Music for a Walk
5 pieces for wandering, thinking and taking the long way round
Long-time readers of this newsletter may have gathered that I do a fair bit of walking.
And by ‘a fair bit’, I mean that 10,000 steps is no longer really a goal. I can double that fairly easily now, which is the sort of thing that makes me sound unbearable, and honestly, sometimes I probably am. My friends are definitely tired of hearing about my daily step count.
I try to do at least 1 proper walk most days. Not a rushed walk to the station. Not a practical walk to pick something up. A proper walk. I also much prefer walking places to getting on public transport, which means I go through trainers at a slightly alarming rate. I have finally accepted that I may need proper walking shoes, although the fashion-conscious little devil on my shoulder is absolutely not happy.
Walking became a bigger part of my life after I injured my foot running and caused some nerve damage. Running, it turns out, was no longer especially keen on me. Walking was lower impact and kinder to my body, but it also did something I wasn’t expecting: it became very good for my brain.
It gave me time to think. Or sometimes, even better, time not to think in any particularly organised way. Headphones in, notifications ignored, social media firmly out of reach, work gently shoved to the side for a bit. It’s not always profound. Sometimes I’m just trying to get some steps in. But at its best, walking gives my mind somewhere to go without asking too much from it.
And classical music is very good at that state. The steady rhythm underneath. The little changes you only notice because you’re not doing anything else. The way a piece can keep pace with you, slow you down, or simply turn an ordinary walk into something that feels slightly more scored.
So this week: music for a walk. Not necessarily music about walking, although there is a dog. More music for different kinds of walking: setting off, getting distracted, walking through a town and losing yourself in a repeated rhythm.
Chanson de matin - Edward Elgar
If you need a fresh morning walk, this little morning song by Elgar is a very good place to start.
It doesn’t make a huge argument for itself. It doesn’t arrive carrying a massive emotional suitcase. It simply opens the window. There is something so bright and gently optimistic about it, like stepping outside before the day has had a chance to become complicated.
Chanson de matin means “morning song”, and that is exactly what it sounds like. Originally written for violin and piano, Elgar later orchestrated it himself, and I think the orchestral version gives it a bit more bounce. The melody still has that violinistic quality, which makes sense, since Elgar was a violinist himself. It seems to sit naturally under the bow, almost as if it is being sung without words.
And maybe that’s why it works so well for walking. It doesn’t push you forward aggressively. It just gives you a pleasant nudge out of the door. There’s a spring in it, but not a forced one. It’s not ‘seize the day’ music, which frankly I often find a bit much before 9am. It’s more like: come on, let’s see what the morning is doing.
The perfect music for the first 10 minutes of a walk.
Walking the Dog - George Gershwin
This one is for the dog people.
Gershwin’s Walking the Dog is a sweet, witty little piece from the 1937 film Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the film, it accompanies a scene in which dogs are being paraded around on a cruise ship, which is already an excellent sentence. It is light, stylish and slightly ridiculous, in the best possible way.
Gershwin is one of those composers who can feel so completely attached to a certain image of early 20th-century America that I sometimes forget how short his life actually was. He gave us Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, Porgy and Bess, and, as a friend of mine was recently surprised to learn, the famous Summertime comes from Porgy and Bess. But he died at just 38.
The story of his death is genuinely awful. In the months before he died, he began behaving strangely: forgetting things, dropping objects, seeming unlike himself. He collapsed while working in Hollywood, and doctors eventually discovered a brain tumour. There was a desperate attempt to find the right surgeon in time, with even the White House reportedly involved in trying to help. But it was too late.
That knowledge gives a strange shadow to a piece like Walking the Dog, because on the surface it is so carefree. It doesn’t sound like a composer near the end of his life. It sounds like a man who can turn a throwaway film scene into something with charm, rhythm and personality. That was part of Gershwin’s gift: even the smaller things have life in them.
Sunday Morning from Peter Grimes - Benjamin Britten
Now, Peter Grimes is not exactly light morning-walk material.
The opera is bleak, tense and full of moral fog. It is set in a fictional fishing town called the Borough, strongly connected to the Suffolk coast and the world around Aldeburgh, where Britten lived. The story centres on Peter Grimes, a fisherman whose apprentice has died at sea. At the start of the opera, an inquest clears him legally, but the town does not really let him go. Later, he takes on another apprentice, and that boy dies too.
