From the canyons to the stars...

As I write this I'm listening to the London Sinfonietta recording of Messiaen's Des canyons aux étoiles..., which was inspired by various locations in Utah - Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon and Zion Park (movements 5, 7 and 12 respectively).  'Cedar Breaks', writes Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise, 'is the music of the bedrock.  Orations for brass in unison alternate with pulsing dissonant chords, rugged writing for piano and quasi-jazzy episodes, replete with wah-wah trumpet and glissando trombone. "Bryce Canyon" recycles certain of those motifs of geological violence, but they give way to a series of mighty chorales, in which the splendor of the canyon resonates within the observer's mind.'

Bryce Canyon, Utah

Photo: Luca Galuzzi

In the photograph above the canyon looks like a huge natural organ.  The red-orange rock formations are evoked in the music itself - Messiaen associated the colour red with E major. In a 1979 interview he said “Bryce Canyon was of special interest to me. That’s because it had all those wonderful colours, and I wanted to put them into music. So, the piece I composed about Bryce Canyon is red and orange, the colour of the cliffs.”  Quite a lot has been written about Messiaen's synaesthesia - if you're interested, check out the three dimensional maps of Messiaen's colour space in a paper by Paul E. Dworak. 

Des canyons aux étoiles... was composed after Messiaen's trip to Utah in 1972 and premiered in 1974.  According to Alex Ross the New York arts patron Alice Tully had 'asked Messiaen to write a work in commemoration of the upcoming American bicentennial.  It was an unlikely assignment, since Messiaen had little love for American culture and a special antipathy for New York.  His reluctance gave way when Tully, well briefed on the composer's vulnerabilities, served him a sumptuous repast capped with "an immense cake crowned with pistachio frogs spewing crème Chantilly."'  Here is an example of the celestial music facilitated by this delicious-sounding cake, the third movement of Des canyons aux étoiles..., 'Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles' - 'What is written in the stars'.

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Postscript 2016: Alex Ross has just posted a story about the St. Louis Symphony orchestra's principal horn Roger Kaza who in 1982 played the solo-horn movement in a branch of the Grand Canyon and sent a recording to the composer. Here's a short extract describing the performance out in the landscape made with a group of friends including trumpeter Tim Morrison.

'Fern Glen Canyon is a tributary of the Colorado, with hundred-foot vertical walls thirty to fifty feet across. Dripping springs create grottoes of ferns, greenery, and delicate wildflowers. Tim and I hiked up the canyon, played a few notes, and immediately reveled in the lush echo resounding off the ancient stone. This was the place to record the Messiaen.  [... ]

[The following day they assembled to perform it.]  By now it was dark and the crickets were chirping. The strange tritone-infused music, with its weird lilting rhythms, seemed perfectly suited to this hallowed place of rock and time. Because my chops were weak, I had to record it piecemeal. Fortunately, the music contains many long pauses and lends itself to such an approach. After an hour or two of retakes, I decided that everything should be covered. We packed up the sand-infested Walkman and hiked back to camp.'

The Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu

Xie Youyu (or Xie Kun) was a Jin Dynasty scholar-official.  One day, the story goes, Emperor Ming asked him how he thought he compared with another official, Yu Liang.  Xie replied that he was no match for Yu Liang when it came to official duties, but he was superior when it came to 'a hill and stream' - imagining himself away from court and finding repose in nature.

Zhao Mengfu, The Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu,

section of a handscroll, ca. 1287

About a century later, Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345 - ca.406) is said to have painted a portrait of Xie Youyu which was innovative in its use of a landscape setting.  Gu explained this in relation to Xie's statement and said "this gentleman should be placed among hills and streams."  Gu's painting (now lost) may have survived long enough to influence the handscroll painted by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) which is now in Princeton University's Art Museum.  Zhao was himself an official who would have empathised with Xie - though his family were descended from Song  Dynasty emperors, he reluctantly accepted various roles as an official at the new Mongol court. 

James Cahill explains in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Paintings (1997) that Zhao 'reconciled his career with his conscience by adopting the stance of chaoyin, "recluse at court," and expressing it in poems and paintings.  The concept of chaoyin was based on the belief that someone could be engaged in a political career in the outside world while preserving internally the mentality of the recluse, spiritually remote from the contamination of public life.'  Like Xie he could work for the government whilst inwardly inhabiting a 'mind landscape' where it was possible to sit alone and at peace, on a river bank among the trees.

Fields For Recording

Here are ten examples of landscape-related music released in 2010.  It is not a 'best of list' by any means, partly because I have restricted myself to albums where I can provide a relevant Youtube clip for you.  In doing this I was interested to see how recent music has incorporated field recordings in various ways.  On this topic though it is worth reading Richard Pinnell's review of the year's CDs - 'as technology has made the use of found recordings so easy the number of discs that just feel like lazy concoctions of traffic sounds, rainfall, children at play, hydrophone recordings etc seem to be ten a penny.'  There are exceptions however, and Pinnell talks approvingly of recent releases by Tomas Korber and Ralf Wehowsky, LaCasa, Vanessa Rossetto and David Papapostolou (none of whom are actually on my list below).

(1) The first one I have chosen is an album that uses arctic field recordings: Craig Vear's Summerhouses, on Mille Plateaux. Tracks include the menacing 'Crevasse Blue', the cold liquid sounds of 'Intertidal Pool' and the drifting music of 'After the Sinking'.

(2) Richard Skelton has been immersing himself this year in the landscapes of Cumbria and the west coast of Ireland, the fruits of which we should see in the future.  His Landings, which I posted about a year ago, had a limited edition release at the end of 2009, but this year saw its wider distribution, along with Crow Autumn, a repackaging of some earlier material recorded as A Broken Consort. Both were inspired by the Pennines; Crow Autumn includes, in addition to 'The River' (below), pieces entitled 'Like Rain', 'Leaves' and 'Mountains Ash.'

