Have you ever found yourself at an impasse, tearing your hair out at a problem you just can’t crack? Have you found yourself, striding fast through Parker’s Piece or along the backs after the frustration intensifies so much that you are forced into the fresh air? And have you found that suddenly the solution comes to you clear as day? If so, you are not alone. Benjamin Britten, perhaps Britain’s greatest composer, was a serial walker. Throughout his long career it was an unshakable fixture of his day. After a cold bath, a breakfast of tea and eggs, and a morning of composing he would stride out from his house at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast into the countryside.

The walks were profoundly clarifying for him, allowing his mind to breeze through the difficulties in his morning work. Not only did these walks clear his head, but they were also sources of inspiration in their own right. Britten’s music is imbued with the sounds and textures of the Suffolk coast and countryside which he knew intimately, having spent most of his life there.

“To transport yourself physically is to transport yourself to new realms of musical inspiration”

At his Aspen Award lecture he argued that artists do their best work when situated in a specific community, a specific place. His greatest work, the opera Peter Grimes, has its greatest moments when it is most rooted in place. Britten learnt the rhythms of the salty Suffolk sea well during his walks up and down the coast. During its stunning ‘Four Sea Interludes’, the sea itself takes centre stage, palling over the human tragedy on stage. The sea speaks with a full emotional register, capable of being rageful, beautiful, mournful. Walking made the landscape part of Britten’s internal world, subtly attaching itself to his perspective and emotions. His music is as much made up of the scraping of stones in the sea, the rise and swell of saltwater, the whistling of wind in whiskery reeds as minims, crotchets and quavers.

Though Britten is the most impressive example of a walker as a composer in our local East Anglian context, he is by no means alone. Edward Elgar’s hikes in the steep and rolling Malvern Hills have a place in his music. His spine-tingling classic ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations rises, falls and rises again like the hills he walked so often. So much has Elgar and his music come to be associated with the countryside around the town of Great Malvern that it has come to be known as ‘Elgar Country’.

The scope of the relationship of walking and composing is not, however, limited to afternoon strolls, but also remarkable odysseys on foot. Johann Sebastian Bach once walked 400km to visit his musical hero, Dietrich Buxtehude. Not only did the encounter shape the rest of his musical career, in works like his stirring ‘Passacaglia in C Minor’, but the shifting German countryside he walked through became a deep well of inspiration. This pilgrimage shows a remarkable devotion to music, as if to transport yourself physically is to transport yourself to new realms of musical inspiration.

“Maybe we weren’t built for the stagnancy of the desk, but for the stimuli of the natural world and one foot in front of the other”

But why do many composers love to walk? Why is it such a common source of inspiration? The sounds of the natural world sit at the foundation of music, before we were music makers as a species we must first have found great beauty in the melodies of birds, wind, and sea. It is walking through a landscape that allows us to encounter the world’s shifting sounds in all their different textures.

Neuroscience has shown the deep connections between walking and creativity. A Stanford study in 2014, for example, discovered that a person’s “creative output” increased a remarkable 60% simply by walking. This makes sense when we consider much of our language about thinking is about moving: ‘a train of thought’, ‘jogging one’s memory’, and so on. Maybe we weren’t built for the stagnancy of the desk, but for the stimuli of the natural world and one foot in front of the other. Whether we realise it or not, we are always thinking on our feet.

Most of us aren’t among the immortal greats of classical music, but if walking worked wonders for some of world music’s greatest virtuosos then perhaps it can at least save us from the panic of coming up against writer’s block halfway through a weekly essay.

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