The Essay: Vaughan Williams: Belonging

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The Essay: Vaughan Williams: Belonging: Vaughan Willliams - Luke Turner

Vaughan Willliams - Luke Turner

Vaughan Williams: Belonging

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Vaughan Williams: Belonging, Vaughan Willliams - Luke Turner

Personal essays on what Vaughan Williams means to five different writers.

Personal essays on what Vaughan Williams means to five different writers. Nature writer and music journalist  Luke Turner remembers childhood car journeys accompanied by The Wasps.

Five writers and artists not normally associated with classical music, discuss a specific example of Vaughan Williams’ work to which they have a personal connection, and why it speaks to them.

Following on from the successful Five Kinds of Beethoven Radio 3 essay series in 2020, where a wide range of Beethoven fans shared their personal relationship to the composer and his work, this new series gives similar treatment to Vaughan Williams. 

Our essayists share their unexpected perspective on Vaughan Williams’ work, taking it outside the standard ‘English pastoral’ box, in a series of accessible essays, part of  the Vaughan Williams season on Radio 3. 


Luke Turner – nature writer and music journalist
The Wasps – Aristophanic Suite was an EMI and John Player Special cassette tape that Luke’s family listened to on long car journeys in the 1980s. Obviously the cassette opens with The Lark Ascending, but like a pop smash hit drawing your attention to an album, that piece was merely the introduction to The Wasps - Aristophanic Suite on the second side, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley. It became the soundtrack to Luke’s growing awareness of the English landscape as it passed by the windows, not in a simple, bucolic way, but the complexities of the place, the baked bean orange of traffic lights on the M62 over the Yorkshire Moors, the strange Cold War military installations that seemed to be everywhere, motorway reservations and the endless traffic jams around the Kings Lynn Roundabout. The piece also captures for Luke an awareness of how music works, how it combines with emotion and experience to become integral to memory, how something called The Wasps could have next to nothing to do with the insects, how his young mind could place onto this music whatever his imagination brought forward. It feels like many of his generation and certainly in his profession as a music journalist see Vaughan Williams as quite an establishment figure or quite conservative, but The Wasps was psychedelic music that made inroads into Luke’s imagination, and unleashed the possibilities of sound connecting to place. 
Luke Turner is a writer and editor. He co-founded the influential music website The Quietus where he runs a regular podcast and radio show. He has contributed to the Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, NME, Q, Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and Somesuch Stories, among other publications. His first book, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Born in Bradford, he lives in London.

Writer and reader Luke Turner
Sound designer Paul Cargill
Producers Polly Thomas and Yusra Warsama
Exec producer Eloise Whitmore

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Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Writers and artists not normally associated with classical music, discuss a specific example of Williams' work to which they have a personal connection, and why it speaks to them.

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