This seminar will consider how the category of "nature" has been constructed in nineteenth-century music-compositional discourses and in critical rhetoric about music of the nineteenth century, including aesthetic, theoretical, interpretive, and analytical writings from the contemporary to the present day. "Nature" is an exceedingly complex term, pertaining not only to the physical world — typically conceptualized as a given entity and a priori defined as "wilderness" — but also to broader concepts of essentiality, including the fundamental character and disposition of individuals.

This seminar, then, considers the idea of nature in relation to nineteenth-century music not only in expected programmatic and mimetic-musical senses, but via a broader critical understanding of the ways in which the term "nature” accrues ideological meanings in discourses about music, from the assumed primacy of the overtone series as a foundation for harmonic language through the musico-dramatic representation of "degeneracy," and beyond.