Around noon on 30 June 1915, England experienced a storm of newsworthy magnitude. An extended column in The Guardian provided a graphic account of ‘How the storm burst over Manchester’ before tracing its journey through neighbouring towns, as it brought a ‘Deluge at Buxton’, ‘Havoc in Shropshire’, and ‘Devastation’ to Burton-on-Trent.Footnote ¹ For the most part, the article focused on the damage wrought to the physical landscape: on beaten-down crops, interrupted telegraph and telephone lines, lightning bursts down chimneys, and floods so fierce that even ducks were reported to have drowned. But the storm's sonic impact did not go unremarked. Outside, the ‘loud thunderpeals’ swamped other sounds with their ‘deafening’ force. Inside, soundscapes were temporarily reconfigured too – and in ways that could be felt viscerally as well as aurally. Most notably, although numbers at the wartime memorial service taking place in Manchester Cathedral were seemingly not affected by the storm, the sacred atmosphere struggled to withstand the ‘umbrellas and clammy macintoshes’. As the journalist explained, with their accoutrements, the tightly packed congregation created ‘an urgent sense of proximity among the auditors and of remoteness to the leisured solemnities of the service’.

Writing at the end 2022, a year in which extreme heatwaves have swept across much of Europe and when activists and politicians have shouted loudly about the devastating consequences of global warming, it might seem obvious that weather – and its attendant sounds – are a constitutive part of modern life. Yet within much of the recent musicological scholarship on modernity, natural sounds have figured peripherally. This is in part a by-product of the particular set of concerns that have driven Sound Studies as it has consolidated its sub-disciplinary status over the past two decades.Footnote ² Scholars working in this field have had a groundbreaking impact on the discipline, turning musicological ears to new objects of study: buildings and sound reproduction technologies replaced pieces of music, subaltern voices began to be heard alongside those of elites.Footnote ³ For all its innovations, however, much of this work has subtly reproduced the pre-existing modernist biases of the academy. Scholars tended to focus on urban evolution and the noisiness of modern life. By equating ‘sound’ with ‘noise’ – and typically noise that emanated from or was amplified by man-made machines – they once again heard modernity as disorientating, disruptive, and disorderly. What emerged, in other words, was a modernity that sounded as radical, chaotic, and man-made as much of the modernist music that had drawn the interests of a previous scholarly generation.

Meanwhile, where scholars did acknowledge nature's presence in twentieth-century thought, it carried with it the dubious connotations of an anachronistic hangover. In the hands of Britain's so-called ‘pastoral’ composers, nature inspired stylistically unadventurous but otherwise seemingly benign compositions. For the likes of F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, on the other hand, interest in ‘the environment’ furnished a dystopian nostalgia for village life that was as idealized as it was elitist.Footnote ⁴ Coded more or less explicitly as the terrain of the pre-industrial era, nature was one of modernity's ‘others’.

Michael Guida's Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio and Modern Life, 1914–1945 provides a welcome intervention into these debates, re-tuning our ears to hear the natural sounds that reverberated throughout early twentieth-century Britain. His starting point is a conviction that encounters with nature need to be understood as a fundamental part of modern life. As he eloquently puts it, ‘[e]ngaging with nature's sonic and sensory experiences was part of being modern – to be modern was to take nature with you into the future’ (4). His goal is to reanimate the ‘natural’ sounds of the early twentieth century: to find out how and where people listened to nature and to understand what these sounds meant to historic listeners. To this end, he has scoured a multitude of sources – from diaries and letters to memoirs and books – seeking where possible to excavate the voices of working- and middle-class people that have so often remained silent in history. The result is an account as thoroughly researched as it is illustrated; with excerpts woven liberally into the prose, the kaleidoscopic soundscape that resonates throughout the book is richly evocative.

One of the most compelling aspects of Guida's account is the variety of places in which he recovers natural sounds. Unsurprisingly, three of the chapters centre on rural spaces of various kinds: the battlefields of the First World War (Chapter 1); Britain's country houses (Chapter 2); and the wilds of the Peak District and Scotland (Chapter 4). But two further chapters unearth nature's sonic presence in urban interiors, investigating how pioneers of radio and gramophone used these technologies to domesticate the great outdoors – from the BBC's celebrated ‘nightingale broadcasts’, which launched in 1923 just 18 months after the BBC's inauguration (Chapter 3, especially pp. 70–5), through to Ludwig Koch's wartime ‘aural documentaries’ of iconic national birds (Chapter 5, especially pp. 120–37). Listening to British Nature thus also contributes to the wave of recent scholarship challenging the easy truism of urban and rural spheres as fundamentally distinct. It listens to the ‘dynamism and interplay’ between them (5).Footnote ⁵ In the process, it advocates a broad perspective on ‘the sounds of nature’: while birdsong is a recurrent trope throughout the book, at one time or another ‘natural sound’ also encompasses everything from ethereal cosmological systems (80–5) to the eerie perceptions of silence in the trenches that typically signalled death (26).