(3) Norway's Pjusk (Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik and Rune Sagevik) use processed environmental recordings in their album Sval. Reviewers all seem to have found themselves transported to an imaginary North: Pjusk 'immerse the listener in fathomless depths of electronic soundscaping, conjuring up the raw, icy topography of their nordic home'; 'like a warm refuge in an arctic winter, Pjusk creates inviting digital ambient music with a shimmering natural glow'; 'Pjusk has quite effectively drawn the connection between the warmly lit cabin in the mountains and the polar environs right outside their door.'

(4) Rangers' Suburban Tours was one of the most notable hypnagogic pop albums of 2010. Joe Knight takes us to 'Bear Creek', 'Bel Air', 'Deerfield Village', 'Brook Meadows' and 'Woodland Hills' (below), although all of these are moods rather than places.

(5) Richard Chartier's A Field for Mixing features 'Fields For Recording 1-8', a fifty minute composition based on 'processed field recordings of small and large, open and enclosed spaces'. It is extremely quiet, with none of the usual obvious landscape sounds. There is no Youtube clip from the album itself, but here is another Chartier composition - a collaboration with William Basinski (who gets a dedication in 'A Field for Mixing', along with Steve Roden).

(6) In September Ghost Box released a revised edition of The Farmer's Angle by the Belbury Poly with some additional tracks.  Further developments can be followed at The Belbury Parish Magazine, including the first broadcast of Radio Belbury.  Another hauntological landscape highlight in 2010 was The Belbury Poly's split single with Mordant Music, 'Welcome to Godalming', 'in which the two artists examine this small English town.'

(7) Taylor Deupree's 2010 ambient album Shoals (from which 'Rusted Oak' below is taken) used looped recordings of gamelan instruments. But he was also involved in Snow (Dusk, Dawn), a multimedia project incorporating sound and photography, the music for which  consisted of a sixteen minute ambient melodic loop.  The photographs were taken with expired polaroid film and featured fleeting images taken during the first heavy snowfall of the winter of 2009, at dusk, in the setting sun - 'nothing was to last, the snow, the image, the day'.

(8) The cover of the Pantha du Prince album Black Noise is an old fashioned mountain landscape painting that reminds me of the Adalbert Stifter stories I've written about here in 2010. Hendrik Weber's electronic compositions include snatches of field recording and chiming bells - they were apparently inspired by his journeys in the Swiss Alps.

(9) I always aim to be eclectic but must admit my knowledge of black metal is rather limited.  I see though that Agalloch's Marrow of the Spirit is one of NPR's albums of the year and their review explains that 'the forest is a common inspiration for black metal, particularly for the Norwegians who defined the genre in the early '90s. That makes sense: It's a cold, mystical place marked by unknown darkness. For Agalloch, the forests of the Pacific Northwest represent all of those things, but they're also a force of healing.' The album opens with a gentle instrumental (see below), 'They Escaped the Weight of Darkness', in which Jackie Perez Gratz plays cello over the sounds of birdsong and running water.  It is only once this track is over that the volume rises, the guitars storm in, and things get heavy... 

(10) Finally, released last month, A Path Less Travelled is a collaboration between Japanese improvisers Minamo and Lawrence English (whose Kiri No Oto I mentioned in an earlier post).  The clip below shows them performing in Tokyo in November.  The Pitchfork review notes that 'birds sing on 'The Path', crickets chirr on 'Headlights', and water splashes against a dock or boat on 'Springhead'. (Birds sing in 99% of pastoral electro-acoustic music and seldom receive any royalties. English's use of crickets and water is more striking: The former add a subtle Reichian pattern to a nocturnal melody, while the latter kick-starts the rest of the track's liquid swirl.)'

The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin

Michele Marieschi, The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin, 1737

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The National Gallery's recent exhibition 'Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals' set the works of Canaletto alongside other Venetian painters like Luca Carlevarjis, whose choice of views and festivals at the start of the eighteenth century were a model for the later artists, Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto's nephew who left to work at the courts of northern Europe (I included one of his views of Warsaw in an earlier post), and Francesco Guardi, whose poetic vision of the city looks forward to Turner.  Perhaps unsurprisingly given the theatricality of Venice, three of the artists in the exhibition began as scene painters: Canaletto himself, his early rival Michele Marieschi, and Antonio Joli.  Canaletto's father was a scene painter and so was his brother.  At this time the trade was often passed to the next generation and the Galli-Bibiena family, who were designing theatrical sets around Europe throughout the eighteenth century, can be seen to have influenced some of Marieschi's compositions.  Antonio Joli worked in the theatre at Modena and Perugia before coming to Venice.  He later visited England, decorating the house of John James Heidegger, director of the King's Theater at Haymarket and a renowned producer of Venetian-style masquerades.

The National Gallery podcast recently had a brief interview with theatrical historian Julie Dashwood on the influence of theatre design on Venetian view paintings.  She discusses perspective, lighting and framing before the interviewer turns to one of Joli's paintings showing the Doge’s Palace, Campanile and St Mark’s Square seen from the waters of the Bacino di San Marco.  "This surely can’t have anything to do with set designs? I mean ships and boats and the rest of it, can it?" "It can," replies Dashwood.  "The Renaissance stage - and in this the baroque stage is not a break, it’s a continuity of what happened in the Renaissance - they loved special effects. And they loved being able to create the effect of water and rain on stage and bringing in all kinds of machines. They had cloud machines – you can see the clouds here.  ... Of course Joli is able to bring it all into one painting and he creates a sort of stage ... the darkened auditorium if you like is on one side and the real action, the big-wigs, the grandees are coming in to play up their parts on the water, which is their stage, and then going into the city, which is their stage."

