The Sound of the English Picturesque - Georgian Vocal Music, Haydn, and Landscape Aesthetics

Revealing the connections between the veneration of national landscape and eighteenth-century English vocal music, this study restores English music’s connections with the picturesque. In the eighteenth century, the emerging taste for the picturesque was central to British aesthetics, as poets and painters gained popularity by glorifying the local landscape in works concurrent with the emergence of native countryside tourism. Yet English music was seldom discussed as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. This book explores this gap, and shows how secular song, the glee, and national theatre music expressed a uniquely English engagement with landscape. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the author addresses the apparent ‘silence’ of the English picturesque. The book draws on analysis of the visualisations present in the texts of English vocal music, and their musical treatment, to demonstrate how local composers and musicians incorporated celebrations of landscape into their works. The final chapter shows that the English picturesque was a crucial influence on Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. Suitable for anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century music, aesthetics and the natural environment, this book will appeal to a wide range of specialists and non-specialists alike.