-constructed spaces of or on the land.
However, our contemporary use and understanding seem to date to
the late sixteenth century, when Dutch artists called their
paintings of inland and rural scenes landschaps. This
adaptation coincided with landscapes' increasing visibility in
Western Europe. They appeared as backgrounds in paintings and
masques and were described and portrayed in the proliferating
literature that accompanied new interests in geography and
travel. In Italy, the garden began to emerge as an art
form. By the eighteenth century, the word
"landscape" was applied to physical landscapes in
addition to their painted representations. While this usage
marked landscapes' renewed association with physical spaces, it
still emphasized their connection to visual experience and
representation. Alexander Pope, after all, asserted that
"all gardening is landscape painting," while also
advising us to "Consult the Genius of the Place in
all." In England, landscape gardening became, like
the other arts, a subject significant unto itself, subject to
abstraction, criticism, and cross-referencing in the other
arts. Landscapes became subjects for composers and philosophers
as well as painters and designers.
Visual experience and visual
representations continue to strongly influence conceptions of
landscape and landscape architecture practice today. And,
indeed, many of the most obvious examples of landscapes in
music are somehow
visual. Today's range of perspectives on
and understandings of "land- scape" means that the
Old English sense is
In what follows, I begin to explore
the implications that these overlapping conceptions have for
music and landscape architecture. These implications involve
literature, painting, dance, theater, and film, as well as
design. I end by presenting a few of my own compositions
informed by music and landscape architecture, compositions of
landscape and sound whose content can be controlled only
partially and whose musicians include nonhuman creatures.
