Luke Ottevanger hears London beyond the street noise

By Tom Whitfield

Composer Luke Ottevanger argues that London’s quietest musical secrets sit in its parks, gardens, squares and waterways, not its busiest streets. The claim appears in an exclusive extract from his new book, The Sound of the Place: A Journey through Britain’s Musical Landscapes, published by Envelope Books.

His distinction offers a way to listen, but the examples he selects complicate it. Ottevanger begins with the density of London’s musical history, where nearly every street carries associations with composers, performers, concerts, parties and other musical events. He offers a selective catalogue of explicit London portraits:

• Elgar’s Cockaigne overture is a “bustling evocation” of London at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony is alternately mystical and menacing.
• Holst’s Hammersmith offers a “darkly ambiguous” vision of the hubbub around Hammersmith Bridge and the Thames flowing beneath it.
• Bax’s London Pageant is ceremonial.
• Ireland’s London Overture takes its “perky” main motive from a bus conductor’s call: “dilly-Piccadilly . . .”

Ottevanger says most successful British composers lived in London at an important or formative point, and most wrote major works there. Music about London and songs with London lyrics already abound, he notes, making an exhaustive survey as vast as the capital.

His target is narrower. He seeks music rooted in intense place-consciousness or in overhearing a delicate, distant, secret sound, not merely a work that names or depicts the city. That narrower target sits uneasily beside the overt city portraits in his own list.

A quieter city beneath London

Ottevanger compares the hunt for such sounds in London with the stillness of a Buckinghamshire orchard, a Sussex woodland, a stretch of Suffolk shoreline and a Cambridgeshire millpond. He argues that the capital’s noise and activity block the quietest sounds, while buildings and tarmac bury the natural spirit of the land.

Ottevanger suggests that the urbanite Betty Lutyens may have sensed the same problem in her younger Braughles years.

In a biographical sketch, Stanford described what Sterndale Bennett’s move to London did to his composing:

“He took no holidays, gained no further inspiration from the meadows or millstream of Grantchester, but fixed himself in his chambers in Gt. Titchfield Street, in a city which could do little, and for nine months in each year nothing, to foster a musical spirit.”

Ottevanger quotes Machen:

“In Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams Lucian Taylor feels the need to escape from rural Wales to London not only to write and to make something concrete of his literary urges but also to escape the irrational force of the natural world . . .”

“But after he arrives in London, creative dullness rapidly strikes Lucian, too: all that is fresh and free has died in his work . . .”

Ottevanger uses both passages to place the rare “old wood-whisper” not in built-up districts but by water and in gardens, squares and parks, where the natural world still breaks through.

London signals the composer denies

Holst took care to state that his wind-band piece Hammersmith was not programme music. His close friend Vaughan Williams said London Symphony, rather than depicting London, was a “symphony written by a Londoner.”

Ottevanger nevertheless finds urban material in both works:

• Hammersmith contains the slow roll of the Thames and the commotion of street life.
• London Symphony includes Westminster chimes, street-vendor cries, the jingle of hansom cabs and the music of buskers.

Vaughan Williams, Ottevanger says, recognized the conflict but chose to ignore it.

In a letter to the American music critic Olin Downes, Vaughan Williams defended that choice:

“I want the symphony to express the spirit of London. If my music does not do so, it will not help to say that a certain bit ‘means’ the Thames or Bloomsbury, etc …”

“You know the story of Erik Satie who told Debussy that in his ‘de l’aube à midi sur la mer’ [‘From dawn to midday at sea’—the first movement of La mer] he particularly admired the bit at 11.35 a.m. I do not want any ‘11.35 a.m.’ interpretation of my music.”

The Satie reference sets a time as an interpretive key: 11.35 a.m. Vaughan Williams rejects that precision, yet his symphony still carries the sounds of Westminster, vendors, cabs and buskers. Ottevanger’s reading therefore tests the composer’s stated intention against the audible evidence.

The extract offers no rule for resolving that conflict. It does make the tension productive, because a listener can hear the urban signals without accepting the composers’ wish that they carry no fixed meaning.

What does this change for listening to London?

For a listener, the practical change is where to begin. Ottevanger’s premise sends the search beyond famous landmarks and toward isolated sound in London’s parks, gardens, squares and waters.

The Holst and Vaughan Williams cases sharpen the test: identify the urban material, then ask why the composer resisted a literal reading. That offers more than a claim that the capital is too noisy; it asks listeners to isolate each city signal and weigh intention against sound.

If the wider book develops this opening proposition into sustained comparisons with Britain’s quieter landscapes, it will have to show that the method survives examples as explicit as Elgar’s, Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s. The extract offers an evocative proposition, not a settled method.