Conference Agenda

Allusions to air, breezes, and rustling boughs abounded in musical references to the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald) around 1900. Apocryphal accounts written by music journalists imagined gentle breezes that, sweeping down from the wooded hills north-west of the city, carried the melodies of favourite waltzes into the waiting ears of canonized local composers like Johann Strauss Sr. The Wienerwald's air was thought to waft out of the works of naturalized composers like Brahms or those of the native Schubert. Turn-of-the-century Vienna’s newly solidified identity as a “city of music” where music was simply “in the air” emerged from common, essentializing arguments about and convictions in the innate musicality of the surrounding landscape (Nußbaumer 2007, Musner 2009). Although forest murmurs and air as a vehicle for creative inspiration were familiar Romantic tropes, this paper contends that musical references to the Wienerwald’s special aerial qualities take on further significance when read against their layered historical and environmental context.

Parts of the Wienerwald formed the first component of a greenbelt legislated in 1905, whose primary function was to serve as an “air reservoir” (Gemeinde Wien 1905) for the city struggling with pernicious dust and smoke problems. The woods’ supply of clean air was considered its most vital offering for working-class day-trippers who could not afford summer vacations to the Alps. The Wienerwald was also home to sanatoria for both tuberculosis—so pervasive in the city it was nicknamed “the Viennese disease”—and nervous illnesses. Fresh air was integral to treatment regimens for both—and, in a way, so was music. In a compelling intersection of wellness tourism with popular music, two newspaper profiles advertising the Purkersdorf Sanatorium reference Hugo Schenk and Oskar Hofmann’s popular 1891 song, “Die Luft vom Wienerwald” (“The Air of the Wienerwald”), in lauding the facility’s healthful surroundings. Drawing on a varied archive of little-known musical and textual sources, and building upon recent musicological engagements with air (Davies 2023), this paper argues that musical references to the Wienerwald’s air were not only grounded in the symbolic imaginary underpinning the Musikstadt narrative but emerged from material environmental factors.

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.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier published a paper entitled “Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (General Remarks on the Temperature of the Earth and Planetary Spaces) in which he imagined the surface of the globe as an interface between the immense heat of the earth’s core and the variable influence of the sun. It was one of the earliest articulations of the greenhouse effect, penned by a mathematician known best for his work in the field of “harmonic analysis.” Here Fourier developed a technique for the decomposition of waveforms that could reveal distributions of intensity across the spectrum of possible frequencies, a technique which came to be known as the Fourier Transform. It and the Fast Fourier Transform, a practice formalized much later by James Coolly and John Tukey in 1965, are now routinely used by acousticians, engineers and musicians in the analysis of sound waves and are central to emerging practices of so-called machine listening.

Building on recent work on the place of music within a broader history of waveform analysis (Jessop 2017; Bijsterveld 2018), this paper focuses on Fourier’s legacy in the world of digital technologies since 1970, particularly in astrophysics in which spectrographic “soundings” of sunlight provide the basis for global temperature monitoring, notably in NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. It asks what histories and political tendencies are contained in the use of such music-adjacent vocabularies: how terms like “sounding” and “harmonic analysis” construct and influence environmental knowledge. At the same time, it makes the case for engaging with mathematical concepts as a productive means of decentring sound across music studies. For example, Steven Feld (2024) has recently advanced an acoustemology of heat; along related lines, sound might be understood through its epistemological entanglements with heat as interrelated forms of environmental sensing. Historical relationships between sound and heat waves also invite reflection on the politics of scientific knowledge in the climate crisis as humanities scholars increasingly strive to extend their senses, through sensors, to think across inhuman scales.