Starting from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ classic ‘pastoral romance for orchestra’, King explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature. The landscape we celebrate as unsullied and ripe with mystique is a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment – not an unaffected idyll – that forged a nation's musical personality, and its dissenting traditions. He listens to the music from the far west of Wales to the Thames Estuary and the Suffolk shoreline, taking in Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Dylan Thomas, Gavin Bryars, Greenham Common and the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass to chart a new and surprising course through a familiar landscape.
