Coloured for Sight and Sound

I’m so pleased that my review of Stephen Groves’ book, The Sound of the English Picturesque: Georgian Vocal Music, Haydn, and Landscape Aesthetics has been published in the latest issue of the leading journal Early Music.

I so much enjoyed reading Stephen’s fascinating exploration of the concept of the musical picturesque in late eighteenth-century English song and Haydn’s The Seasons. Here’s an extract from my review:

“The pastoral mode was ubiquitous in the 18th-century English artistic landscape, transporting audiences to a virtuous, idealized Golden Age of shepherds and nymphs, which offered an attractive rural retreat from the complexities of urban life. However, the pastoral’s sister aesthetic, the picturesque, though much applied to art and literature of this period, has rarely been embraced by musicologists. Groves’s The sound of the English picturesque seeks to redress this imbalance, arguing for the strong relevance of the picturesque to English vocal repertoire of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From the outset, Groves is at pains to demonstrate that the picturesque is qualitatively distinct from the pastoral. For a musical work to express the picturesque, it must venture beyond pastoral convention and instead express, in painterly fashion, the beauty of a particular natural landscape. English composers, Groves suggests, were able to capture the picturesque through musical means, mirroring the techniques of Gainsborough and Capability Brown in their respective arts of landscape painting and gardening.”

To read the full review (though you’ll need an institutional login), just click the link below:

Coloured for sight and sound | Early Music | Oxford Academic