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.
In The Lark Ascending, a wide-ranging cultural history, Richard King considers how music has reconfigured the British landscape down the generations, from Vaughan Williams to the electro-ambient sounds of Brian Eno and Orbital today. Along the way, he explores the history of rambling clubs, English Heritage and the National Trust. Rural Britain has been re-imagined acoustically in a variety of ways, he writes, often with political intent.
During the 1930s, the British Union of Fascists and other blackshirt movements sought to reassert a native folk-music tradition and the agrarian values of toil, blood and belonging. Henry Williamson, the ex-army author of Tarka the Otter, was an advocate of what D.H. Lawrence termed ‘sun awareness’, and disliked in equal measure Jews, Liberals and parliamentary democracy. Having survived the Western Front, he found a purpose in Nazi Germany’s cult of bare-chested manliness and the healthy outdoors, and advocated racial rejuvenation through Morris dancing and other völkisch musical enthusiasms.
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