1: The Landscape of the Lark

There is a familiar moment on any walk of reasonable length. Our sense of time undergoes an almost imperceptible transformation; the distance to our destination no longer concerns us, our point of departure is located in the past and we feel vividly but gracefully alive in the present. Our footsteps have a natural rhythm over which we neither need, nor feel capable of, control. The momentum of our feet silences the inner dialogue of our thoughts, as our physical and subconscious selves coalesce in therapeutic and forgiving harmony. The journey continues in a manner that now feels effortless, restorative, and reminds us of our own vitality.

Although gratifying, experience tells us such moments are far from assured during our time spent outdoors. Often the chatter in our head, the very anxieties and everyday strains of life for which we have prescribed ourselves a long walk, resurface to distract us.

For this reason, many years ago, I made certain any walk I undertook of reasonable length had recourse to being accompanied, or perhaps more accurately, salvaged, by music. The ability of music to dull and placate the thoughts, conversations and memories we are prone to dwell on when walking is incomparable, as is the manner in which a soundtrack brokers the view. The advances in technology were such that, for myself, to listen while walking became reflexive, almost habitual.

My choice of listening material was always instrumental music. I had come to the conclusion that if one is attempting to silence the voices in one’s head, it is preferable to abandon the voice altogether. Instead, my walks were conducted to meditative sounds that weaved in and out of one’s consciousness: minimalism, the composers Laurie Spiegel and Steve Reich in particular, the mid-nineties electronica of Boards of Canada, Jim O’Rourke and Aphex Twin and the long guitar ragas of 1960s primitives such as John Fahey and Robbie Basho.

Occasionally the effect of walking alone in open country while listening closely to a piece of music overwhelmed me. I felt as though I was demanding too much of my senses, which could quickly grow resistant to such a concentrated form of transcendence. I nevertheless experienced regular moments of complete immersion in my surroundings. When heard with the appropriate musical accompaniment, the sight of minor, everyday details seen on a walk such as a recently fallen branch revealed themselves with a momentary and magical clarity. A familiar view, such as the one that presented itself by looking downwards along the footpath I had followed to the top of a hill, was now a scene of great, instinctive drama.

On another occasion I found myself staring, entranced, for almost twenty minutes at two young buzzards overhead, as their endless circling serendipitously fell into rhythm with the music in my headphones. At the end of this reverie, when the birds flew on and I brought my gaze back to ground level, I was greeted by disorientating stares from a flock of ewes standing stock still at the hedgerow of a neighbouring field. I had been unaware of the sheep as they crossed the field towards me. Now, as I emerged from my own mental enclosure we exchanged long glances with each other, occupying our territory in silence.

Despite the experience of these raptures I was also aware that music cancels out the sound of the landscape. I was never at ease with this compromise, one I was reminded of each time I removed my headphones as every activity taking place around me, even the merest suggestion of a breeze, registered in my ears with breathtaking intensity. The trill of birdsong sounded so radiant it was as if I were hearing it for the first time. As I traipsed though a thick bed of leaves the volume of their crunch underfoot was more suited to the noise made by wading through a river in full spate.

At its purest the relationship between music and landscape feels almost divine, an eternal association that resists analysis. The relationship between music and the land itself is often more exasperating and conflicted than the contemplative beauty of pastoral compositions suggests. In honour of the composer who was born in the village of Broadheath, in the Malvern Hills near Worcester, the area is frequently given the name ‘Elgar Country’ by the National Trust, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and similar organisations. The conjecture being that the landscape of ‘Elgar Country’, the rolling hills and open green pasture redolent of Albion, is reflected in the music of the composer Edward Elgar: the Pomp and Circumstance Marches that include ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, The Enigma Variations, and lesser known works such as Pageant of Empire and the composer’s setting for Rudyard Kipling’s musical booklet The Fringes of the Fleet. Throughout the twentieth century ‘Elgar Country’ thus represented a heartland that provided a rousing and proud chorus, particularly in times of war or national celebration, a locus for an easily defined and easily sung patriotism, a rural embodiment of the Last Night of the Proms.

In 1992 an estimated twenty to forty thousand people attended a four-day rave at Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills. For its inhabitants and the self-appointed custodians of ‘Elgar Country’, the ninety-six hours of continuous dance music relayed and distorted by the sound systems occupying the Common were not merely a source of irritation or noise pollution. This invasion of ravers and libertarians also represented a psychological intrusion, a momentary rupture in the hitherto assured character of the landscape, one so extreme as to temporarily question its identity.

