Music, Ice, and the "Geometry of Fear": The Landscapes of Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott, commander of the Terra Nova and leader of the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole in 1910–13, occupies a unique place in the English cultural imagination. His poetic voice, as revealed through his letters and diary entries (especially those recovered from his tent on the Ross Ice Shelf after his party failed to return from the Pole), has often seemed emblematic of a peculiarly English tone or sensibility, the epitome of a notion of national identity that seems frozen in time and space—a cryogenically preserved fragment of Englishness trapped on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War.1 Scott's faith in religion, nationhood, and the human spirit, allied to his unswerving belief in adventure as a moral imperative, crystallizes a particular ideological worldview that has continued to exert a powerful influence. The legacy of Scott's adventure is partly scientific—the expedition led to the foundation of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, which has since served to direct future work on the Polar Regions (including current research on climate change, where the Antarctic has begun to assume a central significance). Yet the story of Scott's adventure has since been retold many times, periodically re-inscribed so that it reflects the changing concerns and anxieties of a different generation.2 Most recently, for example, attention has shifted from arguments concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses of Scott's party, as opposed to those of his Norwegian “rival” Amundsen,3 toward a more cultural geographically informed view, which sees the expedition as a performative act, the linear playing-out or re-mapping of a vision of Empire upon a notionally blank-and-white canvas.4 Scott's voyage, in effect, becomes a form of writing with its own syntax and grammar, or a means of inhabiting, dwelling, and moving through the landscape.5 Another (eco-critical) reading allows the expedition to be read as allegory, a cautionary tale of the futility of the human attempt to conquer or control an unpopulated natural domain whose complex environmental processes factor primarily among the forces that drive and regulate the world's climate.6 But what remains constant, despite these shifting critical contexts, is the figure of Scott himself, whether as actor, agent, or as a haunting presence. As Francis Spufford has argued, the story of Scott's journey to the Pole occupies a “perpetual present tense,” a terrifying state of non-being in which the continual replaying of Scott's final hours somehow “keeps hope helplessly alive”7 while simultaneously reaffirming the expedition's ultimately tragic conclusion. Therefore, Scott's voyage becomes an infinite vanishing point, a mythic narrative whose horizon, like a form of optical illusion that is strikingly common on the polar plateau itself, may frequently be glimpsed but never actually gained.8