Addressing artistic renderings of both the Irish and Iowan landscapes, University of Iowa Graduate Students Rebekah Erdman (Musicology) and Adrian Gronseth (History) will be workshopping projects that showcase the breadth of scholarly engagement with music, sound, and our natural surroundings.  
 

Ina Boyle’s Glencree Symphony: ‘Englishness’ in an Irish Landscape by Rebekah Erdman

Ina Boyle (1889–1967) lived her entire life at Bushy Park, her family home in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland, rarely leaving except for periodic visits to London between the wars. In 1924, two years after the start of the Irish Civil War, Boyle began composing what would become her First Symphony, titled Glencree (in the Wicklow Hills). More than any other work in her catalogue, Glencree is tied to a specific natural location and a personal interaction and experience with the natural landscape. Such musical depictions of the landscape were uncommon for Irish composers, and also an outlier within Boyle’s catalogue. Instead, the Symphony and Boyle’s approach to her natural subject are much more aligned with her male, English contemporaries. In the intricate web of cultural shifts surrounding nature, nationality, and gender in the 20th Century, how do we understand Boyle’s First Symphony, her perception of nature, and her place in the borderlands of British musical culture? In this presentation, I argue that Boyle’s positionality as a female, Irish composer situated her within a complex network where she could uphold a Romanticized view of the landscape aligned with the center of the British musical mainstream and their perception of Ireland as culturally peripheral. At the same time, she was positioned to reject the dominant ideology surrounding the teleological development of musical tradition and attempts to claim the legacy of this tradition through national music.

Monocrop Music: The History of Iowa Agriculture and Water Pollution through Sound by Adrian Gronseth

It’s no secret that Iowa’s waterways are polluted — but what does the history of that pollution sound like? Adrian Gronseth grappled with that question in his sound collage, Monocrop Music, which he created for the BlueGAP Project: a platform dedicated to spreading awareness about nitrogen pollution through data, education, and storytelling. In the summer of 2024, Adrian and five other UI grad students were selected to a multidisciplinary team tasked with exploring the issue of nitrogen pollution and expressing its complexity through different creative mediums. In Monocrop Music, Adrian layers field recordings, community voices, and music to chronicle the history of agriculture and water pollution in Iowa. This multilayered piece details the exponential growth of monocrop farming and nitrate pollution in the state, while pointing to the current work being undertaken by farmers, local leaders, and community members to build a more sustainable future. 

Presenters: 

Rebekah M. Erdman is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Iowa. Her primary research explores the intersection of pastoralism, gender, and nature in the music of late-19th and 20th century Great Britain. Rebekah’s work on The Immortal Hour, the choral drama by Rutland Boughton, has been published in The Opera Journal and her chapter on the collection and preservation of Victorian-era ballads and folksongs is forthcoming in British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700 (University of London Press). 

Adrian Gronseth is a second-year MA student in the History Department at UI. He earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has pursued his twin passions for music and history as a songwriter, performer, researcher, and teacher. In 2017, Adrian won the Grand Prize for American Songwriter Magazine’s Lyric Contest. In 2021, he was selected as an Artist-in-Residence at Stones River National Battlefield, where he composed No Place Like Home, a song cycle about the history of the battlefield. His current research interests include the early American music industry, African American music during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and folk song collecting around the turn of the 20th century.