All at sea: (left to right) Captain Saint-Saëns and his passengers Gipps, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Telemann and Handel.

Ruth Gipps’ Seascape, a performance of which concludes our current Digital Season, follows in a long and varied history of music connected to the sea, and water in general. Like fire, it’s an element rich in musical possibilities, capable of being both peaceful and dangerous, but perhaps volatile above all. Among the many representations of water in music, those that convey this transition stand out as being the most interesting.

Among the earliest works to make their connection to water explicit are a pair of concertos Vivaldi named La tempesta di mare (Storm at sea). One is for violin, while the other exists in various versions, the most famous being for flute – a lively affair that makes a great deal of its rushing scale figures, with a rather desolate slow movement that may well depict the devastation wrought by the weather. While perhaps a little basic by modern standards, it can really come to life in the hands of performers with a little dramatic flair.

When it comes to Handel’s Water Music, the water itself is actually rather incidental to the piece. Often to be found alongside his Music for the Royal Fireworks on recordings, it would be easy to imagine it accompanying some elaborate water feature in a Georgian garden, but the Suites which comprise it (two or three of them, depending on whom you ask) were actually intended for performance on the royal barge as it sailed along the Thames. The presence of a Hornpipe among the movements might suggest a stronger maritime connection, but this dance’s association with sailors actually postdates Water Music. For all that, it was still a clear choice to be included among the music for performance as part of the flotilla that sailed down the Thames to mark Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.

There is, however, a Baroque suite more deserving of its (alternative) title of Water Music, namely Telemann’s suite Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth (Hamburg Ebb and Flood), a work overt in its portrayal of both the sea and the river Elbe. It is still made up of the dances one would expect in a Baroque suite, only these have subtitles stating what they are intended to portray. Most of these concern mythological deities connected to flowing water (from water nymphs all the way up to Neptune), but Telemann also finds room to depict the tides and merry sailors. As with a good deal of his illustrative works, it may not be an absolute masterpiece, but there’s no denying its immense charm: it is utterly unpretentious music and cannot fail to raise a smile.

The Classical age generally passed on attempts at depicting the natural world, with two notable exceptions. In Haydn’s Creation, the bass soloist sings of water in three guises: the sea is first, presented in dramatic tones, followed by broad rivers and finally (the mood now considerably calmer) “the limpid brook”. The last of these forms the basis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 6, ‘Pastoral’ – subtitled Szene am Bach (Scene by the Brook), it conjures up the serene image of a stream winding its way undisturbed through the countryside. Rippling semiquavers in the strings evoke the gently flowing water, and the birdsong heard as the movement draws to a close sets the seal on a wonderfully peaceful scene.

Starting in the 19th century, we find many smaller-scale pieces depicting water. The piano repertoire is particularly rich in this respect, thanks to the effectiveness of cascading figures to represent it. Thus we find Liszt by a spring in Au bord d’une source, Ravel marvelling at a fountain in Jeux d’eau and portraying a water nymph in Ondine (also the subject of a piece by Chaminade), and Amy Beach By the Still Waters (a reference to Psalm 23). If these works owe their existence to any earlier piece of music, it’s probably Schubert’s Die Forelle, in which the titular trout can be heard darting to and fro across a burn in the right hand of the piano.

On the orchestral front, the increasing size of the ensemble vastly expanded the effects at a composer’s disposal, and there is immense variety to be found in representations of water (fresh and salt alike) over the course of the Romantic era. Mendelssohn’s The Fair Melusine (named for a water sprite) depicts water of the flowing rather than surging kind, while the Rhine, as portrayed by Wagner in his Ring Cycle, eventually overflows its banks to quench the fire which burned Valhalla to the ground. A little to the east, we find the Vltav, whose entire course is visited by Smetana in Má vlast (the movement in question being more usually known by the river's German name Moldau). The Danube is given a decidedly more fanciful musical interpretation in Johann Strauss II's most famous composition - largely because it's doubtful the river was ever as blue as his waltz' title would suggest! There's also a degree of creative liberty in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade, whose finale conjures up a thrilling storm off the coast of Baghdad – a city that is actually landlocked.

With Debussy’s La mer, the slate is effectively wiped clean for an Impressionistic take on the sea, one which proved too radical for many early critics. The New York Tribune deemed Debussy’s body of water less ocean than frog-pond, the music being “a lot impressionist daubs of color smeared higgledy-piggledy on a tonal palette”. The tide turned (if you’ll pardon the pun) within a few years as Debussy’s originality became better appreciated – the flowing semiquavers typical of earlier musical seascapes were, in truth, a little old hat by this stage – and La mer gained recognition as an aural counterpart to maritime paintings by Monet and his contemporaries. Its influence can also be felt on Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, the composer having also benefitted from a period of study with Ravel.

There had already been a touch of Impressionism from two perhaps unlikely composers depicting water in different environments. Tchaikovsky's Manfred (after Byron) finds the protagonist at an Alpine waterfall, its spray conveyed in fragments of melody that sparkle in ever-shifting light, while Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals includes an examination of life in an aquarium. Like La mer, this music is concerned primarily with the interplay of light and water, though the instrumentation hints at something mysterious below the surface. Combining a string quartet with two pianos and a flute is admittedly not especially ground-breaking, but with the addition of a glass harmonica, the sound becomes almost otherworldly. Made up of a horizontal staff on which a series of glass bowls is spun, this instrument is played by applying friction to the latter, typically with moistened fingertips. Its history is surprisingly long – it was a favourite instrument of Marie Antoinette and can be heard on the soundtrack of the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – but its unfamiliarity actually works to its benefit, ensuring the sound of the glass harmonica remains arresting. (It’s understandable that a celeste should often replace this rare instrument, but it has to be said it’s not nearly as effective.)

On the topic of unusual instruments to depict water, how about mugs slung across a length of string? This was Britten’s ingenious solution to conveying the sound of (initially) gentle rain in Noyes Fludde, his setting of the medieval mystery play of the same name – the Old English for ‘Noah’s Flood’, as in the Old Testament story. The sea – more specifically, the Suffolk coast – had been a lifelong inspiration for him, and is so central to the plot of Peter Grimes that he punctuated this opera's scenes by a set of Sea Interludes. To some extent, it seems a natural progression from the likes of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman or Smyth’s The Wreckers, both also telling of seafaring communities.

Noyes Fludde arguably outdoes them all in its own depiction of the Biblical deluge. Part of this is down to its orchestration, which also accounts for this music being rarely performed, and thus little known: it is written for string quartet, recorder, timpani, piano duet and organ, supplemented by young musicians playing strings, recorders, bugles and a vast array of percussion including a set of hanging mugs. Britten uses these to depict the first drops of rain after Noah, his family and all manner of animals have sought refuge on the ark. Wind rushes through the rigging, the sails swell and as the waters rise, waves start to crash against the hull ever more violently. With the flood now at its height, the entire cast sings the hymn Almighty Father, strong to save – the line ‘For those in peril on the sea’ at the end of every verse making it a very appropriate choice for the circumstances – and only then does the rain subside. It’s all done so imaginatively that it really does take some beating.

Gipps’ Seascape (coincidentally written in the same year of 1958) also includes stormy weather, observed from the safety of the Kent seashore. Nature is not unleashed with quite the same power here: the bad weather remains at a distance, like the rumbling thunder in the slow movement of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, but Gipps also uses a much smaller ensemble of ten wind instruments, and they are just as adept at conveying the movement of the waves and the breadth of the ocean.