Ecocritical Musicology as a Key to Understanding Grieg's Music

The importance of music in the relationship with the landscape or the environment has been variously evoked by musicians since ancient Greece. Music was not only intended as an imitation of nature, but attempted to evoke it, or even to represent it. A critical attention to the ability of music to convey a specific representation of the relationship between human and nature (or environment), has led researchers to provide interesting elements for the interpretation of the music of important composers of the past. This research, the result of an interdisciplinary study that has combined musicological ecocritics and musical analysis, tries to explore the music of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and its integration and understanding through rhetoric in the context of the environment in which the author lived and that influenced his compositional style. With the analysis of the Lyric Piece op. 54 No. 1 (Gjetergut) the relationships between composer, sound, music, culture and natural world are highlighted: a bridge suspended between multiple identities that are expressed through sound language.