Tore Størvold’s recent book, Dissonant Landscapes: Music, Nature, and the Performance of Iceland, explores the intersection of contemporary Icelandic music with a construction of Iceland as a natural/supernatural landscape. Størvold, a professor of music at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, NTNU), approaches the subject through lenses of musicology and ecocriticism, bringing a broad view to music as a contextual phenomenon. His exploration of the role music and musicians have played in the creation and perpetuation of a narrative of Iceland as somehow more primal and natural takes a wide view, encompassing songs, artists, the music and popular press, and even political discourse. Drawing on music from many genres, and looking at historical and folkloric tropes, Størvold touches on how even the people of Iceland become constructed as part of a natural landscape. The natural becomes supernatural when used as setting, inspiration, and interpretation of Icelandic music.

The book is organized thematically, with six body chapters focusing at times on general tropes or topics, and at times on particular artists. The first chapter explores a musical response to the Icelandic financial crisis of 2008, Mugison’s acoustic song “Stingum Af.” Described by Størvold as evoking the pastoral, “Stingum Af” contains images of a peaceful people living in a peaceable landscape, which serves as an effective antidote to the technocratic and globalized banking crisis that shook Iceland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The next chapter looks at musical reaction to the building of a hydroelectric reservoir in eastern Iceland and its concomitant ecological damage, with artists such as Valgeir Sigurðsson and Sigur Rós in focus. Chapter 3 looks at the “borealization” of Iceland from a continental European point of view, where the country is often thought of as the edge of the world, perhaps sitting on the boundary between this world and another, and musical responses from Ólafur Arnalds. The rise of Scandinavian noir television on the international scale transforms the Icelandic landscape into another boundary between two realms, in this case the living and the dead, in the music of the composers of a television show’s theme music (Jóhann Jóhannsson, in collaboration with Hildur Guðnadóttir and Rutger Hoedemakers). The fifth chapter examines the classical work of Anna Þorvaldsdóttir as an exploration of the natural world, and in the last main chapter, Størvold analyzes Sigur Rós’s song and video, “Brennisteinn” as a multilayered symbol of a volcano and Icelandic geology as a whole.

The arrangement and size of the chapters makes Dissonant Landscapes a very teachable book, and the material covered makes it very useful to a range of classrooms. Courses on ecology and culture, on music and ethnomusicology, or the Nordic or Scandinavian worlds, even on the construction of cultural identity, can find valuable information and insight between its covers. Størvold’s identity as a professor of music is evident throughout, in ways both enlightening and at times frustrating. His ability to dig into what to folklorists will see as “behind the curtain” aspects of the music industry and music itself is enticing and engaging. His efforts at cultural contextualization are sometimes thin, though, but Størvold is not pretending to be a cultural theorist. Instead, he has provided a very valuable set of research findings and insights in a way that allows a wide range of readers to take his work and make use of it. This book may be light on cultural analysis and theorizing, but the material is presented in a way that lends itself to such uses in either one’s own research or in a classroom, if put in concert with other texts.

--------

[Review length: 593 words • Review posted on April 30, 2024]