If the panoply of sounds that echo through Guida's account is abundant in its variety, ‘nature’ ultimately seems to be defined by one, overriding aesthetic quality: ‘quiet’. Guida articulates the connection most explicitly in Chapter 2, which is centrally concerned with interwar uses of ‘pastoral quietude’ as a palliative for shell shock, and so more broadly as a vehicle for national recovery. He writes: ‘Quiet and silence are so closely related in human perception to the sounds of the natural world that sometimes they become interchangeable. Quiet is nature's sound and nature's sound is quiet’ (67). It is not always clear in his account – as it appears not always to be from his sources – to what extent ‘quiet’ and ‘silence’ define the same sonic experience. What seems to matter is that ‘quiet’ is not so much a measure of decibels as a qualitative descriptor: it tells us more about how sound or its absence is experienced than about its measurable volume.

In making the quietness of modern life audible, Guida encourages us to listen again to modernity and to tune in to the subtleties of its variegated soundscape. At the same time, however, hearing nature as quiet paradoxically seems to undo some of the book's work of complicating familiar binaries. Where tradition has been placed in opposition to modernity – natural resources to man-made machines, or the countryside to the dense urbanity of the sprawling city – the equivalent sonic dichotomy has always been quiet or silence versus noise. Luigi Russolo made the point in the most polarizing terms possible in his famous Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises: ‘Ancient life was all silence’, he categorically asserted. Then, ‘[i]n the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men. Through many centuries life unfolded silently, or at least quietly.’Footnote ⁶ If Guida usefully highlights quietude as an underexplored category of sonic experience in the twentieth century, he does so in a way that simultaneously leaves it anchored to pre-industrial ‘natural’ experience. The noisiness of industrial modernity, on the other hand, is implicitly reinforced by the wartime themes of the chapters that bookend his account: for during the First and Second World Wars, man-made objects – the weapons of modern warfare – showered battlefields and home-fronts with noise that could be as destructive and traumatizing for humans as bombs were for the physical landscape.

Another consequence of the emphasis on quietude is that nature also emerges from Guida's account as overwhelmingly gentle and benign – variously a symbol of ‘regeneration’, of life's ‘eternal continuity’, of distance from human madness, of resilience, of normality. For all its innovative focus on sound rather than music, then, the book sustains a vision of nature that seems to be in deep sympathy with that of the much derided ‘pastoral’ school of English music.Footnote ⁷ In many ways, this is unsurprising: although this repertoire has traditionally been understood as reactionary – both because of its ideological stance on nature as an antidote to industrial modernity and because this was typically expressed in stylistically conservative compositions – it nevertheless represented an attempt to use nature to make sense of modern life. To put this another way, there was clearly a prevailing current of human experience in early twentieth-century Britain that prompted strong associations between ‘nature’ and ‘quiet’. Once formed, this association could be embraced as part of modern life (as Guida argues in his account), or as a reaction against it.

However, equating nature and quietude implicitly leaves the darker sides of nature – as a force that, even in a country with a comparatively mild climate, could wreak havoc through extreme weather conditions – outside of modern British experience. Of course, storms such as the one recounted at the start of this review were not everyday occurrences; but nor were they once-in-a-lifetime happenings. If their comparative infrequency meant that the deafening noise did not cause long-term traumatic stress in the way that bombs did, their sonic element rarely went unremarked. To offer another example: in September 1930, the Manchester Guardian reported a ‘severe storm in London’, during which the thunderclaps had been ‘deafening’ – an ostensibly generic trope, but one that seems to take on wartime connotations.Footnote ⁸ For it is followed by a description of the ‘deep holes in the earth on the outskirts of the town … where the thunderbolt fell’, like a shell making a crater in no-man's-land. Nature here seems anything but quiet or benign. On the contrary, it is so noisy and destructive that the writer appears to have invoked the man-made machinery of war to explain it.

Beyond the book's high-level interventions into scholarly debates in Sound Studies, Media Studies, and Ecomusicology, individual chapters also make productive contributions to more specialized research areas. For example, in Chapter 1, Guida moves beyond the traditional focus in First World War scholarship on the pastoral as a literary trope. Rather, in attending to the many kinds of solace that soldiers found in birds’ quiet songs, he uses these historic encounters with the natural world as a way of recapturing something of the ‘lived experience’ of war. Chapter 3 offers a new lens onto the inaugural director of the BBC's vision for radio. Despite much recent debate among radio historians about the extent to which John Reith's paternalism shaped the early broadcasting agenda, little attention has been paid to the role that he imagined for natural sounds.Footnote ⁹ Guida's investigation not only deepens our understanding of Reith's personal beliefs, but also, more importantly, demonstrates how, in invoking nature, Reith – like Koch, and others who followed him – was but one voice in a bigger conversation about modern life. Meanwhile, Chapter 4 explores why ‘rambling’ – that is, walking for pleasure in the countryside – became such a popular pastime in the interwar period. The focus is on the sensory appeal of nature, a topic that was yet to receive sustained engagement from scholars of outdoor leisure. Through this lens, Guida reveals how rambling provided a space in which contemporary gender norms could be challenged. Furthermore, in his subtle reading of two ramblers’ journals, he recovers working-class experience on its own terms, showing it to be distinct from the middle-class voices whose moaning about inappropriate behaviour in the countryside dominated the press.

As a work of scholarship, I found Listening to British Nature thought-provoking. It is inspiring and refreshing to see topics so reminiscent of the long-derided (and still unfashionable) repertoire of British ‘pastoral’ music being so deftly handled. Guida's careful source-work demonstrates a compelling sympathy for his historical subjects. For all these reasons, I highly recommend the book as reading – not just for those who share its disciplinary interests, but also for anyone seeking inspiration on reparative historical writing.