Wire resonance tones induced by the wind

Yesterday Radio 4 broadcast a half hour documentary, 'The Wire', on the music created by wind and weather playing over fencing wire stretched across the Australian landscape.  In it, Chris Watson visits The WIRED Lab in New South Wales and talks to Alan Lamb - artist, biomedical research scientist and composer - whose work with the wires began in 1976 when he first heard the sounds made by a 1km stretch of abandoned telephone wires in Western Australia.  Lamb relates the story of how, as a young boy, he was introduced to the music of the wires during walks with his sister and their nanny, who showed the children how to press their ears against a telegraph pole to 'hear the sound of the world'.  You can get an idea of this from the weather sounds sample below, one of several on the excellent WIRED Lab site.  It is 'a multi-layered mix of natural weather pattern sonifications : rising and falling wind patterns, rain storms (heard as cracks and pops when water strikes the pickup, and as zaps/pings/crackles as the rain strikes the wire) and wire resonance tones induced by the wind.'

CreativeComplex-WEATHER-MIX by TheWIREDLab

The documentary is available to listen to on the Radio 4 site for the rest of this week.  In the course of the programme Chris Watson uses his own contact mics and buries hydrophones in the earth near the wires with the aim of literally "drawing music from the landscape".  But he is also struck by how easy it is to simply stand near the wires and listen to them.  My favourite moment comes about 16 minutes in, when Lamb is explaining to Watson how you can feel the vibrations in the wire.  As they are talking the background sound changes and Lamb says "Now that was an interesting moment because the sound just changed completely.  That's because the sun came out..."

The Larches of Zernikow

In his collection Slow Air (2002) Robin Robertson talks in a poem called 'The Larches of Zernikow' about lines of trees planted by children before the war.  Even in October, the poet says, you would not realise, walking among them, that their yellow gold is branding the forest canopy with the sign of a swastika.  Robertson's endnote for the poem explains that the trees were planted 'under the direction of forester Walter Schmidt as a tribute to the 1000-year Reich.  Known locally as the Hakenkreuzschonung - the Swastika Plantation - it was not discovered until 1992 after an aerial survey of the region.  The trees were felled, but the stumps could not be removed.'

The story of the larches at Zernikow was told ten years ago by Imre Karacs in an Independent article. He explains that one local legend put the plantation's creation down to the inadequacy of the local Hitler oak (Hitler, like Bismarck, had oaks planted in his honour). 'Zernikow had not actually planted a Hitler oak, merely christened its biggest tree in honour of the Führer. According to this story, an official turned up in early 1938, demanding to know what plans were in place for Hitler's birthday. "We already have a Hitler oak," the locals said, proudly pointing to the venerable token of their esteem. "It will not do," the official screamed. "You must have something new." And so Forester Schmidt walked to an empty field to the north of the village, and proclaimed that on this spot should stand an eternal tribute to the 1,000-year Reich...'  Another legend involved 'a farmhand sacked from the estate for "perversion", after being caught in the cowshed with his trousers down', who got his revenge by denouncing the estate manager August Wehr to the Gestapo.  Wehr's friend and employer, the squire Hans von Wedel, then came under suspicion and so 'to placate the authorities Forester Schmidt set about planting the biggest swastika of the region. The squire escaped.'

A quick surf on this topic brought me to Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog where I learned of another example of Fascist tree planting. 'In a surfeit of Mussolini madness in 1939 – no-one would have bothered two years later – the forestry school from nearby Cittaducale planted pines on the mountain side above the town in the shape of the letters D-U-X. Dux is, of course, the Latin for ‘leader’ (from which English gets duke) and a calque and more easily written version of the Italian DUCE, Mussolini’s preferred name among his supporters. The letters remain a much-loved local landmark and it seems that many Antrodocans were irritated when recently some provincial-level politicians tried to get rid of the offending letters.'

Vine and blue Appenine, convents and cypresses

Fra Angelico, The Deposition from the Cross, 1432

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Following on from my last post on Fra Angelico I'd like to focus here on his depiction of the Tuscan landscape in work of the 1430s.  In a 1979 essay Christopher Lloyd described the city representing Jerusalem in The Deposition from the Cross as 'exquisitely rendered with the precision of a miniaturist' and likened the countryside to Ruskin's description in a letter of 1845: 'one vista of vine and blue Appenine, convents and cypresses.'  In his book The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy, A. Richard Turner writes that these landscapes look as if they had been 'carved by a knife from porous rock, and then smoothly rounded until the pores disappear.  The buildings are cut from soft wood, joined with the simplest of planes, and then painted in a naive and happy juxtaposition of pastels and darks.  The lucid simplicity of this world appeals to the sensibility of our own century.  The landscape is unreal, but also supra-real.  A flood of brilliant light moves across the land, reflected with Mediterranean intensity from stuccoed walls, and intermittently absorbed into deep, cool shadows.  Piero della Francesca's luminous landscapes done thirty years later are but the subtle culmination of Fra Angelico's essays in light.'

Another painting from this time also shows the 'Corotesque purity of tone' that Kenneth Clark noticed in Fra Angelico's backgrounds, and has a special place in the history of landscape.  According to Christopher Lloyd, 'the aged Elisabeth surmounting the steep hill from which one can view the full panoply of the southern Tuscan landscape in The Visitation, a predella panel from The Annunciation at Cortona, is an unforgettable image, especially if one has climbed the hill to Cortona, a town which Henry James described as being "nearer to the sky than to the railway station, in order to see the altarpiece."'  David White (who added notes on the paintings to Lloyd's essay for the 1992 Phaidon's Colour Library book on Fra Angelico) explains that the view behind the woman climbing the hill is 'the first identifiable landscape in Italian art.  In the middle distance a lake, which no longer exists, spreads out in the Chiana Valley; beyond rises the town of Castigliona Fiorentino, and further distant the tower of Monterchi.'  This lake has now been drained but it can be seen in the map of the area made by Leonardo da Vinci.

