"In a special programme, Kirsty Young celebrates Desert Island Discs and reveals the tracks you [the public]would want with you if you were castaway."
I must admit I was both astonished and heartened to see that the most popular track was Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. It's probably difficult for English people living in England to come out and say in so many words that this music captures as virtually no other the quintessence of England, but as an Englishman who has spent most of his adult life living abroad I have no such difficulty! But I would be hard put to describe what strange alchemy of history, culture and landscape has combined to ensure that this music, like the Enigma Variations, could only have been written by an Englishman.
At the same time, it represents a picture of England that has all but vanished, if indeed it ever existed. But that, surely, is the power of great music. It creates its own world, one that we dimly perceive as a finer, infinitely more wonderful version of the world we actually inhabit. But we recognise it just the same.
I must admit I was both astonished and heartened to see that the most popular track was Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. It's probably difficult for English people living in England to come out and say in so many words that this music captures as virtually no other the quintessence of England, but as an Englishman who has spent most of his adult life living abroad I have no such difficulty! But I would be hard put to describe what strange alchemy of history, culture and landscape has combined to ensure that this music, like the Enigma Variations, could only have been written by an Englishman.
At the same time, it represents a picture of England that has all but vanished, if indeed it ever existed. But that, surely, is the power of great music. It creates its own world, one that we dimly perceive as a finer, infinitely more wonderful version of the world we actually inhabit. But we recognise it just the same.
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