ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that some of the ways scholars in musicology, social science and the humanities have understood the relationships between music, sound and landscape. It suggests that sonic composition and attentive listening might be thought of as making their own positive contributions to revised conceptions of landscape as practice and event. Environmental sound composition, site specific works, installations and interactive performance juxtapose sounds and environments in ways which challenge established ways of understanding relationships between music and landscape. Most frequently music is connected to landscape through the lyrics and words of songs, the soundtracks to movies or drama, or the scene setting and libretti of operas and musicals. As formalised by R. Murray Schafer in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, the vocabulary of soundscape studies, or acoustic ecology as it is otherwise known, is adopted from visual landscape enabling researchers to account for the spatiality of sound.
