UI Press | Wilfrid Mellers | Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century

Singing in the Wilderness

Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century

From the author of Music in a New Found Land, a set of diverse reflections on how western art music illuminates the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world.

Displaying the broad erudition and intellectual agility that have informed a lifetime of scholarship, Wilfrid Mellers offers a set of diverse reflections on how western art music illuminates the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world.

Beginning with two turn-of-the-century operas--Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande -- that present humankind as lost in a tangled wood that is at once internal and external, Mellers develops the theme of wilderness in sociological, psychological, ecological, and even geological terms. He discusses Leoš Janá ek's Cunning Little Vixen ("the ultimate ecological opera") as a parable of redemption and explores the delicate yet dangerous equilibrium between civilization and the dark forest in works by Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud. Elements of wilderness and the city combine to infuse the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chávez with a blend of primitivism and sophistication, while a creative tension between desert landscape and industrial mechanization inspires the works of Carl Ruggles, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Australia's Peter Sculthorpe. The volume culminates in a discussion of two American urban folk musicians, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.

By suggesting how the "musicking" of ecological issues articulates twinned perspectives on music and our place in the world, Mellers raises intriguing questions about the links among tradition, talent, learning, and instinct. Brimming over with fresh ideas and unexpected cross-pollinations, Singing in the Wilderness is a stimulating addition to the oeuvre of a distinguished and inventive scholar.

"[Demonstrates Mellers'] capacious knowledge of musical sound, the urge to connect it with other social and artistic phenomena, and a striking use of evocative language. . . . [Mellers is] a storyteller concocting a plausible tale in which issues of political power, cultural agency and specific facts about melody, harmony and rhythm are interwoven and dropped into the reader's lap. . . . How gratifying it is that Mellers is still on the scene, exercising his sharp ear, broad learning, uncanny responsiveness and quicksilver imagination." -- Richard Crawford, Times Literary Supplement

"Every cultivated musician will profit from reading almost any publication of Mellers whose productivity as author and composer has spanned half a century. . . . If used in conjunction with a substantial library of recorded music, this book will serve as a reference for a course devoted to unjustly neglected work." -- Choice

Publication of this book was supported by the Henry and Edna Binkele Classical Music Fund.

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