In mid- to late-1960s America and Britain, against the backdrop of escalating socio-political disappointment, countercultural ideologies and fantasies of a musical youth dovetailed with improvements in recording technologies to generate new sonic languages of limning in sound utopian pastoral spaces to which recordists and listeners could escape, virtually. Seeking alternative spaces that their alternative identities could more comfortably inhabit became a central project of many progressive groups and individuals, often, but not always, hailing from middle-class white society. The cultural and musical trends did eventually have a global sway. Coeval advances in sound recording and reproduction technologies made musical recordings a major avenue through which the sought spaces were limned and even materialized sonically, but other media, especially album cover art and film in conjunction with musical soundtracks, provided additional avenues for pastoral spatial projects of this generation and afford us ancillary resources for better understanding these projects. While the specific utopian spatial projects and the underlying ideologies of musicians working in various branches of country rock, soft rock, progressive country, progressive bluegrass, art rock, Afrocentric avant-garde jazz, and proto-New Age music were not always exactly the same, there were considerable overlaps in the societal sources of their disaffections, the wellsprings of their inspiration, and in the textural sonic languages they developed in the recording studio. Unlike music with overtly spatial projects, the sonic aspects of music that subtly captures a hyper-real sense of the natural have remained underconsidered and their contribution to the aesthetic and psychological impact of music has slipped by under the radar of most listeners' conscious attention. This dissertation, then, is an attempt to analyze the subtle acoustic and musical communicative codes devised by musicians and recordists that do inform later music. Through close listening and textual analysis, this dissertation identifies the different levels at which spatial allusions are encoded into a musical product. Ethnographic interviews help distinguish between deliberate manipulations of studio technology and responses based in tacit understandings thereof. An overall cross disciplinary approach, borrowing especially from acoustics and psychoacoustics, aided me substantially with the analyses. / text

Throughout the history of Western Music, composers have written works on rural and agricultural subjects. The first half of this dissertation examines a number of important works from the Baroque era through the present day and the composers who have chosen this specialized subject matter. Rural communities are underserved where the arts are concerned. Yet, rural audiences have perhaps the best chance at identifying with the subjects of this particular subset of vocal art music. The second half of this dissertation examines reasons why it is important to reach rural communities with vocal art music. Four sample recital programs appropriate for rural audiences are included.

British musical style changed dramatically after 1880 primarily due to factors which may be subsumed under the general heading of nationalism. This change from an essentially Germanic style has been termed the British musical renaissance by many writers on the subject. Within this new musical language, several distinctive substyles arose. One of these, British pastoral style, has been alluded to by Frank Howes and others, but these allusions do not contribute to an understanding of the works purportedly belonging to that style. It is the purpose of this study to define British pastoral style and examine its relation to the British musical renaissance. The method employed for defining style will be that of Jan LaRue's as described in his Guidelines for Style Analysis. What is British pastoral style? Judging from the literature, British pastoral style is a type of British music written between 1900 and 1950 which evokes pastoral images, especially those associated with the British landscape. A stylistic analysis of selected works will define British pastoral style through enumeration and discussion of the style's musical constituents. A more refined definition of British pastoral style is achieved by an in-depth analysis of E. J. Moeran's Fantasy Quartet, which represents a large portion of British pastoral music, that is, works featuring the oboe. Finally, an examination of British pastoral style's relation to the British musical renaissance will reveal reasons for this particular manifestation of British musical style.

This study's thesis is that instances of pastoralism in the works of Frank Bridge from 1914 to 1930 demonstrate a gradual darkening of his pastoral vision, and evince his increasingly complex relationship with the genre of pastoral music that flourished in English music in the early twentieth century (referred to in this study as 'the English pastoral tradition'). The study traces the change from the sensual and romantic idyll of Summer (1914-15), through progressively more ambiguous and darker manifestations of pastoral, and eventually to a bleak anti-pastoral vision in Oration (1930). This trend reflects Bridge's increasingly ambivalent relationship with the English musical establishment, his own radical change of musical language during these years, and significant changes in his personal circumstances. It also reflects the decline of romanticism and the rise of modernism in English music, a paradigm-shift that happened around the time of World War I, considerably later than in the music, literature and visual art of continental Europe. Chapters 1 to 3 examine the English pastoral tradition from three different contexts. Chapter 1 suggests that the English pastoral tradition may be understood as a genre, and describes a number of 'family resemblances' that run through and characterise it. Second, the English pastoral tradition is placed in the context of pastoral art from Classical times to the twentieth century, with a focus on pastoral in English literature. Finally, chapter 3 examines the social and cultural context of the English pastoral tradition and explores resonances between English society in the early twentieth century and the meaningstructures that underpin pastoral. The remaining chapters comprise a series of analytical discussions of six of Frank Bridge's works: Summer (1914-5), the first of the Two Poems (1915), Enter Spring (1926-7), There is a willow grows aslant a brook (1927), Rhapsody-Trio (1928) and Oration (1930). While a variety of analytical techniques are employed, the approach is broadly semiotic and focussed on musical meaning. Each analysis traces the relationships between signifying structures in the works and various musical and non-musical strands of the contextualising cultural discourse. As a result the works become the starting points for relatively wide-ranging discussions in which pastoralism in the music of Frank Bridge is understood as a site at which ideas of English nationalism and international modernism engaged with one another. Frank Bridge's place in this discourse, as revealed in the analyses of his works, becomes increasingly ambivalent and modernist.