Fra Angelico, The Visitation, c.1432

Panel from the predella for The Annunciation

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Penitent Saint Jerome

Fra Angelico, The San Domenico Altarpiece (detail), c. 1422-23

In the 1420s Fra Angelico painted three altarpieces and illuminated a choir book for the church and convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, the first of which was a triptych with the Virgin and Child flanked by two sets of saints: Aquinas, Barnabas, Dominic and Peter Martyr.  However, as Diane Cole Ahl explains in her monograph Fra Angelico (2008) it was united into a single panel and repainted by Lorenzo di Credi in 1501.  One of the alterations Lorenzo made was to replace the gold background with a continuous architectural and landscape setting - a serene pattern of water, fields, trees and distant mountains under a misty sky that fades into blue.  Why was this done?  It was possibly part of the renovation of the church, but another motivation could have been to pay homage to the saints and to the revered artist himself:  Lorenzo 'left the figures as they had been painted as precious relics of Angelico's mastery.'  The result is a beautiful hybrid work.  Looking at it, even in reproduction, you feel a particularly strong version of that familiar longing in front of a Renaissance altarpiece to travel beyond the foreground figures and out through the window into the idealised world beyond.

Fra Angelico, The San Domenico Altarpiece (detail), c. 1422-23

landscapes added by Lorenzo di Credi in 1501

When Fra Angelico began his career gilt backgrounds were still the norm and in early paintings like Madonna and Child with Twelve Angels (c1423-4) he placed his figures on solid architecture under a gold leaf sky.  But when he came to paint the Annalena Altarpiece (c. 1435), the simple golden background had been superseded by a realistic interior decoration, showing the Virgin, Child and saints in sacra conversazione before a golden cloth of honour.  This rapid evolution culminates in the San Marco Altarpiece, painted with Benozzo Gozzoli, with its gold throne, mosaic floor and curtains opening onto a golden sunset over a realistic landscape.  It might almost be dusk falling on a Viennese park in the time of Klimt and Schiele. 

 Fra Angelico assisted by Benozzo Gozzoli,

San Marco Altarpiece, c1438-40

Egon Schiele, Autumn Sun, 1914

I'll be saying more about Fra Angelico in my next post, but I can't leave this specific subject without mentioning one more early Fra Angelico painting where the gold background seems less regal or ornamental than harsh and frightening.  Saint Jerome in the wilderness has often been painted by artists interested in landscape, but here he is shown starkly alone, half in shadow, among bear rocks beneath a molten sky. 

Fra Angelico, Penitent Saint Jerome, c1424

Seashore, Venice Beach

There is a good short article by Will Montgomery in The Wire this month about Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda.  '"The most important thing for my field work is the possibility of describing the experience of landscape," he reports.

"I want to know how to fix the experience of landscape.  It is a different method from using photography to fix it.  We can see the outline of objects clearly in photographs.  But when recording, things are not so clear and it is difficult to distinguish what vibrations travel in the place.  It's like a moving sculpture.  I find many possibilities to connect with perception and recognition.  So I cannot focus only on the aspect of sound or music in my field recordings.  Even if it is not popular as an artwork, I am always pursuing fixing the scenery in my recording work."'

Tsunoda's interest in the experience of landscape has led to some interesting experiments in trying to document objectively a subjective soundscape, like this one described last year on the erstwords blog.

'I am currently making recordings like this: I go to a certain place and choose an object that is interesting to me. I fix a stethoscope with a small built-in air mike onto my temples. The stethoscope captures vibrations of my muscles and blood flows. Because of the nature of the air mike, environmental noises are recorded, too. If the wind blows, some wind sounds are recorded when it passes over my head. The recorded sound is like the sound that is heard when I cover my ears with my fingers. What is this? At this point, I cannot explain this well since my intuition is preceding over my understanding. ... There is no relation among temples, air mike and brain waves. Our brain waves do not stir the air. The position of the air mike can be set anywhere near the ears, but I feel that our temples are the best and only place for that. Is this approach just built on impulse? But I am thinking of developing this idea further...'

Over the years Tsunoda has charted the way sounds vibrate and mutate within different environments, working both in the landscape and the studio.  On his 2005 album Ridge of Undulation, field recordings alternate with the sounds built from layered sine waves and vibrating plates.  Nick Hennies' review on the Hapna site explains that

'through careful editing, Tsunoda can make field recordings sound artificial (e.g. the lock-groove loops within “Seashore, Venice Beach” that are achieved apparently only through volume editing). Thus, he conflates any “essential” difference between the “natural” and the constructed. At the same time, his prepared sonic environments are so closely monitored and manipulated that they approximate and extend effects heard within the field recordings. For example, “An Aluminum plate with low frequencies 1” follows directly after the Venice Beach track and sounds like the wind coming in off the ocean at that location, perhaps as heard from under the tide itself.'

