“Wild Music” – playing traditional music outdoors

In the years since the pandemic, there has been a noticeable and accelerating desire for people to reconnect with nature. We see it in the growth of wild swimming, wild camping, and the wider urge simply to be outdoors and present in the landscape. Alongside this runs a renewed fascination with folklore, folk traditions, and their distinctive aesthetics. Colourful costume, seasonal ritual, and older ways of marking time have found new audiences.

As a folk musician and researcher of traditional culture, this raises an important question for me. When we imagine the past, are we imagining it quietly?

Cornish folklore and oral history suggest otherwise. The past was not a silent place. Traditional sources repeatedly describe music as something embedded in outdoor life. The crowd, the Cornish fiddle, was played for dancing, often outside. Midsummer gatherings around bonfires were accompanied by sound and movement. Folk tales speak of fairy dancing in fields and woods, places alive with music rather than hushed by reverence. Early interviews describe concertinas being played at feast days, filling streets and open spaces with melody.

Yet today, much traditional music in Cornwall is heard indoors, most often in pubs, or within the formal routes of processions and festivals. These spaces are vital and have kept the music alive. It is also worth remembering that many traditional instruments were displaced in the nineteenth century by brass and silver bands, which were themselves frequently outdoor and communal. Over the last forty years or so, older instruments and repertoires have made a welcome return, and with them a renewed presence of traditional music outdoors at events across Cornwall.

Alongside this public revival, a quieter and more informal practice has been taking shape.

A group of friends and I have taken to heading out on fine days with our instruments to play traditional music simply because it feels right to do so. Sometimes there are just two of us, the authors of this blog. Sometimes there are six. We turn up in places where music is not expected, and we play. We call it, firmly tongue-in-cheek, “wild music”.

One memorable outing took place during a walk to celebrate the creation of the St Michael’s Way, linking the north and south coasts between the Knill Monument above St Ives and St Michael’s Mount. We played at the Knill Monument itself, and at sites along the route, including the summit of Trencrom Hill, letting the music accompany the journey across the spine of West Penwith.

On New Year’s Eve, three of us squeezed into the tiny walls of St Helen’s Oratory at Cape Cornwall. The sound carried, and a small crowd wandered down from the Cape. In the field below, a couple danced to our waltzes.

We have played on the cliffs at Porth Nanven below St Just, on the boulders by Logan Rock at Treen, and on a nearby prehistoric cliff castle. We have played on Carn Bosavern, among the ruins at the foot of the Kenidjack Valley, by the holy well at Sancreed, and on Carn Eanes overlooking Pendeen. We have played beneath circling choughs at Land’s End, around Penzance’s war memorial in summer, and on the beach at midsummer.

Wild music has also found its way to the water. We have played to welcome Breton sailors arriving in Newlyn, shared tunes aboard a traditional lugger, and played on many other boats moored in Penzance Harbour. We have taken music into the softer landscapes too, playing in the fields around the Helford River, where sound carries differently and the sense of enclosure is gentler.

What unites these moments is not performance, but presence.

It is also worth saying that it is not always Cornish music that we play. Alongside local tunes sit melodies from other Celtic nations, and from just across the border in England. This feels entirely appropriate. Cornwall has never been culturally sealed. The sea does not make us remote. It connects us.

For centuries, maritime routes linked Cornwall into a wider Atlantic world. Ships carried people, goods, ideas, and songs. Tunes crossed the water as readily as cargo, reshaped by memory and local style. Playing a Breton tune in a Cornish harbour, or an English dance tune on a clifftop, feels less like borrowing and more like remembering shared contact. In this sense, Cornwall sits not at the edge, but at the centre of the Atlantic seaboard, facing outward rather than inward.

There is another layer to this that feels just as important, and that is time. Many traditional tunes are rooted not only in place, but in season. They were written for specific moments in the agricultural or ritual year. Tunes such as “Harvest Home” belong to the end of harvest, a musical punctuation mark after weeks of labour. “Glory of the Sun” sits naturally at midsummer, when light and energy are at their peak. Playing these tunes at the right time of year feels different. The music aligns with the season, rather than floating free of it.

In this way, wild music becomes not just about where we play, but when. It reconnects sound with seasonal rhythm, reminding us that traditional music once helped structure the year as much as it filled an evening.

The reactions from people who encounter us range from bemusement to joy. Some stop and listen quietly. Some smile and walk on. Occasionally, people try to give us money, which we politely refuse. We are not busking. We are playing for the joy of it.

We are rarely billed on posters. There are no stages, no set times, and no guarantees. If you want to find us, you have to listen. Sometimes we appear in places where music once would have been normal, and sometimes in places where it is entirely unexpected.

There is something quietly radical about this. Traditional music becomes part of the landscape again, not staged or packaged, but offered freely. It reminds people that this music belongs to Cornwall and to its places, land and sea alike, and also to the wider network of cultures it has always been connected to. It keeps the music alive by being used, and it allows people who might never step into a folk session to encounter it by chance.

This feels like a natural extension of the current desire to be in nature. If we are going outside to reconnect with landscape, season, and place, why should we leave our music behind?

So here is a gentle invitation. If you play traditional music, take it for a walk. Take it to the coast, to the fields, to the harbour wall or the hilltop. Play with friends. Play for yourselves. Play without amplification, without expectation, and without apology. Match your tunes to the season as well as the setting, and remember the wider world those tunes once travelled through.

Cornish music was never meant to be silent, or solitary. Sometimes, you just have to listen for it.