Column: Stuart Maconie
Deep links twixt music and walking.
IT WASN’T A country walk, but it was the next best thing. A lovely evening stroll through the late summer light via Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park to the glowing magnificent cupola of the Royal Albert Hall. Walking has been one consolation of a bleak couple of years for us all. But not so live music; just as important to me, and sorely missed. So being able to stroll through the West London evening to a Proms concert in late August, transported from the constraints of these strange days, was a joy; two joys in fact. Walking and music are two of my greatest passions and plenty of composers have felt the same way, either making music about walks or striding out to get the creative gears moving as well as the legs.
In the first category, maybe most famously, we can put Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky. (That’s his name, not his personality; he was actually loud and unpredictable.) Its most famous section,
Promenade, a beautiful stately melody, evokes the slow gait of Mussorgsky as he wanders the halls of the gallery “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention…” Look it up. You’ll know it. As you will the Flower Duet from
Lakmi by Delibes, a Classic FM/TV advert favourite intended to evoke a garden stroll. Mendelssohn’s
Fingal’s Cave Overture takes some inspiration from walks on the rugged Hebridean island of Staffa. Warning though: don’t expect a route card in this mag any time soon for an actual tour of the titular basalt sea cave. You would definitely get your boots wet.
It’s becoming almost a cliché to extol the virtues of walking as a creative aid, and a long list of ambulatory composers bears this out. Tchaikovsky, for instance, was the kind of guy who would not have left his dacha sans Fitbit. Before commencing his day’s work of composing, he would take a brief stroll, then get down a few lines of manuscript. After lunch though, he would set out again for a walk of two hours exactly. As his brother later wrote: “Somewhere at some time he had discovered that a man needs a twohour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”
It wasn’t just for the good of his health, it was for the good of his music too. He believed a daily walking regimen was essential to keeping his creative juices flowing, and he would compose on the hoof, jotting ideas in a notepad. Likewise, Beethoven always took a walk after lunch with pencil and paper, the most famous result being the Pastoral Symphony, written in and about the countryside. Mahler had some of his best ideas on daily four-hour stomps, while Benjamin Britten’s afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write”.
All the above are lightweights compared to the wonderful and quirky Eric Satie, composer of some of the most strange and beautiful music ever written and a walker to put Wainwright to shame. His daily routine involved a six-mile walk from his cramped flat in the suburbs to Paris’ bohemian Montmartre district, composing in his head as he went. After a busy day of socialising, eating and drinking, he would walk back home in the small hours, jot down ideas, and get to bed just before dawn for a few hours’ kip before repeating the next day. One music critic said that Satie’s odd, repetitive rhythms came from this “endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day”. It brought works like the elegant Gymnopodies and the less well-known but equally wonderful The Dreaming Fish, Truly Flabby Preludes (For A Dog) and Chimes to Awaken the King of the Apes. Give them a listen on your next stroll and think of Eric, weaving his drunken way home from a Montmartre boozer, full of burgundy and tunes.