1 Any survey of the secondary literature on the picturesque ought to start with Hussey, Christopher, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Cass, 1967)Google Scholar. Hussey was the first twentieth-century writer to conduct research on the picturesque (in the 1920s). He had excellent picturesque credentials: he was the grandson of Edward Hussey, who designed Scotney Castle in Kent on picturesque principles in the early nineteenth century. Hussey grew up there and inherited the property. See also Hipple, Walter John, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957)Google Scholar. Malcolm Andrews and John Dixon Hunt did much to renew interest in the picturesque and inspire a new wave of scholarship in a range of disciplines. See Andrews, Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1989)Google Scholar and Hunt, John Dixon, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Among the most recent literature on the picturesque see also Copley, Stephen and Garside, Peter, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Landscape, Literature and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Ross, Stephanie, What Gardens Mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 An exception is Wheelock, John, An Essay on the Beauties and Excellencies of Painting, Music and Poetry, Pronounced at the Anniversary Commencement at Dartmouth College (Hartford: Eben. Watson, 1774), 5–8Google Scholar. Wheelock is something of a rogue voice. His short paper talks of all three forms as ‘sister arts’, although he elevates music to a more ‘noble’ level than painting as it can both ‘enrapture the martial mind with glowing thoughts for victory’ and ‘inflame the friendly mind with sympathy and compassion’.

3 I have deliberately referred to the picturesque movement as an ‘English’ phenomenon, since much of the writing on the subject, and the picturesque arts discussed then and now, originated there. As a consequence, it is music in England, not Britain, that is the concern of this project. Where I have referred to Britain, it is to account for the fact that much important and influential writing on aesthetics was done by Scots and to allow for the emerging interest in Scottish and Welsh beauty spots at the end of the eighteenth century (locations that were none the less sought out, and discussed as picturesque wonders, by Englishmen).

4 On these and other pastoral tropes see Alpers, Paul, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Toliver, Harold, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the semiotics of the pastoral in eighteenth-century music see Monelle, Raymond, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, especially 35–94 and 186–204. Several literary scholars have addressed the relationships between pastoral and picturesque; see, for instance, Aubin, Robert, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1936), 16Google Scholar; Jung, Sandro, Poetic Meaning in the Eighteenth-Century Poems of Mark Akenside and William Shenstone (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2002), 181Google Scholar; and Watson, J. R., Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1970), 11Google Scholar. Ann Bermingham's categories of the ‘rustic’ and the ‘topographical’ are also relevant here; see Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 10Google Scholar.

5 The pastoral represents (even more than a sense of place) a state of mind, an artistic rejection of the iniquities of the city. The arch neoclassicist Alexander Pope was forever stressing his splendid isolation in Twickenham (today, of course, as much a part of the metropolis as Trafalgar Square, despite the riverside setting and the tranquillity of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill). Some scholars see the pastoral as imaginary and idealistic (Terry Eagleton) or simply as a metaphor (Michael Spitzer) – useful notions when comparing it to the picturesque, which was more grounded in the materiality of actual landscapes. See Terry Eagleton, ‘England's Dreaming’, The Guardian, 1 July 2011 (review of Roy Strong's Visions of England) <www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/visions-of-england-roy-strong-review> (29 May 2012) and Spitzer, Michael, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 208Google Scholar. For John Barrell, the picturesque is a version of ‘anti-pastoral’ inasmuch as it resists notions of the countryside as a resource and instead concentrates on charming or elevating visual images; Barrell, John and Bull, John, eds, The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 297Google Scholar.

6 Price, Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; And, On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpouse [sic] of Improving Real Landscape, volume 3 (London: J. Mawman, 1810), 153–155Google Scholar.

