Ecomusicology is the study of the relationship between sound, nature and people or culture, in the context of a natural or built environment. Humanities subjects have long drawn on concepts of nature and environment, particularly from the 1970s onwards, but from around the millennium a critical mass began to emerge, perhaps fostered by rising public concern about global warming, environmental change and pollution issues, a sense that time on this planet is finite, and a feeling that ecological concerns should be taken seriously. In the 1990s, social geographers published studies on the relationship between music and landscape (see Matless 1998), and since 2007 the Ecocriticism Study Group (ESG) of the American Musicological Society (AMS) has existed as ‘a forum for exploring the intellectual and practical connections between the studies of music, culture and nature’ (http://www.ams-esg.org/). As the title of the ESG reveals, it is a direct response to a strand of literature studies known as ecocriticism (see Garrard 2004), which focuses on cultural products that ‘imagine and portray human-environment relationships’ (Allen 2011, 393).