Jess's thesis, supervised by Professor Daniel Grimley, examines musical representations of nature in American contemporary classical from 1970-2024. This thesis moves from visual and literary depictions - such as the Hudson River School, the works of Emerson and Thoreau, the idea of the "National Park" - to sonic ones, questioning how music can both reproduce and challenge environmental histories inherent in certain representations, particularly those indebted to what has been termed the “wilderness myth.” By delving into the idea of "wilderness" alongside settler colonial land history, Jess examines the question of who has the power to change and shape the natural world: one that has more urgency than ever in what some have termed the Anthropocene – the singular of which Kathryn Yusoff writes is always predicated on the erasure of thousands of prior Black Anthropocenes. Through the work of George Crumb, Jeffrey Mumford, and Raven Chacon, this thesis asks what work is done by contemporary cultural works – in this case music – in generating and contesting our understandings of the natural world, and how music might allow us to broaden and pluralise how “nature” is viewed.
