British orchestral composers are inspired by our gloomy weather

Wired / Culture / 22 September 11 / by Mark Brown

Over the centuries, orchestral British composers have been influenced by one national obsession more than any other: our rotten weather.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Reading dug through music from the 17th Century to the present day, and found that UK composers are twice as likely to have written music with meteorological themes than their foreign counterparts.

They looked for types of weather that are regularly depicted in music. Storms appeared often, probably because they're a tidy allegory for emotional turbulence like Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes from the opera Peter Grimes.

Wind was a popular feature of music too, especially as it can be expressed in a variety of ways from a from a gentle breeze -- as in the third movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique -- to a full-blown Antarctic gale -- as in Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica.

All of these taken into account, the research showed that British composers lead the way with musical weather, followed by the French and the Germans.

The researchers, Karen Aplin, from Oxford University's department of physics, and Paul Williams, from the University of Reading's department of meteorology (they did their research on their off-hours), hope that their paper can be picked up in many years time to see how climate-related trends change in culture.

"Will UK composers writing music for a 2050 Proms programme still be interested in representing our warmer, wetter weather?" a spokesperson for the University of Reading writes. "It seems inevitable that our changing climate will influence artistic expression. This paper will provide a basis for comparison."