About the Emergence of an Environmental and Ecological Perspective in 20th Century Music: Some Reflections on Gustav Mahler and Olivier Messiaen

Abstract This article examines the emergence of a new ecological aesthetic and environmental pedagogy in the 20th century music through the works of Olivier Messiaen and Gustav Mahler. Both composers display affinities in their inspiration to nature and to the sound of nature. The monumental dimension of Mahler’s Third Symphony (1893-96) – which conceives the symphonic form as a gigantic world, proceeding vertically from terrestrial nature to God – is similar to the cosmic program of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie (1946-48). The two musicians share a similar romantic adherence to the myth of nature, which rejects the degradation of urban space and the anthropocentrism. Messiaen, after 1950, distancing himself from the serial avantgarde, achieves a radical, integral naturalism in works such as Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-58) and Chronocromie (1960) where a musical reinvention of birdsong becomes fundamental. This evolution is parallel in the 1970s with a new ecoaesthetics and ecological pedagogy which is affirmed, among others, in the works and in the educational model of Raymond Murray Schafer. The new musical ecocentrism is an expression of the crisis of the anthropocentrism of the avantgarde and shows the rise of a new postmodern perspective on the relationship between man and nature.