Lizard Peninsula

What does it mean to be located in a landscape or use place as a stimulus for composition? Writer, musician and broadcaster Kate Kennedy goes walking with present-day composers in the places that were important to their 20th-century predecessors. They explore how countryside, coasts and cityscapes become part of someone's life, and how years of living with them gradually find their way into music and the influences that continue to shape their own music today.

In this episode, Kate is walking the Cornish coastline between Mullion and The Lizard with Cornish composer Graham Fitkin. They’re following in the footsteps of composer Ethyl Smyth, who took a walking tour there in the late 1800s. She was captivated by mythical tales of Cornish villagers who on stormy nights lured passing sailing ships onto their rugged coast to plunder any cargo. This wasn’t her native landscape, but her impressions of her walks would go on to inspire her great opera The Wreckers.

But for composer Graham Fitkin, this Cornish coastline isn’t just a place of the imagination. The ever-changing pace of footfall whilst running daily across the challenging sections of path and grassland, along with unexpected sounds from clifftop waterfalls to coastal caves and even detailed interior noises of trees, remain an ongoing musical inspiration.

Presented by Dr Kate Kennedy
Produced by Adrian Washbourne
Mixed by Julian Mayers
Executive Producer: Rami Tzabar
A YadaYada Production for BBC Radio 3