This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

Affinity with place is a complex web of emotion and sense of belonging. Britten’s creative engagement with place demonstrates a perceptive understanding of the culturally imagined, consumed, and produced places of the mid-twentieth century; a sharp ear for experiential gaps, psychological transitions, and marginalised identities; a sure handling of multi-point perspective – near and far, presence and recollection; togetherness and alienation; and finally an attention to flux and irresolution. This chapter explores Britten’s Suffolk, his attention to place-making in staged productions, and his metaphorical use of travel as a mentally demanding and transformative experience.

The Introduction seeks to define cosmography. The first half of the Introduction takes Pindar's 3rd Olympian as a point of entry to illustrate cosmography with a concrete example. Building on that specific discussion and unpacking it, the second half of the Introduction moves on to more general considerations of a methodological and terminological order, so as to delineate the notion more explicitly, and the possibilities of its application, far beyond Pindar. All following chapters expand and build on these general considerations of the Introduction. The first chapter thus aims to explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through cult and place. Through a complementary focus on the visual media of epiphany in language and art, the second chapter expands the investigation of the first chapter on the cosmography of cult and place. The third chapter aims to further explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through an archive of genres and chronological periods. The fourth chapter looks more closely at the conflicts of knowledge and authority that punctuate the transformations of cosmography in the Classical period. The distinctive creativity of Hellenistic cosmography, finally, is the main object of the fifth chapter.