My own memories of attending Castlemorton are suitably vague and fractured, although I vividly recall my friends and me sitting in stoned anticipation that we would move further along the narrow road on which an endless line of traffic had ground to a halt. Our reasons for attending were prosaic. We were inexperienced and irregular ravers who lived little over an hour away in Bristol, and as the party was held towards the end of May, we assumed there would be serial opportunities to experience an early summer sunrise. As we sat together in a cheap car with the mute anticipation of youth, we gradually realised the music playing around us on car stereos was being danced to energetically by our neighbours, and the vehicles in the queue had been absorbed into the rave. It became clear that no one at Castlemorton was in any position of authority, nor indeed did anyone appear to want to be; the sense of free will encircling us was extraordinarily powerful. The festival had no discernible centre of activity, each sound system had established their own area, one or two of which included a tent. There were no stages or focal points to direct our attention. It was the relentless dancing, a continuous circulation of energy lasting for days, which represented the festival’s nucleus.

Despite the widespread euphoria, a tension circulated in the air, as though it was being broadcast across the sound systems’ remorseless bass lines. To the hedonistic visitors Castlemorton Common represented one of the few accessible central areas in rural England where music might be experienced outdoors, through the visceral and unfettered pleasures of dancing under open skies. To the onlooking residents of its neighbouring villages, the free festival represented a deconsecration of the unchanging set of values in our national past with which the Common was synonymous. The perceived wisdom, that the Common should be experienced as a site to be gazed upon for its historic beauty and as a source for a very British form of reassurance and contemplation, had been shattered.

Due to its legal status as common land and to the frustration of the authorities the rave at Castlemorton was able to continue uninterrupted until the generators and the spirits and energy of those attending had worn out. The police presence at Castlemorton, such as it was, was inadequate to curtail the festival and questions were subsequently asked as to whether sufficient powers were in place to prevent such an event taking place in the future. These questions were answered by the introduction of a new set of laws.

Arguments over to whom it belongs and to what uses it should be ascribed are as old as the land itself, and the four-day free party at Castlemorton was a further incidence of an ongoing rural conflict that predates the Enclosure Act of 1773. The darkened atmosphere at Castlemorton, accentuated by sleeplessness and narcotic disorientation, felt as ancient as the mist that rose over the Common at daybreak.

Before the outbreak of war in 1939, the right to walk through the more remote parts of Britain was an often debated issue. In 1932 around five hundred people, mainly young men, a handful of whom were known to have Communist sympathies, participated in the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District and an area of several hundred acres of moorland managed privately for grouse shooting. This was a form of hunting that was popular with landowners as it provided a higher income than the poor returns received from farming. There was consequently a significant presence of gamekeepers on Kinder Scout, with whom the trespassers came into confrontation. Arrests were made and the incident, which had consisted of little more than pushing and shoving, during which a gamekeeper had suffered a sprained ankle, was declared a ‘riotous assembly’.

The trespass drew great media interest, as did the severity of the punishment dispensed to the organisers, one of whom, the twenty-year-old organiser Benny Rothman, was gaoled for four months. In his summing-up the judge made reference to the fact Rothman was both a member of the Young Communist League and Jewish. As trespass was a civil rather than a criminal offence, the sentences and the fact the defendants were charged for the crime of ‘riotous assembly’ were considered vindictive and harsh. Rather than suppress the burgeoning interest in exploring the country’s open spaces, the furore over the Kinder Scout trespass emboldened members of the public with an interest in the outdoors throughout the country. The popularity of rambling grew further, and the Ramblers’ Association, founded in 1935, began a successful campaign for the right to be granted access to the countryside. After the conclusion of the Second World War the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 included the right of legal trespass.

The Act stated the creation of a network of National Parks in Britain was a result of the need to promote ‘opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of those areas by the public’. Landowners in these designated areas were now obliged by law to agree to grant the general public right of way, in order that they might enjoy these opportunities.

The creation of National Parks, the accreditation of legal trespass and the ability to roam carefree, if only through designated areas of countryside, engendered a sense of common kinship with the natural environment. In the decades to come Parliament would herald the Kinder Scout mass trespass as a powerful symbol of the ability for mild civil disobedience to lead to the advancement and democratisation of society.

