Also notable are the operas of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and particularly his first full opera Peter Grimes (1945). Set in a small fishing community evoking Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast, the opera tells of the struggles of the fisherman, Peter Grimes, against the townspeople of the Borough, the death of his two boy apprentices and the blame thrust upon him by a close knit community. After Grimes disobeys the court's orders by getting another apprentice, who is treated roughly and accidentally slips off a cliff, Grimes is persuaded to sail out to sea and drown himself. Though in the poet George Crabbe's original version Grimes is represented as essentially evil, Britten reworks this to show him as an ambiguous character with both harsh and tender sides to his personality. It is sometimes thought that this dramatic contrast between a non-conformist outsider who ultimately desires acceptance, and a censorious and bigoted community who refuse to understand, reflects eloquently on the acceptability of Britten's own sexuality.

Musically Peter Grimes adopts many key motifs used in music to depict Britain's coastal landscapes: crying seagulls, the movement of waves, the power of a rising storm, sea shanty-like melodic writing; landmark sounds of church and fog horn signify heroism and the perils of life at sea. These motifs return time and again, even amongst the complex and abstract work of contemporary composers. Peter Maxwell Davis, for instance, has found both formal and emotional reconciliation between materials depicting the lives of fishing and crofting communities in the Orkney Isles where he now lives, and a compositional style combining classical structures with forms derived from mathematics and number symbolism.

The orchestral work Lighthouses of England and Wales by Benedict Mason (b. 1955), which won first prize in the 1988 Benjamin Britten Composers Competition, works with sounds made by the sonic beacons used by ships to locate specific lighthouses. The work derives from a journey, in which the composer visited lighthouses between the Solway Firth and the Farne Islands, carefully documenting the exact frequencies of their signals. In an almost impressionistic piece, he portrays individual beacons, but also opposes different signals in complex rhythms of interference. Here conventional associations of the lighthouse with an ethos protection as a guide and comfort to the traveller are fused with dispassionate documentation. Mason takes us on a journey round a hidden coastal landscape of sound which is abstract and impersonal yet descriptive and place specific.

In this brief tour, we have heard the coast as a repository for a wide variety of national imaginings, Elizabethan forthrightness, Georgian exuberance, Victorian certainty, and Celtic mysticism. It encapsulates the heroism, practicality, duty and service of British citizens represented as 'an island race'. However, the coast is always ambiguous and ambivalent in its cultural meanings. Represented in sound it is a symbol of pride and national achievement though it is also a focus for melancholy and self doubt. It celebrates the heroism of seafaring communities and exposes fallibility and human frailty. The coast harbours prejudice and constraint, and it provides a jetty from which to launch journeys of individual and spiritual freedom.

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