ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Italian music periodicals focused obsessively on opera, which is not surprising given its cultural preeminence at that time. But during the 1880s in La scena illustrata, there was an unusual flourishing of writings on connections between music, culture, and nature.
I argue that these authors were an early ecomusicological community, a point substantiated with a discussion of a selection of the writers involved, the themes they discussed, and their relationships. While some also wrote general musical contributions, others were established naturalists (such as Michele Lessona, who translated Charles Darwin). Their writings included the themes of non-musical stories, opera, and animals, among others, and they exhibit mutual readings and influences. Because of opera’s dominance and a simultaneous perception of stagnation, Italians regularly debated its form, function, and future throughout the nineteenth century. These writings in La scena illustrata seem to be part of a quasi-patriotic rethinking of the popular genre: exercises in operatic and ecological imaginations intended to push opera in new directions.
Historiographically, these writings provide a corrective to assumptions that it was only after the twentieth-century environmental movement when soundscape studies, acoustic ecology, and ecomusicology flourished. The authors in La scena illustrata are part of a longer intellectual history of engagements between music, culture, and nature. Rather than frivolous entertainments, their ecomusicological concerns reflect the political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts in which they were written. We may consider our own contemporary ecomusicological communities in similar ways.