In the spring of 1994, over sixty years after Kinder Scout and two years after the rave at Castlemorton, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was introduced to the House of Commons. The Act, which experienced a protracted and often fractious passage through Parliament before receiving Royal Assent towards the year’s end, contained a broad swathe of measures aimed at reducing what the ailing Conservative government, in an attempt at populism, described as ‘Anti Social Behaviour’.

The length and scale of the events at Castlemorton ensured any distinction between raving, free festivals and any other form of casual hedonism had been deemed irrelevant by the authorities.

The Criminal Justice Bill, as it was referred to in news bulletins and became known in the popular imagination, was widely regarded as a draconian piece of legislation. One of the Bill’s most lasting effects was to curtail several of the marginal social movements that had grown in the previous decade, such as the phenomenon of New Age Travellers, and to discourage entrepreneurial promoters in the black economy who hosted outdoor raves and free twenty-four-hour parties in Britain’s countryside. These events were unlicensed, both in the legal sense and also in their formlessness and lack of hierarchy or structure. Their organisers’ principal motivation, aside from the revenue generated by the buying and selling of drugs, was to provide an open space for anyone present to dance to the sound systems on site.

The life of quiet contemplation symbolised by ‘Elgar Country’ existed for barely a few fleeting moments, if at all, in the average working day of anyone whose living was derived from the land. Yet a sentimentality and nostalgia for an apparently fictitious pastoral idyll has continually dominated our view of rural life. Whatever definition we use, the countryside remains a contradiction: a place of survival still, for many who make their living there, but a source of recuperation and rapture to its visitors. To walk through much of rural Britain is to walk through our past. Our landscape may stimulate our subconscious and prompt in us thoughts of airy self-reflection, but the ground itself is as laden with history as any ancient city and the beauty of the view often conceals the anxieties and arguments that characterise this history.

In 1921, the year in which The Lark Ascending received its orchestral premiere, significant areas of the British countryside were undergoing a period of substantive change. The lark flies over terrain whose character had started to alter towards the end of the previous century, when agriculture in England and Wales experienced consecutive years of heavy rainfall followed by inevitably poor harvests. Such conditions only exacerbated the already diminishing returns of farming and the precariousness of the antiquated methods still popular on large country estates. These various misfortunes consolidated and developed into a depression. The steep decline in ocean freight rates and the invention and proliferation of refrigeration allowed cheap imports of staple goods such as cereal, meat and butter from the United States, Argentina and other distant countries to dominate the market. The result was a fall in domestic prices and stagnating levels of yield. Between 1875 and 1895 the prices of wheat and wool halved while the value of livestock depreciated by almost a third. For the half-century between the 1860s and the outbreak of the First World War there was little demonstrable increase in the material health of British farming; the soil and its crops were weakening.

Despite protracted opposition for over a year from a House of Lords populated by wealthy landowners, David Lloyd George’s Liberal government finally passed its People’s Budget in 1910. As a consequence of the continuing agricultural depression the country’s landowners had already suffered a decline in income from the tenancies charged to the farmers who worked their land. The passing of the People’s Budget ensured they were now expected to shoulder the further burden of taxation. The original legislation had included the aggressively contested measure of a land tax, but this controversial proposal was dropped in return for others being accepted, such as an increase in death duties and the taxation of profits made from the sale and ownership of property.

This change in the fortunes of the great estates inaugurated a gradual transformation of the character of the countryside in the twentieth century. Many landowners reluctantly accepted they had no choice but to sell off their assets, and a new class of farmer, the owner-occupier, was created.

The rural population underwent a similar realignment in the years that followed the armistice and witnessed an exodus from domestic service to the cities; having encountered a less restricted life away from the country house, few people were minded to return, even if the work had compared favourably to agricultural labour, an industry which yoked boys as young as eight to remorseless fourteen-hour working days under gruelling and harsh conditions. A depleted post-war public was reluctant to provide the workforce needed to maintain the running of an estate. The aristocracy and gentry had experienced suffering equally and were coming to terms with the loss of a generation of heirs. The reduced revenue of farming rents, the introduction of taxation and the societal shift away from the rigidity of the Edwardian Age, a rigidity that had especially prevailed in the countryside, made the perpetuation of the English country house an impossible task for all but the very wealthy.

