Landscape And Song

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

Public landscapes are an integral part of city life. They not only add beauty to city, but also maintain a harmony and balance between human and environment. This book contains the most recent representative works of numerous excellent designers from across the world. The spaces illustrated include parks, streets, squares, commercial spaces, educational spaces, and cultural spaces. It illustrates the most unique landscape designs from design concept to detailed description, from overall landscapes to partial features.

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual impact between nature and culture, Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people defined their identities, encouraging them to view themselves as belonging to specific landscapes. The book offers close readings of love songs, pastourelles, motets, and rondets from the likes of Gace Brulé, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut, and many others. Saltzstein shows how their music-text relationships illuminate the ways in which song helped to foster identities tied to specific landscapes among the knightly classes, the clergy, aristocratic women, and peasants. By connecting social types to topographies, trouvère songs and the manuscripts in which they were preserved presented models of identity for later generations of songwriters, performers, listeners, patrons, and readers to emulate, thereby projecting into the future specific ways of being on the land. Written in the long thirteenth century during the last major era of climate change, trouvère songs, as Saltzstein demonstrates, shape our understanding of how identity formation has rested on relationships between nature, culture, and change.

Drawing conceptually and directly on music notation, this book investigates landscape architecture’s inherent temporality. It argues that the rich history of notating time in music provides a critical model for this under-researched and under-theorised aspect of landscape architecture, while also ennobling sound in the sensory appreciation of landscape. A Musicology for Landscape makes available to a wider landscape architecture and urban design audience the works of three influential composers – Morton Feldman, György Ligeti and Michael Finnissy – presenting a critical evaluation of their work within music, as well as a means in which it might be used in design research. Each of the musical scores is juxtaposed with design representations by Kevin Appleyard, Bernard Tschumi and William Kent, before the author examines four landscape spaces through the development of new landscape architectural notations. In doing so, this work offers valuable insights into the methods used by landscape architects for the benefit of musicians, and by bringing together musical composition and landscape architecture through notation, it affords a focused and sensitive exploration of temporality and sound in both fields.

A memoir from one of Britain's legendary singers, folklorists, and music historians. A legendary singer, folklorist, and music historian, Shirley Collins has been an integral part of the folk-music revival for more than sixty years. In her new memoir, All in the Downs, Collins tells the story of that lifelong relationship with English folksong—a dedication to artistic integrity that has guided her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life. All in the Downs combines elements of memoir—from her working-class origins in wartime Hastings to the bright lights of the 1950s folk revival in London—alongside reflections on the role traditional music and the English landscape have played in shaping her vision. From formative field recordings made with Alan Lomax in the United States to the “crowning glories” recorded with her sister Dolly on the Sussex Downs, she writes of the obstacles that led to her withdrawal from the spotlight and the redemption of a new artistic flourishing that continues today with her unexpected return to recording in 2016. Through it all, Shirley Collins has been guided and supported by three vital and inseparable loves: traditional English song, the people and landscape of her native Sussex, and an unwavering sense of artistic integrity. All in the Downs pays tribute to these passions, and in doing so, illustrates a way of life as old as England, that has all but vanished from this land. Generously illustrated with rare archival material.

A study of Chinese landscape painting, centered on the 12th century handscroll, "Dream Journey over Xiao Xiang (Xiao Xiang woyou tu)," in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum.