The Sound of the Place: A Journey Through Britain’s Musical Landscapes is a book by composer and music teacher Luke Ottevanger in which he explores the myths, legends, and backstories of nearly 30 composers and roughly 70 musical works, while reflecting on his own creative recovery.

The Sound of the Place grew out of a period when you found yourself unable to compose. Can you describe what happened to your creative life during that period, and what finally prompted you to try to find a way back to composing?

I should stress that I only composed for myself, for the joy of it! If I had to define myself I would have said that I ‘was’ a composer, but no-one else would have seen me in such a way – they would have seen a music teacher. With that qualification made, things changed around 2011 when everything I tried to write quickly became dissatisfying to me and found its way to the bin. Eventually I gave up trying. It felt as if I had written myself into an impasse. Or perhaps the blockage began because, unconsciously, I was changing, and composition was no longer my natural form of creativity. Whatever the reason, I felt distressed at losing my creative outlet. The blockage was just that: the stopping up of something that had previously flowed, and it put me increasingly out of kilter.

Eventually, in early 2022, the desperation to do something about it led to this sudden compulsion to travel to places where other composers had found inspiration, with the vague hope of discovering whether what they had experienced might also rub off on me.

You describe music as having captivated you from childhood, with composition becoming an important part of your life from an early age. What first inspired you to begin creating music of your own?

It just seemed magical to me. In one of my earliest memories I was clearly already enchanted by the idea of creating worlds in sound (it was not yet music!). I was sitting at our old upright as a very young child – maybe three years old – and ‘telling the story’ of Red Riding Hood with my little fingers and, as I remember, my fists. The big bad wolf seemed to be lurking somewhere in the heavy black wooden case of the piano, and those black and white keys I was pressing were the scene on which the drama played itself out. I remember pounding away on clusters of low notes in order to create a dense forest of sound. It must have sounded awful to my poor mother, who was on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, but I was lost in the world I was building out of notes.

I also remember my first piano lesson a little later, at the age of four or so, and the joy I felt at ‘meeting’ C, D and E, and the overwhelming desire to keep learning these notes as fast as my teacher would let me, to go on musical adventures with them.

Then at some point, when I was perhaps eight or nine, I stumbled on a scrap of manuscript paper and realised that there was no reason I could not try to set down my own patterns and sequences of notes, to build them into something bigger, better and more permanent. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. But with no-one to say ‘no’ I kept doing it and gradually learnt a few things.

That first, fundamental joy of playing with notes never left me, and when I write early on in The Sound of the Place that ‘these moments in which sounds are born in silence… are as close to magic as anything I can imagine’ I am describing something that was true at the beginning and is still true now.

The book takes you – and the reader – across the length and breadth of Britain in the footsteps of around thirty composers. How did you choose the composers and the places you wanted to visit?

When the idea hit me it came with an initial list of obvious destinations attached. Some pieces are firmly associated with legends about the place where inspiration struck. Actually, ‘legend’ is a good word, because the first place on my list was Chanctonbury Hill, on the South Downs, with its connection to John Ireland’s atmospheric Legend. It is a piece that has transmitted an enormous ‘sense of place’ to me ever since I first heard it in my early teens, and it is the one such location I had always wanted to visit.

And of course there were plenty of other places with even more well-known links to certain composers – Britten’s Aldeburgh, Elgar’s Brinkwells and the Malverns, Holst’s ‘Egdon Heath’ (to the extent that it is a real place), and so on. So the first stages of the list filled up instantly. After that, it simply grew and grew as I thought on the subject. But I was never aiming to be ‘completist’. There would have been no point in that at all. I simply tried to visit places that called to me, some of which didn’t even really fit my own definition, but which nevertheless simply felt right. And there are places I did not see, which is a shame. I would have particularly have loved to visit some the sites associated with John Ireland in the Channel Islands, for a start, but the chance did not arise.

Why did you decide that travelling to places associated with composers might help you recover your own creative confidence?

Well, on the evening the thought first struck me in early 2022 it simply occurred to me to travel to places which had proved rich in inspirational potential for other composers, and in that instant the decision was made. It wasn’t reasoned-out in any conscious way at that point. 

But, if I take your question as asking specifically ‘why did you go looking for composers, rather than painters or poets,’ then I suppose it was the fact that – because music exists solely as invisible vibrations in the air – composers can be imagined as receivers of these vibrations, people sensitive enough to pick up on the ineffable and make it ‘real’.

In this respect they are like flesh-and-blood incarnations of the windblown aeolian harp that Elgar kept at his house in Herefordshire, and in this sense this incipient music-in-the-air is perhaps the same thing as the inspiration I sought. The words of some of the greatest English composers tell us that they sensed this idea, and perhaps Elgar was even thinking of his aeolian harp when he said that ‘there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.’ To me the accompanied cadenza which is the heart of his Violin Concerto – specifically the otherworldly pizzicato ‘thrumming’ over which the soloist’s ‘windflower’ motives soar – suggests that aeolian harp very profoundly. Both Elgar and Vaughan Williams, in their different ways, even spoke about persisting after their deaths in the form of music, as if music persists around us as a kind of haunting.

So I suppose what I really wanted was to find the places where this potential-music hangs in the air. And perhaps to sense it myself, too. Of course this was just an idle fancy, but nevertheless I allowed myself to dream it because… what if it turned out to be true?

Were there any particular composers whose relationship with landscape you understood differently after actually visiting the places associated with their music?

Mostly the experience intensified and deepened what I already expected to find, but that was really what I wanted anyway, to immerse myself in the reality of something I had previously just imagined. Perhaps what you describe was more the case with some post-Romantic composers who are generally not connected with landscape at all – Lutyens, for instance. She is only a small part of the book, and in fact with her it was not a case of any specific inspiration but of a location which had significance in forming her character. Tracking her to her country bolthole in Suffolk, I saw her as an awkward and conflicted young woman, sensitive but prickly, gathering her resources, rejecting the Theosophism of her upbringing and discovering herself, before turning her back decisively on what she famously dismissed as the ‘folky-wolky’ rural world of her predecessors and becoming a composer of generally thorny and abstract modernist music.

And Birtwistle, too – I knew, of course, that the roots of his modernism lay partly in an atavistic, pre-Romantic view of the land. But experiencing the places where this began for him, around the Accrington of his childhood, was a profound discovery for me.

Above all, Peter Maxwell Davies. On the island of Sanday, Orkney, at the northernmost point of my travels, I had an unexpected encounter with the man who had cared for him in his final years and who still lives in the house, and it deepened and transformed many of my ideas.

But the real discoveries for me were to be found in the larger trends that I discerned: the extent to which this sensitivity to place is a particularly British (and largely English) trait; but also the degree to which it springs from the example of (the German) Mendelssohn, in a long thread that binds his Hebrides Overture to works like Tippett’s The Rose Lake.

We often talk rather loosely about a landscape ‘inspiring’ a composer. Having explored the subject in depth, what do you think that inspiration actually consists of – scenery, atmosphere, memory, history, solitude, or something less tangible?

It may be any of those things, and there are examples of all of them in the book. What surprised me was how often several of them seem to be operating simultaneously.

The earliest example of them all, really, is the opening of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. In this case the atmosphere of the ruined chapel at Holyrood Palace prompted thoughts in Mendelssohn’s mind of the historical events which had taken place there, but these thoughts were also filtered through the fact that he was having this experience as a young man in an ancient city a long way from home, feeling deeply aware of the past and of time’s passing. The impressive Andante which resulted is a heady brew in which the ‘outer’ weight of world history alternates with ‘inner’ music of personal reflection.

Another example: Patrick Hadley’s The Hills is a work concerned with his own memories, but also his deeper family history, filtered through impressions of the rugged landscape of the Peak District where his parents met and fell in love.

The genesis of Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blis is even more complex – it was inspired by the memory of a youthful vision on the slopes of Helvellyn, but a few years after the piece had received its premiere, when the composer moved to the Orkney islands, he realised that the music had always been a foreshadowing of the landscapes of Hoy in which he now lived.

The slow movement of Rubbra’s Sixth Symphony sprang from a line of Italian poetry which meditates on a view of the infinite through a window – but when one sees the view through the window at which Rubbra wrote it, one understands exactly why the line took on such force for him. And at the top of the very same hill up which Rubbra gazed one finds the idyllic landscape in which John Foulds had a clairaudient sense of the voices of the gandharvas which seem to sing through much of his music thereafter.

