Rather than suggest a confident assertion of Britishness, music reflecting the place of Britain as a seafaring nation has often expressed doubt concerning Britain's role in the world, at once acknowledging its maritime heritage and questioning what that means for being British. A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is a case in point. First performed at the Leeds Festival in 1910, it is a work for orchestra, chorus, soprano and baritone soloists. Written in such a way as to appeal to the very extensive market for sacred oratorios which developed in Britain during Victorian times, the work has a grand opening statement depicting the vast expanses of the mighty ocean rhythmically mimicking the movement of the sea. This is followed by a celebration "[o]f unnamed heroes in the ships…" set to music adopting the robust qualities of a sea shanty. It would be very easy to see this work as merely another expression of imperialist excess; however, this is very far from the case. In spite of his privileged background Vaughan Williams had distinctly socialist and antiwar sympathies (during WWI he worked for the Ambulance Corps in France). A Sea Symphony sets words by Walt Whitman which are distinctly humanistic and ecumenical. The work is a hymn to all humanity in which the sea represents the vastness of the universe; and the sailor, a journey into true faith made by each humble individual.

The limitless power of physical nature suggested by A Sea Symphony forms another important focus as British composers depicted the grandeur of rocky coastlines and the struggle of humans against the sea whilst telling a variety of stories about Britain and Britishness. In Arnold Bax's (1883-1953) orchestral tone poem Tintagel (1917-19) the composer claimed the music was designed to conjure a vision of the cliff on which stood the fabled castle. Here Bax uses the power of nature to evoke a majestic and mythologised Anglo-Celtic history. Bax explains: "in the middle section it may be imagined that with the increasing tumult of the sea arise memories of the historical and legendary associations of the place, especially those connected with King Arthur, King Mark and Tristan and Iseult." The Garden of Fand, (1913-16) Bax's symphonic poem about Irish sailors venturing out upon the ocean to be seduced by an enchanted island, also relates Celtic myth to the power of the sea. The work is a ghostly invocation of the hero Cuchulain under the spell of the abandoned wife of the god of the ocean.

Like Bax, Vaughan Williams draws on an Irish example to portray the sea as a cruelly dispassionate arbiter of human fate. Riders to the Sea (1937) set to J. M. Synge's portrayal of an Irishwoman's loss of her sons to the ocean, one after the other, is often thought of as Vaughan Williams' most successful opera. It uses the sea as a cauldron from which the orchestra boils up, threatening to overwhelm the singers just as the sea threatens to engulf the family in the story. It is a tale of stoic resignation in the face of implacable nature and of fate. By contrast, in his Norfork Rhapsody No. 1 (1906- revised 1914) Vaughan Williams portrays coastal landscapes with an imperturbable serenity. Opening with orchestral sounds echoing the bird song of marsh and fen, the work develops broad folk song based melody interweaving three sea shanties collected by Vaughan Williams at Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. After a lively interlude based on sea shanties, which seems to celebrate the fishing community of Yarmouth, the work returns to its tranquil and ethereal opening. In this soundworld the coastal landscape of Norfolk exists as a harmonious idyll of fen and fishing communities set within broad melancholy expanses of sea and sky.

Yet portrayals of peaceful coastal communities are relatively rare in British music. More frequently fishing communities have been the setting for stories of oppression, prejudice and intrigue. Dame Ethyl Smyth's (1858-1944) opera The Wreckers (1906) is set in Cornwall in the mid 18th century. The plot concerns a poor isolated community and the tragic struggle of two of its members to escape the oppressive values which threaten their love for each other. At the end of the work the lovers are left to die together in a cave as the rising tide engulfs them. More recently Peter Maxwell Davis's (b.1934) chamber opera The Lighthouse (1980) is based on the unexplained desertion of the Flannen Isles lighthouse in 1900. For the lighthouse keepers it is a tale of isolation and hysteria in which brutality, loss and guilt emerge from their pasts and come back to haunt them.

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