Before giving consideration to the overtures of property developers eager to participate in the expansion of house building of the 1920s (overtures that were regularly accepted), many estates attempted to realise an income by converting parts of their lands for increasingly popular field sports. It was for the fashionable activities of hunting, shooting and fishing that Britain’s landowners employed gamekeepers such as those who skirmished with the trespassers at Kinder Scout.

The confidence with which those ramblers defied their authority demonstrated that the certainties of the previous era no longer prevailed.

Perhaps more than any other piece of British, or specifically English, music Vaughan Williams’s composition The Lark Ascending epitomises an idea of place. Due to the absence of a lyric, The Lark is immune to the corruption of interpretation that befell Blake’s short verse ‘And didst those feet in ancient time’ as it transmuted into the green and pleasant lands of ‘Jerusalem’. The Lark Ascending is a meditation of less than fifteen minutes, during which one experiences a reverie initiated by birdsong.

As listeners to The Lark Ascending we might exchange mental notes of our interpretation of this music and its location, one with which we feel a deep sense of recognition. A country dance observed by a bird in flight; the flight itself, a lyrical expression of grace and freedom; a sense of being perfectly alone in a perfect landscape so powerful it renders us almost inarticulate, suspended in its daydream. Memories and emotions are stirred from our subconscious as we follow the bird on our inner journey through its pentatonic score.

We might remind ourselves that however forcefully the music stirs in us nostalgia or wistfulness of our own, Vaughan Williams was, with good reason, himself nostalgic for a prelapsarian landscape, an idea of a pastoral idyll of Albion which the Great War had nullified permanently.

There are unsubstantiated stories regarding the piece’s inspiration, later dismissed by his second wife Ursula as apocryphal. One involves the composer being mistakenly arrested as a spy, while idly observing troop manoeuvres during a holiday the couple were taking in Margate, at the outbreak of the war.

What is certain is that within weeks Vaughan Williams volunteered as a private for the Royal Ambulance Corps. At the age of forty-two the composer was almost twenty years older than the average soldier and legally exempt from active service. Vaughan Williams initially served for two years as a medical orderly, a post that included tending to the dying, before receiving a commission to the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1917. The war had as considerable an influence on Vaughan Williams as on any of his contemporaries, its emotional and physical effects enduring throughout the composer’s life.

Ursula Vaughan Williams later suggested her husband would have found it difficult to identify a lark, but as a student of traditional English music and a former editor of The English Hymnal and as a collector of regional carols, Vaughan Williams drew on his instinctual temperament for the cadences of the past to create the sense of agelessness that is one of The Lark Ascending’s principal characteristics. His lack of familiarity with its call notwithstanding, in the delicacy and intensity of Williams’s score the language of birdsong has an undeniable emotional charge.

The dream state recognised by the reviewer in The Times is established by the piece’s opening modal chords, before a solo violin played in high register recreates the lark’s call to create a sense of weightlessness and of growing becalmed, as though time were being suspended. For the listener this is often experienced as the sensation of feeling physically rested but awake in one’s imagination.

The playfulness of this soaring bird is then heard in dialogue with the orchestra. In the central orchestral section echoes of folk song, harvest dances and hymns are played with a liveliness evoking country weddings or the libidinal exhilaration of a morning in May. These are Arcadian rhythms, the steps of the ‘Earth feet, loam feet’ of T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ bounding together across the land, passed around by the orchestra as though it were a dance partner Vaughan Williams achieves a synthesis of air and earth as the skylark shares in the merrymaking taking place below, and the intoxicating sense of euphoria is absolute.

The orchestra slowly fades as the solo violin returns to prominence; we are left alone once more with the trills of the lark, now played at the top of the instrument’s range as the notes gradually die away. The lark’s final song of the day bids us farewell, a conclusion that even in the mildest encounter with this composition can produce a feeling of catharsis, or in certain moods, a poignancy accompanied by tears.

Vaughan Williams had drawn his inspiration from the poem ‘The Lark Ascending’ by the Victorian novelist George Meredith and prefaced the original score with twelve of its lines:

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake …

For singing till his heaven fills,

’Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows

To lift us with him as he goes …

Till lost on his aërial rings

In light … and then the fancy sings.

Vaughan Williams subsequently deleted this epigraph; the following lines, which occur in the central section of Meredith’s poem, perhaps better describe the effect Williams’s composition has on the listener:

The song seraphically free

Of taint of personality,

So pure that it salutes the suns

The voice of one for millions,

In whom the millions rejoice

For giving their one spirit voice.

