Blakes Wood Essex

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.

Kate is walking amidst bluebells in Blakes Wood in Essex, with composer Nicola Lefanu. It’s an idyllic secluded wood that Nicola lived nearby as a child. Her mother, the equally prolific Irish-English composer Elisabeth Maconchy, was one of the great British composers of string quartets. Yet Maconchy moved frequently between England and Ireland during her childhood and later relocated across different English regions for her education, family life, and wartime safety. For her, landscapes were symbolic of a sense of uprootedness. Her music was often characterised by an intense, energetic style, so different from the serene English pastoralism popular in her early career. She may have lived in and amongst the loveliest of rural idylls, but her works were, in her own brilliant phrase, an impassioned argument - fizzing with movement, invention and purpose.

Presented by Dr Kate Kennedy
Produced by Adrian Washbourne
Mixed by Julian Mayers
Executive Producer: Rami Tzabar