Conference Agenda

Gardens contain multitudes, and not just in terms of their impressive arrays of visual abundance or variety of plant life. Gardens also emerge as spectacular worlds designed to offer olfactory, haptic, visual, and sonic contrast with their surrounding environments. This panel presents several perspectives on gardens as multisensory spaces of materials and sounds. Diverging from conceptions of gardens as primarily botanical, verdant, or visually organized, we understand gardens as not-totally-natural, but carefully designed environments and audible landscapes, in an effort to explore how sound informs encounters with physical or imagined gardens and their contents. With material studies and sound studies constituting common threads across all three papers, this panel illuminates how musical and sonic attunements to gardens prove relevant to discourses of health and wellness, environmentalism, and histories of public entertainment and operatic dramaturgy. How are gardens’ magnificent qualities engendered in layered interactions of acoustic and material dimensions? How do gardens’ sonic aspects amplify or resist colonialist fantasies of preservation, collection, and display? How are garden sounds (and silences) imagined as therapeutic, particularly in contrast to urban noise or other consequences of climate change?

Our papers engage with a range of garden cultures trans-historically and cross-culturally through European, American, and Japanese styles of design. We draw from various corners of musicological research, including critical organology, sound studies, media studies, and acoustic ecology. The first paper offers “pleasure garden” as a path for exploring operatic histories and built environments around 1900. The second paper moves the panel into the botanical garden, exploring the intertwined roles of glass in natural history and in musical contexts. The session concludes with a paper that investigates the construction and effects of quiet in Japanese gardens. Taken together, these close examinations of gardens as rich musical and sonic spaces argue for a closer listening to designed environments from throughout history and in the present. This attunement enriches collective understandings about cultures of musico-sonic performance, the politics of aural pleasure, and of embodied interactions with more-than-human worlds in our midst.

In this paper, I use pleasure gardens as a lens for comparing two Viennese gardens around 1900, one material and the other operatic: the amusement park “Venedig in Wien” (“Venice in Vienna”) and the pleasure island Elysium in Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (premiered 1918). Pleasure gardens were ticketed, multimedia entertainment environments; they thrilled audiences with contemporary technologies like gas lighting and animated fashionable historical and exotic fantasies in landscaped grounds. Scholars have addressed the significance of musical entertainments and materials for 18- and 19C pleasure gardens—including Vauxhall Gardens near suburban London (Cowgill 2013, Joncus 2013)—and for later 19C World Exhibitions (Fauser 2005), a related kind of place. Applying Josephine Kane’s insight that early 20C amusement parks overlapped with pleasure gardens and echoed their layouts and entertainment offerings (2013), I frame “Venedig in Wien,” which opened in 1895, as a pleasure garden. My interpretation renders “Venedig” a contextual counterpart for the island Elysium, and, moreover, permits new insights on both places. This paper is derived from my dissertation, which extends recent efforts to examine opera and early 20C musics from place-based perspectives (Aspden ed. 2019, Grimley 2018). I propose gardens as an important site for considering opera’s resonances with the urban environment.

I focus on the interactions of sound with space in “Venedig” and Elysium, which are more alike in labyrinthine layout, artificiality, and theatricality than in any botanical sense. Peter Franklin’s description of Elysium as “a landscape that is audible” (2006) recognizes sound’s centrality in Schreker’s rendering of the wondrous artificial garden. Pleasure gardens’ immersion requires separation from the everyday world; this real and imagined distance is constructed through location, layout, design vocabulary, and, importantly, in sound and music. In both the Venetian playground “Venedig” and the operatic Elysium, I suggest, sound functions to distance each garden from Vienna and from Genoa (the operatic setting) and augment their immersive illusions. Beyond contributing to an urban-centric perspective on gardens in opera, this paper supplements cultural readings of fin-de-siècle Viennese gardens, which emerge not only as dream-like retreats for aesthetes but as material, sounding spaces in the urban landscape.

Where there are plants, there is glass. The relationship between plants and glass manifests in the form of architectural structures like greenhouses, or in whimsical blown glass installations peppered throughout botanical gardens worldwide. But where there is glass, music and sound linger not far behind. Twinkly instruments made from metal, precious stone, and glass have frequently been used to evoke realms of magic, fantasy, and sacred ritual across musical traditions (e.g., Richards 2015, Wu 2019). Implantations of fragile glass in plant-filled worlds and stagings of plant life in glass worlds require onlookers to confront the precarious balance of forces within human-nonhuman intimacies. In what follows, however, I argue that sounding also figures in these opulent stagings of multiple materialities and species. But what or who should we listen for?

This paper considers musical and sonic legacies of botany in glassy mediums. I elucidate how botanical life works as an instrument on the spectrum between natural-historical and musico-sonic instruments (Tresch and Dolan 2013). The intersections of music, performance culture, and natural science have interested musicologists and historians of science alike (e.g., Carroll 2008, Trippett and Walton 2019, Werrett 2019). This paper expands upon this literature by writing a material history of 18th-century glass instruments, 19th-century glass flower replicas currently housed in museums, and present-day blown glass sculptures that reimagine “natural” forms. I place sounds produced by glass harmonicas and wind chimes in direct conversation with the silence of glass specimens as objects of taxonomic identification and preservation. If, as Rachel Mundy (2018) asserts, attuning to sonic histories undermines post-Enlightenment tendencies to visually categorize, this paper wrestles with the tension of these vibrant specimens as lively representations of plants, even though botanical life is commonly considered the quieter counterpart to animals. In these displays of biological diversity, glass’s translucency seemingly amplifies these unheard assemblages to make their quietude audible. The “voice of the vegetal other” emerges under the pretext of reciprocity (Gagliano 2018). I therefore conclude by asserting that aural attunements to nonhuman life can facilitate multispecies relationships that can undo some of the damages wrought by anthropogenic climate change.

Japanese gardens are carefully curated aesthetic spaces. Originally exports of the turn-of-the-century World’s Fairs and Expositions, Japanese gardens have since spread across the United States and have been integrated into spaces such as botanic gardens, public parks, college campuses, and even private backyards across the country. While scholars have analyzed Japanese gardens primarily as works of visual art (Kuitert 2002), my research explores the rich multisensorial nature of gardens, and the critical role that sound plays in garden design and experience. I build on studies that analyze sound from a spatial and computational perspective (Cerwén 2019, 2020; Fowler 2010, 2014) to seek a more social understanding of how designers and visitors co-construct soundscapes in Japanese gardens in the U.S.

I discuss three aspects of sound in gardens: (1) the intentional curation of quiet by garden designers through sound-making features; (2) the cultivation of a listening practice by visitors who orient themselves toward the garden’s soundscape; and (3) the calming effects of these quiet spaces, which visitors describe as supporting well-being and fostering both individual and political peace. I define “quiet” as a balanced relationship between sound and silence, while also exploring how “quiet” is used as a metaphor for physical and mental states of being. Drawing parallels between R. Murray Schafer’s definition of a “hi-fi” soundscape and the Japanese aesthetic of yohaku no bi, I show how designers block out undesirable urban noise and cultivate desired sounds within the garden using features such as the suikinkutsu, shishi-odoshi, and waterfalls. In addition to scholarly literature, I draw from garden design manuals, conversations with members – including garden designers, builders, managers, and visitors – of the North American Japanese Garden Association (NAJGA), as well as my first-hand experience visiting Japanese gardens across the U.S. I seek to broaden the sound studies literature that often engages with silence as a tool of power and control to instead demonstrate that quiet can be a positive and peaceful sonic state. A close attention to these soundscapes can help us reflect on the relationships between sound, listening, and well-being, both in and beyond the garden.