Landscape

This chapter examines one of the most popular critical frames for the English pastoral: the representation of nature. While older rural pastoral signifiers (such as the evocation of birdsong) persist in English compositions written after 1900, many composers engaged with the pastoral through A. E. Housman’s poetic anthology A Shropshire Lad. Musical depictions of the British landscape also appear beyond the West Country, whether as existentially bleak meditations on man’s ephemeral relationship with nature, or in explorations of the tensions between the industrialized modern city and the idealized rural village, especially as experienced by the populations caught between.