Full Description
Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 reveals for the first time how the sounds and rhythms of the natural world were listened to, interpreted and used amid the pressures of early twentieth century life. The book argues that despite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature's voices were drawn close to provide security and engender optimism. Nature's sonic presences were not obliterated by machine age noise, the advent of radio broadcasting or the rush of the urban everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living.
This book examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who made use of nature's quietude and the rhythms of rural work to restore shell-shocked soldiers, and of ramblers who sought to immerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors. It reveals how home-front listening during the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong, broadcast by the BBC. To listen to nature during this period was to cultivate an intimate connection with its energies and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be taken into the future. Listening to nature was a way of being modern.
Contents
Introduction
1. Birdsong over the trenches: the sound of survival and escape
'The air is loud with death' - listening in fear for danger
Sonic relief amid the shelling
Regenerative rhythms
Resilience and 'carrying on' in birds and men
Skyward escape with the lark
Conclusion
2. Pastoral quietude for shell shock and national recovery
Quiet for the wounded?
Country house therapy
The 'beneficent alluring quietude' of the Village Centre utopia
Quiet for national recovery
Conclusion
3. Broadcasting nature
John Reith's public service nightingale
In touch with cosmic harmony
Normalising radio with nature
Conclusion
4. The rambler's search for the sensuous
Re-balancing the senses
Willis Marshall: into the moors
Nan Shepherd's merger with the mountain
A violent assertion of personality: hedonism in nature
Conclusion
5. Modern birdsong and civilisation at war
Recording and modernising birdsong
Home front listening tensions
'Consoling voices of the air': Ludwig Koch's broadcasts
Birdsong civilised and civilising
Conclusion
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography and sources
Index
