Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century. (Diverse Topics).

Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century. By Wilfrid Mellers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. [ix, 211 p. ISBN 0-252-02529-6. $29.95.]

During the last decade, musicologists have found a growing interest in ecology applied to music. The term "musical ecology" is used in several different ways: (a) in cultural or sociological studies on music and musical life (e.g., Thomas Cushman, Notes from Underground [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995]); (b) in anthropological studies on musical aesthetics (e.g., Wolfgang Kluxen, Natur und Musik: Eine anthropologische Marginalie zur asthetischen Okologie [Bonn: Bouvier, 1998]); (c) in acoustics (e.g., Klaus Leidecker, "Akustische Okologie als musikpadagogisches Konzept," in Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Axel Beer et al. [Tutzing: Schneider, 1997], 749-53); (d) in ethnomusicological studies (e.g., Thomas James Solomon, Mountains of Song: Musical Construction of Ecology, Place, and Identity in the Bolivian Andes [Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1997); and (e) in studies on music cognition (e.g., Mauri Kaipainen, Dynamics of Musical Knowledge Ecology : Knowing-What and Knowing-How in the World of Sounds [Helsinki; Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura, 1994]). Wilfrid Mellers's most recent book claims to fit several of those categories in that it "concentrates on the theme of wilderness not only in sociological and psychological terms but also in an ecological, and even geographical, sense" (p. vii). The book cover even promises that "Mellers offers a set of diverse reflections on how Western art music illuminates the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world." I will come back later to the point of how Mellers's book illuminates this shifting and how it relates to established directions in research on musical ecology.

Initially based on several revised chapters of Mellers's 1967 book Caliban Reborn: Renewal in Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Harper & Row, 1967; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), Singing in the Wilderness is organized in five parts. Part one discusses examples of late-romantic and early-twentieth-century music and how they relate to nature. Compositions discussed in this part are, among others, Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet, Claude Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, and Leos Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. Part two focuses on compositions by Charles Koechlin that were based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and works by Darius Milhaud, who was influenced by the culture and nature of Brazil. Part three is on the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chavez, a combination that indeed "explicitly reveals the connection between the jungle within the mind and the asphalt jungle" (p. viii) of big cities. The c onfrontation of nature with human-made products continues in part four, which concentrates on music of Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varese, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Peter Sculthorpe, and how their lives and compositions reflect the increasingly ecological focus of artistic expressions. Part five "concerns the sundering of the barriers between civilization and wilderness" (p. viii) by Duke Ellington and George ...