Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 traces the impact of sounds and rhythm of the natural world and how they were listened, interpreted, and used amid the pressures of modern life to in early twentieth-century Britain. Author Michael Guida argues that despite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature's voices were drawn close to provide everyday security, sustenance and a sense of the future. Nature's sonic presences were not obliterated by the noise of war, the advent of radio broadcasting and the rush of the everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living. Listening to British Nature examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures in order to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who used quiet and rural rhythms to restore shell-shocked soldiers and of ramblers who sought to immerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors, revealing how home-front listening in the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong broadcast by the BBC. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace and unpredictabilities of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around. To listen to nature during this time was to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be taken into the future.
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
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