Native wood-notes wild | 20 June 2019

With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear cleaning’ exercises that might attune us beatifically to a hushed environment. Silence itself can be quite noisy, of course. Even in the countryside the thoughts in one’s head and the sound of one’s breathing can disturb the peace. Music, at least, may help to restore a sense of quietude.

Vaughan Williams’s 15-minute meditation ‘The Lark Ascending’ conjures a pastoral idyll untouched by the clamour and carnage attendant on the Great War. In 1921, when the music was premiered, the green fields of Europe had been psychologically altered by the bloodiest battles in recorded history. Thousands of casualties had been left decomposing in the mud of the Marne, and rural Britain was disfigured by the destruction of woodland for rifle and ammunition-case manufacture. In his fantasia for violin and piano, however, Vaughan Williams imagined a prelapsarian Albion, alive with larksong.