The opera never lets us settle comfortably into one version of Grimes. Is he brutal? Misunderstood? Dangerous? A victim of a judgmental community? Something worse? That uncertainty is part of what makes the piece so disturbing. Everyone in the Borough seems to be watching everyone else, and nobody comes out of it looking especially clean.
But within this dark opera, Britten gives us these extraordinary orchestral interludes, music that covers scene changes but does far more than simply fill time. Four of them were later published together as the Four Sea Interludes, and Sunday Morning is one of them.
You can hear the church bells immediately. Not actual bells, but orchestral bells: bright, insistent patterns that make you picture a town waking up and people hurrying to church. There is movement everywhere. You can almost see doors opening, people crossing paths, shoes on cobbles, coats being buttoned, glances exchanged.
But because this is Britten, it is not just a pretty postcard. Underneath the bustle, something feels unsettled. The music is alive, yes, but it is also tense. Those bells don’t just ring sweetly. They nag. They insist. They create the feeling of a community gathering, but also closing ranks.
That is what I love about Britten. He can depict something ordinary, a Sunday morning in a seaside town, and make it vivid enough that you feel you are walking through it. But he also lets you hear what is underneath: suspicion, pressure, unease, the things nobody is quite saying out loud.
Ciaccona - Maurizio Cazzati
I mentioned Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata a couple of weeks ago, and since then I have fallen into another Pluhar rabbit hole.
This seems to happen to me every year. I listen to one track, then another, and suddenly I’m back inside that L’Arpeggiata world: Baroque music, folk influences, improvisation, dance rhythms, plucked strings, percussion, voices, and that feeling that everyone involved is having a much better time than you usually associate with historically informed performance.
Calling them a Baroque ensemble is technically true, but it also feels a bit limiting. Yes, they work largely with music from the 17th century and earlier, but the way they perform it feels wide open. They pull in different traditions, different colours, different kinds of pulse. It never feels dusty. It feels alive.
This Ciaccona is by Maurizio Cazzati, a 17th-century Italian composer, and appears on L’Arpeggiata’s album All’Improvviso. A ciaccona, or chaconne in French, is built around repetition. Usually you have a short repeated bass line or chord pattern, and the music above it changes while that underlying pattern keeps returning.
Which, when you think about it, is basically walking.
One foot, then the other. The same basic movement underneath, while everything above it shifts. Your thoughts move. The light changes. A street you know well suddenly looks different. You remember something you weren’t planning to remember. The body keeps the rhythm, and the mind wanders off.
That is exactly why this piece works so well on a walk. The repeated bass line gives you something steady to fall into, but the music never feels stuck. Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata make it sound loose, playful and full of discovery, as if the piece is being invented in front of you. I don’t know how much of this particular performance was improvised in the moment, but that feeling of improvisation is everywhere.
On an Overgrown Path - Leoš Janáček
This one is for the broody walker.
Imagine a misty morning. Damp pavements. A bit of chill in the air. The kind of walk where the world feels slightly blurred at the edge.
Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path is a piano cycle I discovered relatively late, and it has stayed with me. The title alone is enough to pull me in. An overgrown path is not a clean route from A to B. It suggests somewhere half-forgotten, or somewhere you used to go.
The music began life in smaller pieces and gradually grew into a set of piano miniatures. Many of them are connected to memory, grief and private feeling, particularly around the death of Janáček’s daughter Olga. You do not need to know that to hear the atmosphere, but it helps explain why this music so often feels like it is circling something it cannot quite say directly.
Janáček’s musical language is so distinctive. He doesn’t always give you long, flowing melodies in the obvious Romantic sense. Instead, you get fragments. Little speech-like shapes. Repeated gestures. Sudden turns.
For the playlist, I chose No. 7 from Book 1, Good Night! It is gentle, but not sentimental. There is a lullaby quality to it, though not the sort that makes everything safe. It feels more like someone trying to soothe themselves. The music has that private, inward quality.
This is the memory walk. The one where the path outside and the path inside start to blur. You are technically walking forward, but your mind has gone backwards, sideways, everywhere.
I hope this gives you something good for your next walk, whether it’s a proper long one, a quick loop around the block, or the sort where you leave the house mainly because your brain needs airing out.
As ever, I’d love to know what you’d add to the playlist. What’s your favourite music for walking?
Cannot wait to listen to this on a big Sunday walk tomorrow!
Enjoyed listening to this article while walking! Will enjoy the playlist on a future walk!