Wild Isles: Wild Music

The Listening Service

Inspired by David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series, Tom Service goes in search of music that reflects British wildlife and wilderness, and our relationship with it. From the songs of Henry Purcell written whilst wolves still roamed the British Isles to orchestral representations of composers like Hamish MacCunn, Grace Williams and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the score for Wild Isles itself, written by the Oscar nominated film composer George Fenton. But perhaps truly wild music isn’t music written about wild places: perhaps it's music which has a wildness of spirit, of process, or of uncontrollably organic construction, music that releases the untamed and the untameable, by composers like Peter Maxwell Davies, Brian Eno, and Chris Wood. But where do the real sounds of nature fit into all this – the sounds of birdsong, bacteria, and fungi…?

Our witness today is the award-winning author and naturalist Mark Cocker.

Producer: Ruth Thomson