7 Price, , Essays on the Picturesque, volume 1 (London: Robson, 1796), 56Google Scholar.

8 Sime, John, Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Methuen, 1904), 36Google Scholar. Reynolds had in turn adapted these terms from Cicero, who wrote of the great, middle and plain styles, as had Addison, Joseph in the third of his Essays on Taste and the Pleasures of the Imagination from The Spectator (London: John Taylor, 1834)Google Scholar. On this subject see also Roger Barnett Larsson, ‘The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought in Britain’ (PhD dissertation, State University of New York Buffalo, 1980), 9 and 27, and Ross, What Gardens Mean, 174.

9 Crotch, William, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music: Read in the University of Oxford and in the Metropolis, by William Crotch, ed. Rainbow, Bernarr (Clarabricken: Boethius, 1986), 40–70Google Scholar.

10 For example, Peter Brown's reading of Haydn's ‘Drum Roll’ Symphony claims that the juxtaposition of the sublime introduction with the otherwise ‘ornamental’ (Crotch's synonym for the musical picturesque) first-movement Allegro is an example of the picturesque acting as a foil to the sublime, wherein sublime gestures mark enhanced climaxes. He cites the contrapuntal development in the second movement of Symphony No. 99 as a further example of this stylistic mix, ‘sublime in treatment, ornamental in content’. See Brown, A. Peter, ‘The Sublime, The Beautiful and the Ornamental: English Aesthetic Currents and Haydn's London Symphonies’, in Studies in Music History Presented to H. C. Robbins Landon on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Biba, Otto and Wyn Jones, David (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 44–71Google Scholar.

11 Richards, Annette, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

12 Richards thus continues with the kinds of approaches that have characterized musicological work on the Kantian sublime in the music of Haydn – research that has generally led to considerations of some late eighteenth-century Viennese works as non-mimetic conduits to elevated thoughts and experience, independent of preconceived narratives. Among a large literature on the late eighteenth-century musical sublime see Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Recalling the Sublime: The Logic of Creation in Haydn's Creation’, Eighteenth-Century Music 6/1 (2009), 41–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramer, Richard, Unfinished Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 153–170Google Scholar; and Webster, James, ‘The Creation, Haydn's Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime’, in Haydn and his World, ed. Sisman, Elaine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 58–102Google Scholar.

13 That music figured ‘movement’ and ‘motion’ was, for the majority of eighteenth-century British critics on music, its only imitative facet. See Neubauer, John, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 152–157Google Scholar.

14 See Larsson, ‘The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque’, 154–155. Likewise, the poet Anna Seward, when recording her reactions to music by Handel heard during the third commemoration in 1786, expressed surprise at the ‘picturesque effect of the choruses, which caused the ear to perform the office of all the other senses’ (my italics). See McVeigh, Simon, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 24–25Google Scholar.

15 On the eighteenth-century concept of the characteristic see Will, Richard, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Today, more popular uses of the term ‘picturesque’ in reference to music (in programme notes and textbooks, for example) use the term where perhaps ‘pictorial’ might be better, since it is seldom contextualized as an Enlightenment aesthetic or a category described by Price or Crotch. See, for instance, Andreas Friesenhagen, ‘Es werde Licht!’, liner notes to recording of Die Schöpfung by the Freiburger Barockorchester and Rias Kammerchor, conducted by René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi HMC 992039.40, 2009).

16 Histories of English music, such as those by John Caldwell and Roger Fiske, have attempted to address the poor coverage of the period between 1700 and 1900. Even here, the tone can be apologetic or even at times despairing. Caldwell, John, The Oxford History of English Music, volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Fiske, Roger, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

17 Many composers of continental European descent resided in England for the greater part of their lives, yet they were often employed for the reason of their ‘foreignness’ and were perceived as ‘imports’ long after they had settled in England. For the purposes of this study, if a composer was born in England, or to English parents – even if extensive musical education was gained abroad – I describe them as ‘English’ (thus Stephen Storace was English; Muzio Clementi was not).

