It seems natural that music
would try to emulate nature, since music itself comes from nature: bird song,
the howl of wind, the patter of rain, the roar of thunder, and so forth. Early vocal music often imitated the natural
world, though its palette was relatively limited; only with the rise of
instrumental music could a composer invoke breezes and storms, rivers and oceans,
and the chirpings of a summer night.
It’s fascinating to trace the development of ‘nature’ music in the
orchestral repertoire, since a specific delineation of natural elements
required increasingly abstract music. In
many ways, the pursuit to make music more than itself led to a breaking point,
unshackling music (temporarily) from tonality until it became something totally
alien to human ears (the music of Schoenberg onward). While it might be misleading to say that
serialism and twelve-tone music is the direct result of programmatic music, I
think nature served as an expressive ideal, tempting artists to capture the ‘real’
music that lives all around us. After
all, what could be more otherworldly than the chattering of icicles on
snow-covered trees in the bitter wind of a winter evening? Vivaldi attempted a rudimentary form of tone
painting in his famous Four Seasons concertos, though it remains a
gesture more than a true embodiment.
Only the expanded orchestral language of the late 19th century would
approach nature as it truly sounds: not always harmonious, and often downright
barbaric. Here are a few unique pieces
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries that attempts to paint nature with the
brush of the symphonic orchestra, though without devolving into mere scene painting
or crude mimicry.