Christmas in Driftwood Valley

'By the time dawn was coming we had scraped two peepholes in the frost on the panes; and we stood quiet to watch the winter sunrise. The radiant peaks of the Driftwoods, cut like white icing into pinnacles and rims against the apple-green sky, were brushed with pink, that, even as we watched, spread down and down and turned to gold. Rays of the rising sun, coming between the pointed firs of the east shore, stretched straight across the white lake, and as they touched it huge crystals, formed by the intense cold, burst into sparkling, scintillating light. The snow-bowed trees of the south and west shores were hung with diamonds; and finally the willows, around our cabin, were decked with jewels as large as robins' eggs that flashed red and green and blue. No Christmas trees decorated by human hands were ever so exquisite as the frosted trees of this northern forest. The sky turned to deep, deep blue, and the white world burst into dazzling, dancing colors as the sun topped the forest. The dippers, undismayed by a cold that froze dumb all other living things, broke into their joyous tinkling melody by the open water patch below the bank. And our first Christmas Day in the wilderness was upon us.'

This is from Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher's account of her months studying plants and animals in north-central British Columbia, Driftwood Valley (1947). You can read a fuller extract in Lorraine Anderson's Sisters of the Earth anthology.

A snowfall on the Esquiline Hill

Masolino, The Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore, c1427-8

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The snow has been melting here and the passage of days has left Kline-like compositions on the ground mapping the departure of vehicles, the clearing of paths and the making of snowmen.  Looking out of the window now it is not clear why certain patches of snow remain, as if they have some special significance. Masolino's central panel for the Santa Maria Maggiore Polyptich shows Pope Liberius marking out the site of the future church after a miraculous summer snowfall on August 5th 352.  The snow had been predicted in a dream shared by the Pope and a rich Roman couple who wanted to donate their wealth to a worthy cause.  In Masolino's painting, snow floats through the golden sky beneath a fleet of clouds that resemble UFOs.  From the largest of them Christ and Mary look down and snowflakes fall more thickly on the place where the new building will rise, a permanent legacy of this fleeting phenomenon.  Later depictions of the legend by artists like Grünewald and Murillo treat the subject more naturalistically and less interestingly.  Today the miracle of the snow is recreated in Santa Maria Maggiore and other churches every year with a shower of flower petals.

Steal softly thru snow

We'll be raising a glass to the memory of Don Van Vliet / Captain Beefheart this evening.  The clip here shows the band in their final incarnation doing 'Ice Cream for Crow' and features examples of the paintings to which he would subsequently devote himself.  At 1:36 and 2:42, for example, you can see canvasses planted in the landscape that clearly inspired them.  Also, about two minutes in, the band start adding pot plants to the desert - a gesture that may well make some significant point about culture and landscape that I ought to be elaborating upon here.

I saw an exhibition of Don Van Vliet's paintings in Brighton back in 1994.  I remember it was hard to be objective about them when you had 'I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby' playing on a TV monitor in a corner.  The exhibition's introduction noted that 'for many years Van Vliet lived in the Mohave Desert before moving more recently to the Northern Californian coast and his palette, with its heavy greens, blues and ochres, is entirely reminiscent of the landscape he inhabits and his concerns for that environment, while his strong use of thick washes of black and white serve to delineate his own interior sensibilities.'

London is completely black and white today, lying in thick cold snow, and has been reminding me of a Captain Beefheart song:

Steal softly thru sunshine
Steal softly thru snow
The wild goose flies from winter
Breaks my heart that I can`t go...

The lanes and fields of Gloucestershire

In talking to others about Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, I have found that those put off by the book's premise, and the accounts of climbing trees and freezing on mountain tops, have nevertheless enjoyed some of its digressions about writers and naturalists.  A section on Ivor Gurney, for example, in Macfarlane's chapter 'Forest', could stand alone as a fascinating short essay.  It charts Gurney's engagement with landscape from pre-war Gloucestershire, to the 'anti-landscape' of Ypres.  Then, back in England, having been shot, gassed and invalided out of the army, Gurney returned to the countryside, taking long walks, often and night, whilst writing and composing prolifically.  But by 1922 he was behaving increasingly oddly and his 'mental state, always precarious, tilted into unbalance...'

There is a poignant description of the visits Edward Thomas's widow Helen made in the late twenties to see Gurney at the mental asylum in Dartford. By that stage 'his madness was so acute that he was able to communicate only briefly with her, and showed little interest in her presence or her association with Edward.  The next time she travelled to Dartford, however, Helen took with her one of her husband's Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire landscape through which both Thomas and Gurney had walked.'  They knelt by the bed and traced out the old routes.  As Helen recalled, Gurney "trod, in a way we who are sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well ... He had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulaiton ... I became for a while the element which brought Edward back to life for him and the country where the two could wander together."

The Ground Aslant

A couple of years ago I mentioned here Harriet Tarlo's essay ‘Radical Landscapes’, in Jacket 32, and went on to describe (briefly, as usual) three poets she featured: Geraldine Monk, Colin Simms and Geoffrey Squires.  In January next year Shearsman are due to release The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, edited by Harriet Tarlo.  In an interesting preview article she argues that this writing cannot easily be contained within the definition of 'post-pastoral' put forward by Terry Gifford (see my earlier post on this).  She also contrasts radical landscape poetry with ecopoetry; given my occasional feelings of guilt that this blog is about landscape rather than ecology, it is quite heartening to read of a new book that is not another collection of environmental poetry.  She writes: 'although some landscape poets may be ecopoets and some ecopoets may be landscape poets, the two are by no means interchangeable. Ecopoetics goes beyond landscape into a wider political and global sphere and landscape poetry goes beyond an exclusive concern with the environment. For instance, the poetry here is still very much concerned with the relationship between the poet and the landscape, an age-old concern of poetry since the Romantic age, whereas some hardcore ecocritics assert that human concerns should be sublimated in ecopoetry. However, we also find some amazing writing about the relationship between the human and the non-human in innovative poetry.'  I am looking forward to reading it.

