Musical topoi are typically understood as flexible constellations of stylistic cues rather than fixed formal structures. Yet this flexibility makes them resistant to empirical investigation: they lack stable syntactic boundaries, overlap with neighboring domains, and generate abundant borderline cases in which analysts’ judgments can substantially shape results. Can topic theory sustain corpus-based inquiry without sacrificing the nuance that gives it interpretive force?

This paper proposes a methodological model for addressing that question through a historically delimited case study. Around 1770, following Luigi Boccherini’s move to Spain to enter the service of Infante Don Luis, a distinctive topical configuration consolidates in his instrumental music. I term this configuration the brilliant pastoral: a fusion of brilliant surface activity (rapid figuration, high-register ornamentation, kinetic repetition) superimposed upon a pastoral ground (static harmony, sustained pedals, gentle dynamics). The result is what Elisabeth Le Guin calls a “tableau” of enlivened stasis, a shimmering mesh of surface motion unfolding over harmonic stillness.

Rather than coding instances of the topic wholesale, a procedure prone to interpretive ambiguity, I model its emergence by tracing the distribution and co-occurrence of constituent features. A corpus of Boccherini’s instrumental works (1760–1780) is annotated for core and optional traits, allowing measurement of feature clustering over time.

The results reveal a clear chronological shift. In the pre-1770 repertory, relevant features appear largely in isolation. After 1770, however, bundled constellations of core traits increase markedly, often supplemented by optional features. The String Quintet Op. 10, no. 6, L’uccelliera, with its explicit birdsong imagery, provides an early mimetic anchor, stabilizing the association between the brilliant pastoral and nature. In subsequent non-programmatic works, the same configuration appears without overt representational framing, beginning to function as a more general aesthetic resource.

I interpret this shift as evidence that Boccherini’s Spanish milieu catalyzed a broader transformation in which “nature” moved from localized icon to generalized aesthetic principle. More broadly, the study offers a methodological model for topic theory: by tracing the convergence and stabilization of features over time, we can preserve interpretive nuance while advancing empirically grounded claims about topical evolution.

Early- to mid-twentieth-century musical portrayals of the American West, such as those by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, are generally thought to use compositional techniques such as the quotation of vernacular musics, folk evocations, widely spaced harmonies, and pentatonicism in order to evoke the West (Hubbs 2004; Levy 2012; Crist 2005; Von Glahn 2003; Pollack 1999). In this paper, I build on this scholarship by considering echoes and modifications of the pastoral topic in musical portrayals of landscapes in the American West, demonstrating one way in which early twentieth-century American art music descended—and ultimately diverged—from European pastoral music of the common practice period.

I first draw on Leo Marx’s (1964) concept of the “machine in the garden,” a literary metaphor for the American impulse for industrialization and colonization in otherwise idyllic settings. Marx frames the machine in the garden as a textural phenomenon, where, in a literary text, the sensory details of the machine interrupt and clash with those of the garden. By examining modifications of the pastoral topic in works by Copland, Thomson, and Ferde Grofé, I demonstrate that the machine in the garden can also be heard in musical textures that portray the American West, often expressed through textural juxtapositions and contrasts that evoke both “garden” and “machine.” Finally, I show how these modifications of the pastoral topic in American music—which I call the “frontier” topic—reflect wider midcentury perceptions of the American frontier as a site defined by its colonization.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s Da gelo a gelo (2006), after the diary and poems of the eleventh-century writer Izumi Shikibu, eschews linear plot in favor of an “ecology of listening” (Angius 2020) articulated through noise, micro-gesture, natural sounds, and silence (Somigli 2025). Situating the work within topic theory in its broadest sense, this paper examines how recognizability and stylistic cueing function as dramaturgical resources—creating orientation, contrast, and semantic affordances in a music-theatre work whose action is primarily atmospheric. These processes come into sharp focus when Sciarrino briefly foregrounds culturally marked styles.

The central case study is Scene 16 (designated musica di corte in the composer’s sketches). Here Sciarrino introduces conspicuous Western materials—notably a Schubertian military-march idiom and Mozart’s “Alla turca” (K. 331). From a topical perspective, these idioms project regularity, ceremony, and public display, establishing a regime of social legibility that cuts across Sciarrino’s fragile textures. At the same time, their topical charge is reconfigured through fragmentation, timbral displacement, and scenic framing, such that “court music” emerges as a constructed foil to Izumi’s lyric temporality of waiting and seasonal listening, and to the scene’s rapid montage of dawn–day–night.

A second analytical strand traces a recurring tonal module associated with the words Dei fiori d’arancio, introduced as an antica canzone in Scene 2. Without positing a single identifiable source, the passage produces a phenomenon of constructed familiarity: tonal stability, repetition, and cue-like framing generate the impression of a pre-existing song. I argue that this operates as an invented topic of “old song,” demonstrating how topical meaning can arise through recurrence and framing even in the absence of quotation.

Finally, I consider Sciarrino’s stylized nature sounds—especially cricket sonorities—whose sketches differentiate seasonally inflected types and corresponding strategies of musical realization (Utz 2010). In combination, quotation-topics, invented song-ness, and nature-sound writing constitute a network of topical processes that segment time, guide attention, and shape semantic and psychological agency in late-modern music theatre. Methodologically, the paper integrates score study, aural analysis of recordings, and intensive work with the composer’s sketches, framing the results through relevant Sciarrino scholarship (Li 2023; Utz 2023).