Aug 24: 'The Lark Ascending' #5: Wilhelm Reich and 'Cloudbusting'

Richard King's 2019 book explores British music and its link with the landscape of Britain. Here's the 4th post connected with the book.

In a chapter exploring mystical connections, he focusses on Kate Bush's music and the video for the song 'Cloudbusting'.

The Uffington White Horse is three thousand years old. I visited back in 2010.

This pile of chalk is ready to be used to re-chalk the figure and keep it white and visible from a distance.

The Uffington White Horse sits below Dragon Hill.

This was the scene for the video of 'Cloudbusting'.

The music video, directed by Julian Doyle, was conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush. 

The video features Canadian actor Donald Sutherland playing the role of Wilhelm Reich, and Bush playing the part of his young son, Peter, wearing a short wig.

In the book, King explains how the video features imagery of rural England

• a blue sky over a green hill
• a Fair Isle cardigan worn by Bush
• Sutherland's tweed jacket
• a vintage car

It's inspired by Peter Reich's book 'A Book of Dreams'. He built a house in Oregon called Organon in 1948, named after his discovery of 'orgone': a universal libidinal life force. He built instruments to try to capture this force. He believed orgone was responsible for drought and started to build a rain making / stopping machine. Reich was worried that in the wrong hands this could become a weapon. A model features in the video.

By the mid-1950s, Reich linked orgone with the presence of UFOs.

He was arrested and his work destroyed. The authorities are present in the video.

The book mentions her use of the Fairlight (also used by Peter Gabriel).
This was particularly evident on her suite of songs: 'The Ninth Wave' on the 'Hounds of Love' album.

This ends with 'Morning Fog'....

The White Horse was featured on the cover of the 1982 XTC album 'English Settlement'.

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Aug 20: 'The Lark Ascending' #4: Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Richard King's 2019 book explores British music and its link with the landscape of Britain. Here's the 4th post connected with the book.

There is a chapter on the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

This is the track most people will associate with the band.

The album this was from was released in 1978, and called 'Music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra'. Credit was given to Simon Jeffes. He was an acolyte of the composer John Cage.

The front cover of the album features a painting by Emily Young.

The follow up also featured Emily Young art work.

She was the inspiration for the early Pink Floyd song 'See Emily Play'.

The second album featured the track 'Telephone and Rubber Band', used in TV advertising.

The book explores the story of the "found harmonium". In 1982, Jeffes found it abandoned in a Kyoto side street while in Japan collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto. He picked it up the following day and took it to his apartment and then back home to London. It was then taken across the world. This piece was to do with found objects (objets trouvés).

There were connections with the new age music released by Windham Hill, and Brian Eno and Michael Nyman's music.

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Aug 18: 'The Lark Ascending' #3: The Sea, the sea...

Another post exploring some of the themes of Richard King's book 'The Lark Ascending'.

Chapter 9 of the book explores the sea, and starts by referencing Rachel Carson, author of 'Silent Spring' but who also wrote books on the oceans - copies of which sit on my book shelves - she was a marine biologist.

We are an island nation and the Territorial Waters and seabed surrounding us are owned and managed by The Crown Estate. The King owns a lot of the nation's coastlines and sea bed.

The Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4 has been going for over a century. It also offers familiarity and constancy for those who aren't at sea, perhaps lying awake at night.

The sea forms part of the English Hymnal...

We had this music as part of our wedding service.

There is also 'They that go down to the sea in ships' by Sumison.

This performance is by the Ely Cathedral Choir, with whom I am familiar as I teach at King's Ely.

The lyrics evoke the sea's power.

Gavin Bryars also drew on the sea for his more contemporary and experimental pieces including one called 'The Sinking of the Titanic', which was produced by Brian Eno.

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Aug 16: 'The Lark Ascending' #2: Elgar and the Malverns

The second in a series of posts linked to Richard King's book 'The Lark Ascending'.

The first chapter of the book mentions Edward Elgar's links to the Malvern Hills. He was born in Broadheath, in the Malvern Hills near Worcester.

The National Trust and other organisations refer to the area as 'Elgar Country' and the National Trust manages 'The Firs' - his birthplace, which can be visited.

As you step into the birthplace cottage of Sir Edward Elgar, in the heart of his ‘beloved country’ between Worcester and the Malvern Hills, you are stepping into a space that inspired and comforted him, his entire life. Stand within the four walls of the humble cottage where he was born and be immersed in a world that Elgar believed already contained music that was there for the taking.

He appeared on the UK £20 note for some years.

There are various walking routes that can be followed which trace walks Elgar himself took - where inspiration was provided for pieces such as 'Land of Hope and Glory'.

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Aug 14: "The Lark Ascending" #1: Vaughan Williams & KES

"The art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation"

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Richard King's 2019 book explores British music and its link with the landscape of Britain.

I have a copy of the book and enjoyed reading it when it first came out. I've mentioned it previously on the blog.

I've now revisited it for this blog and there is plenty of relevance to the blog's theme, so there will be a number of posts to follow through the next month or so.

Vaughan Williams is referenced in the prologue and his quote that "Folk music is not a cause of national music, it is a manifestation of it'.

He wrote 'The Lark Ascending' which was premiered in 1920 having been started at the outbreak of the Great War.

It was premiered near Bristol.

Vaughan Williams believed that music was a latent force in all people... "the only means of artistic expression which is natural to everybody."

The soundtrack to the Ken Loach film 'KES' (from Barry Hines' book) has a wonderful soundtrack by John Cameron.

"Kes flies higher" has a link to 'The Lark Ascending' in its structure and feel...

Chapter 1 of the book explores the piece in more detail.

It epitomises an idea of place, and because there are no lyrics it hasn't been (mis)interpreted as Blake's 'Jerusalem' has been.

It invokes a reverie: a country dance observed by a bird in flight, "a lyrical expression of grace and freedom".

King says that 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."

Vaughan Williams described folk songs as "an individual flowering on a common stem".

The book is available from all the usual places and comes highly recommended.

Apr 25: Music Books #6: 'The Lark Ascending' by Richard King

This book from 2019 is subtitled:
People, Music and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Britain.

Over the course of the twentieth century, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams is the piece of music that has come to define the mythical concept of the English countryside, with its babbling brooks and skylarks. 

Yet, the landscape is not really an unaffected utopia, but a living, working and occasionally rancorous environment that has forged a nation’s musical personality. On a journey that takes us from post-war poets and artists to the free party scene embraced by the acid house and travelling communities, 

Richard King explores how Britain’s history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.

This is a really interesting book on how landscape and nature have influenced composers over the decades.

I am preparing a longer piece on the book for publication later in the year.

It starts with an exploration of the story of the composition of one of the most popular pieces of English music.

Here's a performance specially filmed in... er, Queensland, Australia....