ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the importance of the pastoral to a geography of music. It traces some of the ways in which the pastoral in music constitutes an important medium in cultural politics negotiating the relationship between landscape, nature, society and politics. The chapter also examines implications of the pastoral for British music in the period 1880-1940. The period in British musical history between 1880 and 1940 has come to be known as the English musical renaissance. For geography, the pastoral raises a number of parallels between the study of music and the study of landscape. The pastoral provides a very powerful set of metaphors for ordering and classifying material and spiritual worlds. The pastoral has been an enduring ideological resource in Europe from its origins in classical antiquity. Like landscape, music has played its part in policing the nature-culture divide sorting order from chaos and civilization from barbarism in western thought since classical antiquity.