18 Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language, 74. In France in 1779, Boyé had argued against musical mimesis by saying that the imitation of nature was not music's goal and that music could only be memorable, never ‘pittoresque’; see Ellis, Katherine, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This was a view endorsed thirty years earlier by Abbé Charles Batteaux; see Le Huray, Peter and Day, James, eds, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3Google Scholar.

19 Beattie, James, Essay on Poetry and Music, As They Affect the Mind; On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition; On the Usefulness of Classical Learning, third edition (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1779), 119–120Google Scholar.

20 James Harris, ‘A Discourse Concerning Music, Painting and Poetry’, from Three Treatises Concerning Art, excerpts of which appear in Lippman, Edward, ed., Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, volume 1: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Pendragon, 1986), 177–184Google Scholar.

21 Cited in Barry, Kevin, Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 102Google Scholar. Twining, with his unusual preference for instrumental music, was to go further in pursuing the idea of music's being suggestive, signifying in a way that the listener could respond to subjectively. Music was, in his view, a starting-point – a basis for negotiation and a vessel of psychological activity. See Barry, Language, Music and the Sign, 94–104.

22 See Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language, 151–166.

23 The awkward nature of the picturesque as a category is observed by Stephen Copley and Peter Garside in the Introduction to The Politics of the Picturesque, 1.

24 The principal texts here are Gilpin, William, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792)Google Scholar; Knight, Richard Payne, An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805)Google Scholar; Repton, Humphry, The Art of Landscape Gardening (London: Archibald Constable, 1907)Google Scholar. Christopher Hussey speaks of painting and poetry as being ‘infected’ with the picturesque. He wryly reports that poetry had ‘had the picturesque’ but recovered from it. See The Picturesque, 5.

25 This is a phrase that crops up repeatedly in English theatre of the time, the oak being a symbol of English fortitude. The implication is that the land is guarded by the sturdy oak and that England is thus resistant to invasion.

26 In the first half of the century, however, the influence of Virgil and Horace on English poets such as Pope and Thomson was manifest. But Thomson in particular believed that he lived in an age of Augustan glory that had arrived within the borders of England. See Barrell and Bull, eds, The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse, 295. George Cowper's poetry, especially in ‘The Task’, takes a topographical approach, ranging widely over a series of scenes as the speaker walks through the landscape. The scenes are frames and prompts for Cowper's moral and political reflections, which distinguish his poetry from the observational, topographical verse of, for instance, Mark Akenside or John Cunningham. See Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 649Google Scholar. On the move away from imagined and idealistic classical landscapes towards the recording of national scenes in the wake of the establishment of the Royal Academy, see Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 4 and 11–13.

27 Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 11. See also Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 2003), chapter 4Google Scholar. Colley argues that a sense of national identity and patriotism grew steadily through the eighteenth century, particularly through changing attitudes to art. This growing national confidence, she argues, was caused in part by Britain's expanding empire and resulting influence on the world stage, as well as increasing self-consciousness in the face of more frequent encounters with others, both at home and abroad.

28 Dabney Townsend sees this as a move away from an allegorical register, indicating a rejection of the idealization of nature, towards a more immediate Lockean psychology; see ‘The Picturesque’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/4 (1997), 366Google Scholar.

29 See Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 41–50, and Hunt, John Dixon, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 41–43Google Scholar. The ruined abbey at Netley on Southampton Water was a case in point. Much discussed in print, notably by the poet Thomas Gray, Netley became the backdrop for an opera by William Shield.

30 Aubin, Topographical Poetry, 51.

31 J. R. Watson, Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry, 37–38.

32 Some literary critics are reluctant to unite pastoral and topographical verse under the same heading. John Barrell convincingly explains the observational technique of Thomson's The Seasons in terms of the planar structure found in the landscape paintings of the seventeenth-century artist Claude Lorrain. Claude figures prominently in eighteenth-century literature on the picturesque: his name was even given to a handheld mirror for use in the field, the ‘Claude glass’. Yet Barrell prefers not to associate Thomson's poetry with the picturesque, despite his later reception – even though Barrell refers to the English ‘picturesque poets’ (though without making it clear which ones belonged in the group). He does indicate, though, that the picturesque poetry he has in mind is of inferior quality, echoing Gray's (and, later, Wordsworth's) contempt for ‘mere’ description without moral or psychological underpinning. See Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 50–63, 79Google Scholar.