The constant presence of the river Ouse flowing quietly by at the end of the road throughout Gavin Bryars’ childhood has seeped into much of his music and his style in general. Perhaps his whole character and way of thinking – calmly ruminative, associative, borderless – springs from these fluid beginnings …

What connects all of these, though, is the mysterious process of transmutation which turns landscape and location into musical expression.

From Mendelssohn’s journey to Scotland in 1829 through to Benjamin Britten and Peter Maxwell Davies, the book encompasses some two centuries of music. Did you discover any recurring ideas about place and landscape across those very different generations of composers?

I suppose that if you look into anything for long enough you will always find recurrences or unexpected connections. One recurring idea was the obvious but still surprising extent to which inspiration often comes not from beauty but from any strong impression, including the impact of industry.

So we probably think of inspiration coming from scenes of scenic splendour – the Malvern Hills, the South Downs and so on. But the last pages of Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony seem to have been born whilst the composer was deep underground in a Welsh mine whose miners suffered from debilitating lead poisoning. The sounds of the industrial Black Country society in which he was born echo through the music of Havergal Brian. Birtwistle’s conception of the world was altered when a gigantic power station was built in the next field to his childhood home. Gavin Bryars’ childhood was formed to a large extent by the presence of the tamed, tired river Ouse bearing barges and cargo ships past the end of his street in Goole.

James Dillon’s The Soadie Waste is a slightly different case, but it was inspired by the legend of a Rutherglen dance house built on a spot of old industrial land so steeped in chemical waste that poisonous fumes were said to leach into the air when the dancing got too hot.

What matters is not whether a place is conventionally beautiful, but simply whether it has an imaginative charge for the person encountering it. Sometimes that charge may be beauty, but it can just as easily be ugliness, industry, danger or simply the accumulated weight of human activity. The fact that pollution often attended these scenes offered an ironic counterpoise to that fanciful idea of inspiration floating beneficently in the air.

Was there one particular journey or location that had an unexpectedly powerful effect on you – or somewhere where the reality was quite different from the landscape you had imagined through the music?

Many places affected me profoundly. One that I often return to in my mind is Tintagel, which I visited primarily because of Bax but whose Elgarian connections affected me equally deeply. It was a heavy, overcast late afternoon following a lot of driving, a lot of walking, and a lot of powerful impressions, and as I stood on the cliffs I felt the weight of the nameless something that happened there and that seems to have given the place such significance to Elgar and his ‘Windflower’, Alice Stuart Wortley.

But the place where the reality most unexpectedly transformed the music for me was the dew-drenched orchard I stumbled into at Darvill’s Hill (the tiny hamlet in the Chilterns on the hill above Rubbra’s house) where John Foulds seems to have heard those ‘clairaudient’ voices, which he transcribed in his Gandharva Music. I was there in May, and the place was buzzing with a joyful, burgeoning verdancy that I associated instantly with another work by Foulds which bursts with exactly this same flourishing: the unique, wondrous April-England, a full-blooded piece compared to which Gandharva Music is a light pencil sketch of an intangible idea.

Has researching the relationship between music and place changed the way you listen to British music – and is there now a particular landscape that, for you, has become inseparable from a particular piece of music?

Profoundly yes, to both. I have always loved the music of many British composers, but only in the same way that I love the music of many (say) French, Spanish, Russian or Czech composers – loving the national style, revelling in the sense of place it imparts. And of course, because after all I am British, it also gave that feeling of ‘home’ that I am sure it gives many others.

But loving Vaughan Williams was still fundamentally the same sort of thing as loving Janáček, Granados or Ravel. Writing the book changed this subtly, because I began to sense that there was something different in the way that British music is British. It is nothing to do with quality, of course, simply of tone. There is a kind of eyes-welling-up fulsomeness, an innocence, and a wildness too, that comes, perhaps, from being at the fringes of the continent. I think of it as being at the bottom of a well-kept garden, where the grass grows longer and the wildflowers are poking up. There is a nice phrase by Wilfrid Mellers which sums it up – ‘our native woodnotes wild,’ he wrote.

What are your favourite works which evoke a particular “sense of place”?