The listener quietly rejoices while listening to The Lark, an activity that recognises a shared sense of reverie that may be particular to this contemplative piece of music and gives their spirit a voice. Music above all else and music ‘free of taint of personality’, such as the music I heard on the sound systems at Castlemorton where the presence of the DJs was purely technical and almost entirely un-egotistical, bestows us with a sense of direction with which to wander our mental pathways; The Lark Ascending grants us access to ramble through our mind’s own wild places.

Vaughan Williams rarely spoke of his time at the Western Front. This was a trait common among many veterans who were aware that, while serving, they had witnessed a fracture in human nature so profound its character may have been permanently altered. If The Lark Ascending is imbued with nostalgia, it is a nostalgia that recognises the depth of this rupture, and the landscape it evokes is one of a more innocent age. The composer wrote that ‘The art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation – any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history and common ideals, and, above all, a continuity with the past.’ The break with the past experienced by his generation was so severe any sense of continuity would struggle to be apparent. A significant element of The Lark’s emotional range lies in Vaughan Williams’s ability to evoke the spiritual bond connecting ‘the soul of a nation’, despite what he had witnessed while serving at the front.

This is a geography similar to that described in one of the most celebrated passages from Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the anonymously written novel by Siegfried Sassoon, a contemporary of Vaughan Williams who served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was decorated for his bravery. George Sherston, the narrator and titular fox-hunter, recalls riding before the war when ‘The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers … For it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover.’ The ‘something’, which George was unable to discover, lay buried within the landscape of his memory. Sassoon’s use of the word ‘discover’, rather than recover or rediscover is notable; it suggests a source of impenetrable emotional energy made all the more overwhelming by his inability to locate it, an inability he is carrying as if it were a wound from the battlefield.

In a later passage Sassoon describes George’s relationship with the landscape of the trenches in terms of intimacy, where despite the enduring horror he still recognises the song of the lark: ‘Now and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air where the larks are singing. The sound of the shell is like water trickling into a can. The curve of its trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash.’

It is the sounds made by another bird, an earthbound partridge, which dissipate these momentary distractions. George’s thoughts lead instead to the more immediate past and the death of his friend Dick, with whom he had recently ridden in the French woods and, the novel suggests, fallen in love: ‘Somewhere on the slope behind me a partridge makes its unmilitary noise – down there where Dick was buried a few weeks ago. Dick’s father was a very good man with a gun, so Dick used to say.’ In his grief George recognises that the youthful life of contemplation and country pursuits he enjoyed before the war has been extinguished in him, that even if its hills might look and feel familiar should he be lucky enough to survive the war, the landscape through which he rode no longer exists.

The fractured narrative of Jacob’s Room represented a significant break with the traditional and linear storytelling of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Woolf’s restructuring of time, voice and character acknowledge the change in awareness that had occurred during the war. These experiments established a means with which that change might be recognised and processed. Jacob had died in battle, but in her following novel, Mrs Dalloway, Woolf explores the mental suffering endured by those who returned from the front. One of the main characters, the veteran Septimus Warren Smith, suffers terrible hallucinations, struggles to distinguish between the living and the dead and occupies a state of near-perpetual hysteria. For long periods he is haunted by Evans, a friend killed in the trenches. As the severity of his condition increases, his suffering grows so great he throws himself through a window onto the Fitzrovia pavement.

The delayed symptoms of extreme post-traumatic stress disorder that were diagnosed as ‘shell shock’ are present throughout the literature written in the aftermath of the war. Siegfried Sassoon developed an acute nervous condition for which he was granted convalescent leave. During his stay in hospital he concluded he was unwilling to return to the Front and wrote an open letter to his commanding officer that was then widely published in national and local newspapers. He had written the letter as ‘an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’. Sassoon considered he had ‘seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings, for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust’. In conclusion Sassoon stated he was taking this course of action ‘on behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them.’

Prior to his convalescent leave Sassoon had been previously decorated with the Military Cross for his valour. That he chose to communicate his decision not to return to the battlefield in such strong terms put him at risk of great censure. In all likelihood a highly commended officer who embarrassed his superiors so publicly would face court martial. In his memoir Goodbye to All That, Sassoon’s friend and regimental comrade in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Robert Graves, claims he intervened on Sassoon’s behalf and informed the military authorities of his colleague’s nervous problems and pleaded clemency. ‘Much against my will, I had to appear in the role of a patriot distressed by the mental collapse of a brother-in-arms – a collapse directly due to his magnificent exploits in the trenches. I mentioned Siegfried’s “hallucinations” of corpses strewn along on Piccadilly. The irony of having to argue to these mad old men that Siegfried was not sane!’ Graves and Sassoon would later fall out, their shattered emotions outlasting their friendship.