33 Hagstrum, Jean, ‘Description and Reflection in Gray's Elegy’, in Pre-Romanticism in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Watson, J. R. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 157Google Scholar. More recently, the work of Sandro Jung has shone a light on the marginal figures of Akenside and Shenstone (the latter a favourite poet among English song composers) and their rejection of the Augustan idea of nature as a ‘background to the celebration of man's importance within the context of creation’. Akenside and Shenstone made nature itself their focus; Shenstone explained that this writing was elegiac rather than pastoral. See Jung, Poetic Meaning, 87 and 181.

34 A Collection of Glees, Canons and Catches by the Late J. W. Callcott Selected and Arranged with a Memoir of the Author by William Horsley, volume 1 (London, 1824), 15Google Scholar. The growth of scenic print-collecting, and the clamour for travel guides that went hand in hand with a new culture of tourism, was part of the same trend.

35 See Robins, Brian, Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 149Google Scholar. The glee composer R. J. S. Stevens apparently received advice on poetry from Lord Thurlow, Alderman Birch and a ‘Dr Relph’; see Cudworth, Charles, ‘Two Georgian Classics: Arne and Stevens’, Music and Letters 45/2 (1964), 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The ‘memoir’ of Callcott by Horsley records that a ‘Judge Hardinge’ recommended Gray's poem ‘Thyrsis’ to ‘Dr Callcott, Dr Cooke and Mr Danby’; see Horsley, Memoir, 14.

36 See Robins, Catch and Glee Culture, 13. Fanny Burney's diaries recount an occasion at the Devizes residence of Henry Hoare (owner of Stourhead) when a game of cards was interrupted by one of Hoare's guests playing the overture to La buona figliuola on the pianoforte. See The Diary of Fanny Burney, ed. Gibbs, Lewis (London: Dent, 1950), 46Google Scholar.

37 It may appear paradoxical that songs about the countryside should find their primary outlet in urban settings. But, as Tim Fulford has observed, picturesque tourism was an interest that involved many city dwellers. Further, in the second half of the eighteenth century, mobility between the town and the country had much increased. Poets, composers, singers and club members would be all too aware of the difference between the two. (See Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, 117.) Indeed, Humphry Repton and William Wordsworth were critical of townsfolk who thought that they could adapt to life in the countryside.

38 Argent, Mark, ed., Recollections of R. J. S. Stevens: An Organist in Georgian London (London: Macmillan, 1992), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Callcott's setting of William Collins's ‘Ode to Thomson’ suggests that glee composers' attitude to poetry and poets was more than merely utilitarian.

39 The ‘Lunar Men’, a group of scientists and artists, were mutually fascinated by astronomy and the poetic possibilities of the theme of night; see Fraser, David, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society: An Essay on the Artist's Connections with Science and Industry’, in Wright of Derby, ed. Egerton, Judy (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 15–24Google Scholar.

40 For McVeigh, this places the glee in a negative light, ‘as pastoral charm lapsed into the sentimental’; Concert Life, 139.

41 Knapp, J. Merrill, ‘Samuel Webbe and the Glee’, Music and Letters, 33/4 (1952), 346–351CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Bacchanalian verse of the Greek poet Anacreon made him a heroic figure for the glee club members; banquets and drinking sessions were common at club meetings. One prominent London club was dubbed The Anacreontic Society; see Robins, Catch and Glee Culture, chapter 4. Emanuel Rubin has cautioned that ‘pastoral’ is too broad a term to apply to all glee settings of poetry concerned with matters of the natural world; see The English Glee in the Reign of George III: Participatory Art Music for an Urban Society (Warren: Harmonie Park, 2003), 195Google Scholar.

