ABSTRACT
The first ecology to be considered is environmental. This is the most common understanding of the word ‘ecology’, linked to nature or, more accurately – because today we know that ‘nature’ is a human construction – to the living world (cf. B. Morizot, 2020). This section takes a historical perspective, and has four chapters. The chapter ‘Music and Nature’ begins with the inseparability of nature and culture, as discussed by anthropologists and ethnomusicolists, and cites Steven Feld’s contribution. Then, by way of illustrating the theories of imitation that have dominated in the West, and the ambiguous role they assign to art – nostalgia for the original unity, but also domination of nature – it traces a brief history of birds in music, from Jacob Senleches (ars subtilior) to Alexander Liebermann, via Clément Janequin, Louis-Claude Daquin, Mozart, Gustav Mahler, Maurice Ravel, and Ottorino Respighi; this section ends with a critical deconstruction of Olivier Messiaen’s relationship with the world of birds. A third section explores modern sensitivity to nature, whereby the relationship is beginning to free itself from the bonds of representation: with Claude Debussy and Japanese composers such as Yoshihisa Taïra, with Anton Webern, a passionate mountain climber, with modelisations developed by François-Bernard Mâche, by spectral composers (Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail) and by Jean-Claude Risset. The chapter ends with an analytical study of Xenakis, who uses natural sciences as the basis of his compositions, but is also open, in a sense, to environmental music.