Palestinian Walks

Palestinian landscape, photographed by me in 1997

I have been reading Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008).  In his introduction, Shehadeh explains that he began taking long walks in the late seventies.  'This was before many of the irreversible changes that blighted the land began to take place.  The hills then were like one large nature reserve with all the unspoiled beauty and freedom unique to such areas.'  He describes walks 'in the hills around Ramallah, in the wadis in the Jerusalem wilderness and through the gorgeous ravines by the Dead Sea.'  But as the book progresses, the landscape changes: settlements grow and walking becomes more difficult, particularly after the construction of the separation barrier around and in the West Bank.  It made we wonder how much of what I saw on a trip to Israel in 1997 would still look as it did then.  I was staying then with an economist working with the Palestinian Authority and in his car, with UN plates, we were able to travel pretty much where we wanted.  I can't find my notes for this trip but have included a few snapshots here (you can tell it's the nineties because I'm wearing a SubPop baseball cap!)

 Masada

In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain said of this 'desolate and unlovely' land: 'Palestine is no more of this work-day world.  It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is a dream-land.'  Thackeray wrote of 'parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys paved with tombstones - a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate ... There is not a spot at which you look, but some violent deed has been done there.'  Raja Shehadeh compares the way these travelers brought with them a Palestine of the mind, where history is more alive than the people around them, to the narratives underpinning the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. Almost despairing at the construction work deforming the hills around Ramellah, Shehadeh takes comfort in the long view: in a land where Crusader castles now lie in ruins he is reminded of Robinson Jeffers' poem 'Carmel Point', in which the rocks endure while the works of humanity eventually dissolve.

Struggling to climb a small boulder in a wadi

(Robert Macfarlane I am not)

Palestinian Walks does provide a sense of the area's beauty, but it is fleeting and there is less nature description than I was expecting.  On each walk Shehadeh is reminded of the politics of the landscape and begins reflecting on his career as a lawyer, opposing the growth of the settlements.  He describes one walk through sun dappled fields to a wadi, where the path leads up through olive groves, partridges scuttle from the path and through 'an abundance of wild flowers mottled with the shadows of the clouds.'  But the earth underfoot begins to feel wet and 'we soon realized that we had walked into the open sewers of the Jewish settlement of Talmon to the north. This settlement might have had a rubbish collection system but it did not have one for treating sewage, which was just disposed of down the valley into land owned by Palestinian farmers.'

The Dead Sea

Thinking back to my visit in 1997, I was also coming with preconceptions - partly from talking to my (future) wife, who had recently lived in the region whilst working with Palestinian refugees, and partly from books.  I remember persuading my traveling companions that we should drive along the shore of The Dead Sea looking for surreal salt landforms, which I vaguely recalled from a Michel Tournier novel, Four Wise Men.  I have just dug my old paperback out and found the part I had been remembering.  In it, Taor, Prince of Mangalore, and his companions make their way downhill, 'at times so steeply that the elephants' feet dislodged great masses of gray earth. By the end of the day, white granular boulders made their appearance.  The travelers examined them.  They proved to be blocks of salt.  Then came a forest thinly settled with white, leafless bushes that seemed covered in frost.  The branches were as brittle as porcelain.  They too were salt.  Finally the sun sank behind the travelers, and in a gap between two mountains they saw a distant patch of metallic blue: the Dead Sea.'  The next day they reach the sea itself and see strange white dots on its surface which turn out to be 'great  mushrooms of white salt, rooted in the bottom and emerging at the top like reefs.'  The men are disgusted by the water, with its salt, magnesia, bromine and naphtha, stinging the eyes and coating the body in crystals of salt.  Only the elephants seem to like it, showering each other with their trunks.  But the next day the travelers find to their horror 'two enormous mushrooms of salt, shaped like elephants ... paralyzed, asphyxiated, crushed under their burden of salt, but safe from the ravages of time for several centuries, several millennia.'

The Westway at night

Chris Petit's road movie Radio On (1979) was for years a film I'd heard about but never seen.  Iain Sinclair mentioned it, in that entertaining Jeffrey Archer chapter of Lights Out for the Territory, and the soundtrack alone made it seem worth trying to track down.  Now you can see it on a BFI DVD where the extras include an interview with Petit and producer Keith Griffiths (who has also worked with Patrick Keiller, the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer), along with the digital video essay radio on (remix) (1998) in which Petit retraced the route taken in the original film.  Returning to his original locations, Petit found, like Simon English in the England Revisited project I mentioned recently, some places unchanged and others completely altered.  The most striking shot in Radio On shows two characters illuminated in the windows of Bristol's Grosvenor Hotel, taken from the Victoria Street flyover - a structure that Petit fund being demolished when he returned in 1998.

Wim Wenders lent Petit his director of photography, Martin Schäfer, and the clip above shows another memorable sequence in which the film's protagonist, Robert B, leaves the Westway Interchange to the sound of David Bowie's 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'. As John Patterson's has written, 'the film is peppered with long, coldly stirring shots from B's clapped-out Rover, moving through a series of defamiliarised, Ballardian English landscapes - the Westway at night, the M4, Hopperesque filling stations in deepest Wiltshire, and what Petit's collaborator Iain Sinclair refers to as "typically featureless Petit fields". Between them Petit and Schäfer attempt to remake our understanding of British urban space, much as Godard discerned contemporary Paris's futuristic foreignness in Alphaville.'

In addition to Bowie, the Radio On soundtrack includes Devo, Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury, along with the more cinematic sounds of Kraftwerk and Robert Fripp ('Urban Landscape' - see below).  Ian Penman wrote an article about the music to accompany the DVD, praising the way Radio On manages to avoid being date-stamped with signifiers.  'Spatially, and sonically, it doesn't feel like a UK film ... It's murky, strung out, hauntological.  Indeed there are long stretches of Radio On when we could be in some comparable backwater in Belgium, or France, or Germany.  Industrial estate, dockside, car park.  Rotterdam or the Ruhr or Weston-super-Mare.  Out of season arcades and signless avenues.  Suburban purgatory.  A DJ playing melancholy rockabilly to bored factory workers in spectral white lab coats - it might be anytime in Britain from the previous 30 years...'

