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<jats:p>Mendelssohn's overture The Hebrides or Fingal's Cave is regularly considered the musical landscape (or seascape) painting par excellence. Scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the wide horizons, delicate nuances of changing color and light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and freedom of the sea. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of this idea of musical landscape since the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn's archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn's overture, uncovering his music's implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn's work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The traditional musicological perspective on Chopin's slow, minor-key mazurkas and mazurka sections—that he modeled these episodes on the kujawiak, a Polish folk dance from Kujawy region — is plagued by contradictory statements. Re-evaluation of source material reveals that the kujawiak, as it is understood in relation to Chopin's mazurkas, is largely a creation of Polish nationalism after Chopin's time. In Chopin's own time, the term kujawiak is used only sporadically and appears to be interchangeable with mazur; by the end of the nineteenth century, however, the kujawiak becomes an important marker of Polishness for which authors offer specific but widely diverging musical characterizations. It is around this time that writers also begin to emphasize the kujawiak's impact on Chopin's mazurkas, forging a persistent link between this imagined “national dance” and his compositions. In place of these vague and conflicting constructs, it is proposed that Chopin used the slow mazurka—the kind widely but anachronistically called the kujawiak—to summon nostalgia for the spatially and temporally distant (and mythical) Poland, through musical styles and gestures that include reminiscence and allusion; auditory distancing; disruptions of form and genre; and surface distortions. Nostalgia as a cultural and medical concept also provides a prism through which his contemporaries perceived Chopin's illness, his experience in exile, and his music.</jats:p>

<jats:p>A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article examines the musical, literary, and theatrical practice of a group of early German modernists — above all Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind. All of them turn to dance, its unmediated physicality, and its erotic charge to articulate a response to Richard Wagner's theatrical project, specifically the concept of the total work of art. Although Wagner had included a few ballet numbers in his mature operas, he treated the form (and the number as such) as a threat to a specifically operatic plenitude of sensuous meaning—dance, he feared, threatened to dance music and drama right off the stage. I argue that this allowed certain post-Wagnerians to interrogate Wagner's aesthetic through the category of obscenity — the dancer who, by dint of her brute physicality, could disturb and misalign theatrical spectacle became an important figure in their art. After a planned collaboration on a number of ballets came to naught, Strauss and Wedekind each turned to their native media to stage and interrogate balletic forms: Strauss through the medium-scrambling Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé, Wedekind by inserting his ballet drafts into a strange novella, Minehaha, Or on the Bodily Education of Young Girls. Strauss's collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which was to prove far more consequential and productive than the one with Wedekind, likewise began with an abortive ballet draft, and again came to reflect on dance's role in other media (opera and theater, in this case). Their reflections on the role of dance in operatic and theatrical spectacle find their expression in Elektra's final dance, which turns on its head the mysterious persuasiveness that Wagner had feared in dance and that Wedekind and Strauss had used to such effect in Salomé: a dance so expressive no one is moved by it.</jats:p>