Choreographers have always found difficulty in fitting stories to existing musical scores and there have been few occasions when such music has fitted the dramatic structure entirely satisfactorily at every instance. There are two solutions to the problem: either to commission new music or to manipulate an existing score so that it suits the choreographer's purpose, by editing, changing the order of events or the orchestration, even by finding a composer to write a few bars here and there ‘in the style of’ the main body of the music. Such manipulation is by no means the property of story dances; Balanchine altered the order of events in Serenade for instance.

Frederick Ashton has more often than not chosen the ‘welding’ approach, as he calls it, and this is the method he and John Lanchbery used in A Month in the Country. The two men spent a week in September, 1975, working out action to music before any of the dance was choreographed. Before A Month in the Country, Ashton had already collaborated with John Lanchbery in a similar fashion, on La Fille mal gardée (1960), The Two Pigeons (1961) and The Dream (1964), and, much earlier in his career, he had worked with Constant Lambert who introduced the approach to him and was on hand to arrange and orchestrate pieces, even to suggest which music Ashton should use.