Edinburgh from the Calton Hill

I have recently been wondering if the reason I've focused more on landscapes than nature is the want of a decent pair of binoculars.  A few weeks ago, inspired by my reading of The Running Sky and watching a flock of birds in motion, I was lecturing my wife on how we should pay more attention in autumn to the massing of starlings on the roofs of Stoke Newington.  She agreed, but pointed out that what I was looking at was a group of pigeons.  So I've resolved to get some binoculars for myself for Christmas (does anyone have any tips?)  Armed with these I shall be full of New Year's resolutions to get out and study the birds of the Lee Valley, the flora of Clissold Park and the architectural details of Hackney.

J. Wells after Robert Barker, Panorama of Edinburgh 

from the Calton Hill (detail), c. 1800

There is a great essay in Kathleen Jamie's book Findings called 'Skylines' in which she takes a telescope up to Calton Hill in Edinburgh to study the city from above, looking at the spires and domes, inscriptions and statues, clocks and weather vanes.  'The city sends up noise and fumes, and also the symbols of the day, the zeitgeist cast in shining brass and lifted skyward.'  Among the roofs she sees an eight-pointed star, an arrow, a trident, a moon, a red lion, a pelican, five different cockerels.  In the old days of the city, 'before every scrap of land was built on and cities became slums, what was raised up high were cockerels.'  Later generations would elevate allegorical sculptures, great Victorian crosses, aerials and telephone masts.  Now, after centuries of urban development, the newest building visible from Calton Hill has on its roof (invisible from the ground) a garden.

Limestone

Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, which I described in an earlier post, was originally part of a collection called Bunte Steine (Coloured Stones) (1853).  The other stories were Granite, Limestone, Tourmaline, Muscovite and Moonmilk - how great would it be to have an English translation of the full collection?  I'd imagine the theme of coloured stones would be as likely to draw readers in now as it did a hundred and fifty years ago.  You can at least find some of the individual stories translated elsewhere - Limestone, for example, is available in Penguin's much-less enticingly titled Brigitta and other Tales, translated by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly.

Limestone is no more about limestone than Rock Crystal is about rock crystal - the story was originally titled 'The Poor Benefactor' - but of course being Stifter the rocky landscape in the story is a constant presence.  Watanabe-O'Kelly writes that landscape in Stifter functions 'variously as man's best teacher, as his moral amphitheatre but also as a symbol of his most insoluble problems and as an inimical and destructive force ...  The priest in Limestone learns to see and love the unpropitious karst which most people find hideous.  Here he finds his moral purpose, yet the karst, like himself, is hiding something, for all its flora and fauna are to be found only by attentive searching in little cracks in the stones.  At the same time this very landscape can erupt in a thunderstorm which both at the time and in its after-effects can bring death.'

Adalbert Stifter's stories seem to offer a gentle, enjoyable form of escapism and Watanabe-O'Kelly notes that 'the fatal combination of pine-trees and apple-cheeked country children ... convinced generations of readers that Stifter was a charming chronicler of the countryside and nothing more.'  But, as Thomas Mann wrote, 'it has only rarely been noticed that behind the quiet, inward exactitude of his descriptions of nature in particular there is a predilection for the excessive, the elemental and the catastrophic, the pathological.'  His stories have that combination of gentleness and oddness that I appreciate in later writers like Robert Walser.  The priest in Limestone, along with other Stifter characters like the rich eccentric who finds love in The Forest Path (1845), are descendants of Peter Schlemihl and similar figures in earlier Romantic Novellen: misfits who 'see better than those that fit in.'

Precipices, mountains, wolves, torrents, rumblings

Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait, c1647

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Salvator Rosa exhibition about to finish at Dulwich and transfer to the Kimbell seeks to show that Rosa is more than simply synonymous with the "precipices, mountains, wolves, torrents, rumblings" that Horace Walpole famously saw on his journey through the Alps in 1739.  The exhibition begins with a room of portraits, including one of the most arresting paintings in the National Gallery which I'd always taken to be a self-portrait (there is now some doubt).  It shows a brooding young philosopher with tousled hair and furrowed brow, holding a Latin inscription: "Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence."  Nearby was the Met's Rosa self-portrait (not in doubt) where he bears a passing resemblance to Russell Brand.  Rosa was famous for his spontaneous wit and lively character 'with a skill in repartee and improvisation that enchanted and astonished his companions'.  In her biographical essay in the catalogue Helen Langdon describes him shining at conversation, poetry and theatrical performance, although he could take the humour too far on occasions - the reaction to a satirical comedy attacking the playwright Ottavio Castelli and Rome's greatest artist, Bernini, may have contributed to Rosa's decision to leave for Florence in 1640.  Three years later Rosa's performance on stage in Pisa was reported to have been so funny that the audience was 'in danger of bursting, or meeting some such similar mishap.'  Writing of his friend Rosa's performance in another role, Lorenzo Lippi, a poet-painter 'of vivacious and fiery spirit' who excelled as swordsman and dancer and shared with Rosa a passion for practical jokes, declared that 'whenever he moves or speaks / he dislocates the audience's jaws.' 

