Jan 26: 'In the Fen Country'

Any fool can appreciate mountain scenery, but it takes a man of discernment to appreciate the Fens.

An anonymous Fenman quoted in Sir Harry Godwin's 'Fenland' (1978).

I work in The Fens: an area of land which is low lying and flat, and has been created by drainage and land reclamation over centuries, which led to the removal of the water-logged and wilder Fen of the past, and before that it was a sea bed. It's a shifting mutable landscape which has a variety of ecosystems and wildlife.

Here's a piece of music which aims to capture the Fens from Ralph Vaughan Williams.

If anyone out there has a particular interest in classical music and wants to write some blog posts about it they would be gratefully received, as it's not a genre that I know a great deal about it, although I can recognise most pieces used in questions on 'University Challenge' slightly better than most of the teams.

In the Fen Country is an orchestral tone poem written by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams had completed the first version of the work in April 1904, but subsequently revised the work in 1905 and 1907.

This website introduces the piece in slightly more negative terms with respect to the landscape:

The Fens are a bleak, desolate, and relentlessly flat marshland found in East Anglia on the east coast of England. They resemble a slice of the Netherlands, transported from the other side of the North Sea. Their austere mystery inspired Graham Swift in his 1983 novel, Waterland, to ask, “what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing?” 

Alluding to the oppressive, stale air which rises from this swamp land, Shakespeare’s King Lear, in cursing his daughter, exclaims, “Infect her beauty, You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun, To fall and blister!”

Here's a digitally enhanced film which has been shared on the Fenland on Film YouTube channel. 

You will find out more about the Fens by watching this.

If you know of other pieces of music which are connected to The Fens and Fenland, let me know in the comments. I can think of one particular song, but I won't be mentioning that one... not yet anyway...