A condition as acute as post-traumatic stress is experienced by degree; there is no record of Vaughan Williams exhibiting its symptoms, although Ursula Vaughan Williams noted her husband experienced survivor’s remorse. The composer suffered in other ways, enduring the loss of hearing in one ear, a consequence of his nightly proximity to 18-pounder cannon while serving in the Royal Artillery. The first major work Vaughan Williams completed after the war was A Pastoral Symphony, his third, in 1922. Several contemporary critics made assumptions about the composer’s use of the word ‘pastoral’ in the title and in so doing misunderstood the work and the composer’s intention. Although it habitually evokes the bucolic imagery and rural gentleness associated with his compositions, Vaughan Williams weighted this pastoral with a less obvious meaning.

In a letter to Ursula written before their marriage the composer defined its usage: ‘It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted,’ he wrote. Earlier in the correspondence he had indicated that the landscape the symphony evoked was the condemned battlefields of the trenches. ‘It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset.’ Such scenes are more usually the subject of requiems; their evocation by Vaughan Williams as ‘pastoral’ is a recognition of the need for forms of composition and narrative to undergo an adjustment equivalent to those who had witnessed the war’s horrors, to proceed with ambiguity and hesitancy through the uncertainty of its remains.

The hills and sunsets in A Pastoral Symphony are drawn from memories of war, locations that despite their outward beauty are now associated with death and futility, not the vitality of nature, a paradox that provides an unresolved air of tension throughout the work. From the opening of the First Movement, as the harmonic idiom shifts from one tonal centre to another, the listener is aware only of the ephemeral and indistinct, creating an atmosphere where little seems fixed or certain, other than the need for reflective concentration.

At the start of the Second Movement a lone trumpet is heard, a sound immediately evocative of the Last Post; there is a remoteness to the instrument, as though we might be hearing the tune being played through a fog. In the same letter to Ursula, Vaughan Williams wrote, ‘A bugler used to practise and this sound became part of that evening landscape and is the genesis of the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement of the symphony.’ Later in the movement the stillness of the orchestra around the trumpet grows unsettling and there is a brief impression of incapacity, as though the trumpeter were missing notes or playing them incorrectly; that reaching the end of the tune, although familiar from repeated practice, is a struggle.

Surges of sudden energy frequently interrupt the sense of insubstantiality that continues throughout the symphony, which the listener now recognises as the signature Vaughan Williams chose for this work. The Fourth and final Movement introduces a wordless soprano, a voice without the power of speech. In the score this is marked ‘distant’ and in performance the soprano is often off stage, disembodied from the orchestra and alone. A Pastoral Symphony concludes with the uncertain climax of a final, disconcerting tonal shift, before the lamenting soprano is once more heard, now even further in the distance, now a ghost. In his use of a fluctuating tonal structure and his refusal to allow the listener to settle, Vaughan Williams suggests received ideas such as victory or defeat are of little consequence. This is the sound of absence made temporarily and temporally present, music assembled from memories of lost lives, a pastoral for a landscape in which the lark’s voice would struggle to be heard.

It is inarguable that volunteering for the front line at an age when he was not legally required to do so was an act of great patriotism by Vaughan Williams. His sense of national duty was profound and unhesitating. During the Second World War, now in his late sixties, the composer contributed to the Home Front by growing food in a field he had dug specifically. He also organised the collection of spare household aluminium that might be put to use in the construction of aircraft. When calling on houses in his hometown of Dorking to enquire of any spare pots or pans the composer was occasionally mistaken for a tramp. In later life he was often regarded as a teddy-bear like figure, and his rumpled tweeds and patrician nature were mistaken for a fustiness. This was an opinion that misunderstood the passion in his music, which provided a country known for its stiff upper lip with a means of experiencing the emotion it so frequently buried within the rigidity of its society. Throughout his compositions and during The Lark Ascending in particular, Ralph Vaughan Williams offered every listener the opportunity of a heightened consciousness.