Away from the city, Rosa indulged in more cultivated pursuits at various Tuscan villas, 'reading "good books", enjoying festive meals with amusing friends, taking the air in the late evening, and then, after dinner, discussing topics that had arisen from their morning's reading' (Helen Langdon, paraphrasing Baldinucci).  A letter written to Ascanio della Penna quotes Guarini's praise of wild countryside in Pastor Fido (1590) and describes life at the Maffei villa where 'freed from worry, they read philosophy by the water and shade of the banks of the streams, and sometimes climb a mountain to satirize the follies of the world beneath.'  But Rosa also used his walks to find inspiration for paintings - at the Maffei villa at Monterufoli he could see rocks, ravines, cliffs, gorges and distant crags.  The poets of Florence praised Rosa's landscape paintings for the way they created a whole world, mixing pastoral beauty with more frightening prospects.  Paganino Gaudenzio said such works "sweetly transported souls and hearts" whilst Antonio Abati wrote that "who gazes at them, remains enchanted."

Rosa continued to seek out what would later be thought of as Romantic landscapes and in 1662 was in the Appenines, where he wrote a letter praising the rugged countryside and remarking on the desolate hermitages visible from the road.  The exhibition at Dulwich has three of Rosa's hermit paintings, where the small figures are seen dwarfed by inhospitable surroundings and, in contrast to Renaissance paintings of saints in the wilderness, there are no glimpses of distant fields and cities. The church at the time was seeking to make links with early Christianity and the hermit motif was pursued by other artists in addition to Salvator Rosa (Philippe de Champaigne, for example).  Roman aristocrats like the Chigi, Altieri and Colonna had hermitages built in their private palaces  - Cardinal Flavio Chigi was so enthusiastic he had three - and they all bought paintings from Salvator Rosa.  

Stories about about the lives of the saints were popularised in Paolo Bozzi's novel Tebaide Sacra, which described penitent monks in rugged Rosa landscapes.  Other writers were talking about the wildness of nature more directly, like Carlo de' Dottori, whose L'Appenino includes "a horrid scene" on a steep mountain path, looking down on a dark misty valley and a sheer drop over the precipice.  Helen Langdon also quotes Daniello Bartoli's L'Uomo al punto di Morte, which evokes the sort of elemental landscape seen in Rosa's late works, like Tobias and the Angel (below), where the figures seem menaced by the powers of nature.  After walking through woods, valleys and fields, Bartoli's man comes to 'a forest, bare and solitary; a desert and wilderness more than a countryside; an earth that is dead and desolate, with mountain crags and rocky alps opposite' and torrents of water cascading off them "con piacere di orrore a vederli" - provoking a feeling of pleasurable horror.

Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, c1670

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Green and brown landscapes in conversation

Apart from citing a few writers like Jonathan Bate, I haven't written much here about ecocriticism.  However, much interesting writing on landscape is now done within this academic discipline, so I thought I'd do a post here that provides a bit of background.  In The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) Laurence Buell traces the history of ecocriticism in overlapping phases:

• Precursors  - It is possible to look back to early books on literature and the environment, e.g. in the US Norman Foerster's Nature in American Literature (1923) or even Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836).  But two influential texts that stand out as having influenced later writing in Britain and American respectively were Raymond Williams' the Country and the City (1973) and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (1964).

• Influences - Of the many intellectual influences on ecocriticism, Buell cites three in particular.  The first is Darwin, whose work displaced the privileged position for homo sapiens.  The second is Aldo Leopold, whose 'land ethic' gives rights to non-human life and asked the reader to 'think like a mountain.'  And the third is 'modern continental thought' - specifically Arne Naess, inventor of deep ecology, Heidegger, and phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard.

•  First Wave Ecocriticism - Ecocriticism proper is seen as originating in work that were influenced directly by the ecology movement, starting in the USA with Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1972) which set out the idea that comedy adapts us to the natural world whereas tragedy estranges us from it.  In Britain Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology (1991) challenged the view that Wordsworth's nature poetry was simply a refuge from politics and society.  First wave ecocriticism sought an alliance with environmental science, partly as a corrective to cultural relativism, although at the same time other strands (particularly within ecofeminism) were suspicious of scientism.  Early ecocriticism focused mainly on nature writing and was clearly aligned with efforts to conserve the earth and expose pollution. The representative anthology is Glotfelty and Fromm's The Ecocriticism Reader (1996).

• Second Wave Ecocriticism - There is no clear distinction, but towards the end of the last century ecocriticism broadened its scope, spreading to all forms of text with an environmental interest.  In terms of contemporary writers, interest was extended beyond the likes of Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams to writers like Linda Hogan, Chickasaw author of novels dealing in tribal and environmental issues like Mean Spirit (1990), Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998).  The distinction between natural and built environments is now seen as less clear cut.  Buell writes that between his first book on The Environmental Imagination (1995) and his second Writing for an Endangered World (2001) he moved to the view that 'a mature environmental aesthetics - or ethics, or politics - must take into account the interpenetration of metropolis and outback, of anthropocentric as well as biocentric concerns.'  An anthology that mixes this newer approach with direct political analysis is The Environental Justice Reader (2002).  However, Buell is careful to stress that all strands of ecocriticism are still active and environmental justice concerns have not, for example, replaced criticism inspired by deep ecology.

Buell's book is by no means the only recent discussion of ecocriticism and you need go no further than the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) website for a whole stack of PDFs examining the field and discussing its evolution - the most recent, at time of writing, is Loretta Johnson's 'Greening the Library: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism'.  The one book on the subject I would most recommend is Greg Gerrard's excellent Ecocriticism (2004).  In the concluding chapter he cites Laurence Buell's Writing for an Endangered World among examples of contemporary 'hybridized reading practices' and welcomes its inclusion of urban writers like Dickens and Dreiser alongside the likes of Robinson Jeffers and Wendell Berry.  As Buell himself writes, the aim of this was to 'reckon more fully with the interdependence between urban and outback landscapes' and put “‘green’ and ‘brown’ landscapes, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with one another.”