The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape by Richard King
Faber & Faber
Richard King’s latest book The Lark Ascending is subtitled The Music of the British Landscape but I suspect that that may not have been his idea. The book is, in many ways, a collection of essays, in chronological order, walking through the twentieth century and the soundtracks that may have been inspired by, or because of, the land on which the foot falls. Or, as I found out, perhaps not.
There are times, albeit few and far between these days, that I would deliberately listen to a piece of music to complement a particular place, imaginary, in memory or in reality. Most people will put in their earbuds in order to shut out the world around them, but how many pay attention to the choice of music to complement their surroundings. We are more likely to choose something to go with our current mood, or what we are going to do, or to distract us from something – or because we want to listen to that piece of music, in private, at a volume we want, without disturbing anyone else.
So starts Richard King, walking with a soundtrack, and if we think about British music (because it is about the British landscape) we still probably come back to those composers of the early twentieth century, Delius, Bax, Holst, and above all, Vaughan Williams. If nothing else, his The Lark Ascending is the epitome of English classical composition, defining a style that would, and still does, represent the epitome of Englishness. We only have to listen to it to be transported to arcadian downland, bright summer days, gently scudding clouds and the ubiquitous skylark singing its song just out of sight.
King’s book starts here and leads us to consider the reality of the piece. The reality of the period of its composition, an activity that covered a large part of the First World War and how the evocation of a sense of place, of a return to peace and the hoped-for status quo, adds to the mythologising of Vaughan Williams’ tune. The author also points out that one of the tunes saving graces is that it is a tune, that there are no words attached to it and thus did not fall victim to appropriation in the way that William Blake’s Jerusalem did when put to music by Parry.
King moves away from the music temporarily to look at the artistic effect of the hostilities through the war-artist Paul Nash and then on to starting to define a tension between the rural idyll versus the harsh realities of the century. This tension reaches a snapping point with the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932. This was a figurative turning point in the realisation that society had changed and done so significantly. The rural idyll had become a place for the privileged and excluded the worker, upon whose labour the privileged had gained their wealth. This change was, unsurprisingly, illustrated with Ewan MacColl’s Manchester Rambler, albeit a song that had to wait twenty or so years before it reached a wider popularity.
We now reach a point in the book that took me a bit by surprise. Having settled into a discourse on the links between English classical music, folk music and the landscape, along comes Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins and Under Milkwood. I initially had trouble with this chapter sitting in a book that I had assumed would be about the aforementioned styles. But no, here are some of the best of British jazzers and a fictional Welsh coastal town. From here things take a darker, or at best odder turn with Rolf Gardiner and the relationships and links, a rather family-tree style set of connections between the Hitler Youth, Mary Neal, Cecil Sharp, and Vaughan Williams and the English Hymnal. These lines of connectivity continued on to John Hargrave and The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, Lady Eve Balfour and the founding of the Soil Association. Fascinating stuff but somewhere the music got left behind, as did the landscape.
The sixties are reached with Kes, Donovan, The Incredible String Band and the start of the great escape to the country and the good life. This era of the natural world supplemented with the sharper and at times more painful worlds of LSD saw bands de-camping from the metropolis to quieter homes, rural idylls where they could escape, find themselves and produce that special album that combined the satisfaction of their personal ambition with the gratification of their manager and bank balance. This was also a period when they could get more for their money in the country than they could in the town or city. This was also something that had not escaped John Seymour – he of the Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency – who settled in north Pembrokeshire to return to a simple life, whilst those around him wished for modernisation to hurry up and get to them.
Rachel Carson launches a chapter on the landscape of the British seas including Brian Eno and from there we detect that we are comfortably entering King’s own time with Kate Bush, The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Greenham Common and the story of Travellers across this land. We end up with a history of the free open-air gatherings, festivals that sought to combine the landscape with the music but were always interrupted, if not during the event, then soon after so that they quickly became unrepeatable.
Ending at this point wraps up the century and puts a comma or at the most a semi-colon into the story of the British landscape and music. Except that, as I said at the start, I am not convinced that the subtitle is correct. This is a book made up of a series of connected essays that may well have started out as the landscape and its connection with music but that relationship in some chapters is small to the point of not being there. The same thing goes for the music.
So what is this book? Don’t go looking for a text filled with bands and performers and their direct links with this hill, that dale, the other lake. This isn’t it. Neither is it an in-depth exploration of the connections between landscape and British music. It is not an academic text so it can choose not to set definitions. Neither does it contain itself as you might expect a heavier tome to.
The Lark Ascending is a book that reflects one person’s interpretation of the landscape and the music of a country and what connections there are. I don’t think it ever set out to be definitive. I do think it set out to be interesting and it certainly is that. I loved the connections, and the odd “Oh that’s what he did” moment. I had to learn that it was not what I thought it might have been but having done so, I thought I might save you the trouble. Read it for the interest, for the connections and for the possibility that it might make you want to find out more about something. I missed the whole nineties thing so am now listening to Music Has The Right to Children. See where The Lark Ascending takes you.
The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape is published via Faber and Faber and available now in digital, paperback and hardback.