"Music in the Landscape"

I read a review in Gramophone magazine of a new book, Music in the Landscape: How British Countryside Inspired Our Greatest Composers by Em Marshall (Robert Hale, Ltd, 2011). Marshall is founder-director of the English Music Festival and chair of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (to which I belong). She has appeared on British radio and has authored several articles.

Beginning with Vaughan Williams, Britten, and Elgar I’ve grown to love English music over the years and own numerous LPs and CDs of their and other composers’ pieces. For instance, I’ve most of Britten’s operas and many Vaughan Williams compositions on LPs, numerous Vaughan Williams and Finzi CDs, a lovely series called “English String Miniatures” on the Naxos label, a box set on the ASV Living Era label called “My England: A Collection of Timeless English Concertos,” all 20th century English composers’ concertos, and other CDs and downloads. Many mornings I start the day with a downloaded piece called “Lonely Waters” by Ernest John Moeran. So when I saw Marshall’s book reviewed, I promptly ordered it.

Although Marshall briefly discusses earlier British composers, she focuses upon 19th and 20th century figures. She tells of Edward Elgar’s pleasure of bicycling around the countryside, and also Sir Arnold Bax’s cycling trips. Gustav Holst took many long walking journeys throughout England, while Peter Warlock took his friend Bela Bartok on a motorcycle tour of north Wales with Bartok in the sidebar. Both Bax and Moeran also lived the Irish countryside. Moeran, in fact, found the countryside “fundamental” (p. 213). He died of a stroke in a rural location that he loved. Anyone who knows of Benjamin Britten knows that his home was in Aldeburgh beside the sea, an essential location for his composition. Gerald Finzi’s work was inspired by Yorkshire landscapes where he spent his childhood, and one of his passions was his orchard of apple trees, including rare varieties. Rutland Boughton moved himself and his family in a small woodland cottage on the Surrey and Hampshire borders; there his musical imagination blossomed. Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, always devotedly Irish, drew inspiration from Ireland's west coast.

Marshal discusses forty composers, of which fourteen are subject of longer chapters and the rest more brief analysis. She does not include technical musical analysis, which is good for a person like me who loves music but knows little theory. It sounds funny to say that I love the pictures in the book, but the color photographs of English countryside are gorgeous. She provides historical photos as well as contemporary pictures of typical landscapes in places associated with different composers. I hang my head in shame that I’ve only visited the U.K. once, last year, and the book makes me want to return to England soon. Marshall writes at the end, "The countryside---in all its moods----is the key that unlocks the secrets of English music, and is what makes these glorious works as timeless, familiar and beautiful to us today, as yesterday" (p. 281).