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Grab your sensible shoes, lightweight layers and a flask of hot tea, for a trek up and down literary and musical mountains across the world. Siobhan Redmond and Tachia Newall are our readers.

We begin our hike In the Tatra Mountains, inspired by composer Vítězslav Novák’s own journeys in Eastern Europe, then try to find the way to Cold Mountain with mysterious Chinese poet Han Shan, traverse the light-struck plateau of the Cairngorms beside Nan Shepherd, and haiku master Basho chuckles at foggy rain hiding Mount Fuji.
We also take in Cape Town’s Table Mountain with Miriam Makeba, yodelling from Fritz Liechti and his family, bass-baritone Paul Robeson sings of England’s pleasant pastures and mountains green, and hear a Himalayan trekking song accompanied by the Pahari folk tale ‘A Monkey Objects to Criticism.’

We also explore the romance of craggy summits and stars with Keats, plus Annie Proulx’s tragic love story of Brokeback Mountain alongside the film’s soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla, Laurel and Hardy are pining for the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Bjork’s Hyperballad arranged for string quartet hurls belongings off the top of a mountain, and Erica Jong’s poem ‘Climbing You’ details a sour relationship akin to a doomed expedition.

Faced with falling talus from above, Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination’ takes us to risky rambles up glaciers accompanied by Ferde Grofe’s Death Valley Suite, we also hear Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King alongside HP Lovecraft’s ‘Mountains of Madness’, and head to Middle-earth as hobbits Samwise and Frodo come face-to-face with the ominous Mount Doom.

Metaphorical mountains include Naomi Long Madgett’s powerful poem ‘Midway’ representing the racism she fought to overcome in the United States, heard alongside John Coltrane’s Alabama, widely believed to be a response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15th 1963. The nostalgic and unsettled quietude of Over the Hills and Far Away by Frederick Delius is interwoven with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Mountain’, a reflection of the confusion and turmoil during the aging process as the world seems to change around you.

Producer: Nancy Bennie

READINGS:
Emily Dickinson – The Mountain Sat Upon the Plain
Han Shan – Cold Mountain translated by Gary Snyder
Nan Shepherd – The Living Mountain
Basho - The Narrow Road to Deep North and Other Travel Sketches translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
Helen Mort - A Line Above the Sky: A story of mountains and motherhood
John Keats - Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain
Erica Jong – Climbing You
Robert Macfarlane - Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
HP Lovecraft – Mountains of Madness
JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Alice Elizabeth Dracott – Simla Village Tales, or Folk Tales from the Himalayas
Naomi Long Madgett – Midway
Elizabeth Bishop – The Mountain
Emily Bronte – Loud Without the Wind was Roaring