42 Rubin, The English Glee, 31–33.

43 See Rubin, The English Glee, 226–228.

44 Hullah, John, ‘Glee’, in Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Grove, George (London: Macmillan, 1900), 598Google Scholar.

45 Jackson, William, Observations on the Present State of Music in London (Dublin, 1791), 14Google Scholar. Jackson's objection appears to be that glee textures were harmonically conceived, either with three- to six-part block harmonies or three- to six-part counterpoint. On the previous page of the Observations, Jackson praises English opera composers for allowing simple melody to shine. Perhaps this coloured his low opinion of glees: denouncing the genre, he complained of the ‘numerous doleful Ditties with which our Benefit-Concerts are so sorely afflicted’. Rubin detects a move away from the kind of ‘particular expression’ to which Jackson refers as the eighteenth century came to an end – a sign, for Rubin, of the emergence of the glee from the aesthetic paradigm of the madrigal; see The English Glee, 215.

46 See Knapp, ‘Samuel Webbe and the Glee’, 350–353.

47 Ritson, Joseph, ‘A Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song’, in A Selection of English Songs with their Original Airs, the Second Edition with Additional Songs and Occasional Notes by Thomas Park, volume 1 (London, 1813), xciGoogle Scholar.

48 This glee was performed at The Freemason's Hall on 6 January 1791 as part of the second concert in the Academy of Ancient Music's 1790–1791 series; see McVeigh, Concert Life, 244. In The World (31 January 1794) ‘a clergyman’ contributed a poem after hearing Charles Knyvett (a pupil of Webbe and Cooke, and a well-known singer in London circles) and his three sons sing this glee. The poem included the words ‘Hear Nature's voice, hear souls impassion'd, Whose tuneful notes from cordial feelings spring … So soft, so smoothly flows th'harmonic strain, The “Universal Song” it felt thro' ev'ry strain’.

49 Cited in Hussey, The Picturesque, 207.

50 The words appear in the collection of song and glee texts entitled A Select Collection of English Songs with their Original Airs compiled by the poet and antiquarian Thomas Park. The title-page implies that all unattributed poems in the anthology are by Park.

51 A similar sentiment is the subject of George Berg's glee ‘Lightly Tread, ’tis Hallowed Ground’, written around ten years later.

52 See Leask, Nigel, ‘Reimagining the Conquest of America’, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Pratt, Lynda (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 133–150Google Scholar.

53 See Gilpin, William, A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1976), 14Google Scholar. See also Humphry Repton, The Art of Landscape Gardening, 17–31, and Hussey, The Picturesque, 186–204.

54 Heely, Joseph, Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil, and the Leasowes; With Critical Remarks, and Observations on the Modern Taste in Gardening, volume 1 (London, 1777), 21Google Scholar.

55 Quoted in Bicknell, Peter, Beauty, Horror and Immensity: Picturesque Landscapes in Britain, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 22Google Scholar.

56 Horsley, Memoir, 15. On the previous page, Horsley praises Callcott's ‘Father of Heroes’, which contains references to the Wye valley, a picturesque hotspot following Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye. Horsley says, ‘the effect is grand and highly picturesque throughout; and … the contrasts, and the beautiful descriptions with which it abounds, can hardly have escaped the most careless auditor’.

57 There are myriad examples of songs whose literary borrowings are taken, as it were, ‘out of context’. Brahms's Magelonelieder might be an example, their texts excerpted from Ludwig Tieck's Phantasus. Schumann also took snippets from Heine's verse in Dichterliebe in order to create a ‘quasi-story’. Schubert's Ossian settings could also be seen as borrowing for the sake of creating atmosphere, as opposed to conveying the stories of Macpherson. I thank David Owen Norris for drawing my attention to these examples.

58 See Horsley, Memoir, 2.

59 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village (London, 1770), 11Google Scholar.