There are many, including some I have already mentioned. April-England, as I said. Bax’s Tintagel and the Tintagel works of Elgar – the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto. And of course Elgar’s three ‘Brinkwells’ chamber works: the String Quartet, Piano Quintet and Violin Sonata. Ireland’s Legend and his Cello Sonata. The slow movement of Rubbra’s Sixth Symphony. Holst’s Hammersmith and his Egdon Heath. Tippett’s Ritual Dances. Maxwell Davies’s difficult but unique Worldes Blis. Vaughan Williams’s Flos Campi and his Third and Fifth Symphonies. Many of the watery pieces of Gavin Bryars. Weir’s dancing Ardnamurchan Point. Birtwistle’s Oockooing Bird and his Duets for Storab. Baines’s Paradise Gardens… And, even more than The Hebrides, that opening Andante of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. But I could go on…

The journeys were partly an attempt to restore your own creative confidence. At what point did you begin to feel that composition was becoming possible again, and did returning to it change the kind of music you wanted to write?

On the way to Cornwall one of my visits was to the bronze age Rainbarrows on Duddle Heath in Dorset, which are as close as you can get to visiting Hardy and Holst’s ‘Egdon Heath’. I got soaked to the bone, covered in mud, torn at by thorns. Totally bedraggled! But the experience was magical.

At one point as I walked through the woods I was approached by three silent and unconcerned wild ponies, one brown, one black, one white, like something in a fairytale. The otherworldly nature of this stayed with me, as did the image of myself as an awkward kind of wild-man stumbling through the scene, and when I got home music began to flow easily for the first time in years.

Part of the resulting sketch is shown at the very end of the book. And, yes, there were differences in it from the music I was writing during the five years before the block set in. Instinct has always been important to me when I compose, but in a technical and harmonic sense this sketch followed my instincts in ways that I was not doing when composition stopped in 2011.

I am not sure if that is significant or not. Because, although the last pages of the book contain a glimmer of hope, it turned out that this little burst of composing dwindled out too, so I never got to find out.

What has the experience of researching and writing this book taught you about creative blocks?

I don’t know much! For a number of reasons – but one in particular, which I will get into – things did not work out as I hoped they would.

But at the very least I did discover that negative situations like this can be changed by putting oneself into unexpected situations, even if the change is not always the one that you are hoping for. That was the case with The Sound of the Place. Subsequently, too, for a second book, undertaken for a different reason but with a similar modus operandi, positive change occurred.

I think the lesson is less about how to cure a creative block than about the value of changing the conditions in which you are trying to create. Sometimes the change may not be the one you expected, but that does not mean that nothing has changed.

Now that The Sound of the Place is complete, where has your own composing taken you next?

As I alluded to earlier, what happened next was not expected. I finished writing the first draft in April 2023, but, as its last words explain, my wife Philippa became very ill shortly afterwards. She woke one morning to find herself unable to stand, and from that day until the day she died, which was Christmas Day 2024, she was bed-bound and in excruciating pain. I became her carer, and unfortunately I also had to keep working, so there was no time to compose during her illness. More importantly, even if there had been, there was absolutely no emotional energy for it.

After her death, the importance of virtually all of the music I loved withered away for me almost entirely – with few exceptions everything about it seemed very petty. The Sound of the Place itself became painful for me to deal with. It was a memory of a joyful experience from a different lifetime but also – I have to be honest – one I resented in some obscure sense given that, whilst I wrote it, and unsuspected by Philippa or me as I gallivanted across the country, the cancer was growing within her. I found it difficult to do the work necessary to fulfil my side in bring the book through various stages of editing, which is why it is being published so long after my journeys ended. I am very grateful to Stephen Games, my editor, for many things, but one of them is his patience!

But what did happen was also unexpected: I began to write the second book I mentioned earlier, which turned out to play a part in beginning to process my grief. As with The Sound of the Place I travelled the country visiting places with a specific type of musical connection. And, just like The Sound of the Place, I made those journeys and wrote the book for no reason except a sense of personal imperative that I could not ignore.

This new book has been the focus of my creative energies over the last year, and writing it I have slowly come to the conclusion I already hinted at: that somewhere in the last fifteen years, perhaps I ceased ‘being’ a composer. Instead I slowly became a writer. I will never rule out a return to composing, but as I grow older writing about music seems to suit me better. I think this is because composing, in the non-verbal, primal, instinctive language of harmonies and rhythms, requires of me an innocence and simplicity that I currently find hard to recreate. Too much second-guessing, too much self-doubt. Whereas writing about complex, contradictory, tricksy concepts that relate musical creativity to life – that I think I can do.

I have come to love The Sound of the Place again. But for obvious reasons this new one means even more to me.

The Sound of the Place is published by Envelope Books. More here