The people behind this Snape plan should think about what harmony really means

A reed bed behind Snape Maltings. (Image: Archant)

On Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, I went to Orford Church at noon to listen to some music. Sacred music in a sacred place: heart-breakingly beautiful. Organised by Snape Maltings – Aldeburgh Music – of course. I left the place in a state of perfect gratitude: that such places, such people, such music exist. Now I hear that Aldeburgh Music are talking about tearing the church down to build a multi-storey car-park.

That last bit's a lie. They're talking about doing something a good deal worse. Let's move onto that in a moment.

I went to lunch in Snape: at the development around the concert hall. At the Plough and Sail pub I had a ploughman's with not one but two home-made chutneys. It cost eight quid and it was the perfect pub lunch.

Afterwards I took a stroll: past the concert hall to where the eternal marshes stretch out towards the world's end. As always there were children using the dramatic Barbara Hepworth sculpture as a climbing frame, the marshes visible through the gaps and the holes in the structure. I think the sculptor would have got equal pleasure from the children and the reedbeds.

Being gifted that way, I was able to make out a shadowy, wavering shallow vee in the sky, maybe half a mile off: like two perfect strokes from the brush of a Japanese calligrapher. This was a marsh harrier, a bird once extinct in this country, and as recently as 1971, reduced to a single pair, just up the coast at Minsmere. Now they are part of the landscape again: rightly so, gloriously so. They're here because we have cherished our watery landscape and brought it back to life.

Now, a fortnight further on, the reedbeds will be in full song: reed and sedge warbler, Cetti's warbler, the call of cuckoo, and the boom of bittern: a landscape jumping with life. Nowhere else in the country can do it quite like East Anglia: the big sky, the endless reeds, the sound of birds. Sacred music in a sacred place, if you like. Certainly, heart-breakingly lovely.

Now I hear that Aldeburgh Music are talking about paving over a chunk of land on the banks of the River Alde to make a car-park with 470 spaces. And no, that's not a lie. That's the absolute truth.

Oh, it's all very vague still. Exploratory. Dipping toes in the water. Seeing how people would react, especially the local people seriously motivated to protect something they love.

It's about money. Well, of course, it is. And power, obviously, for the two usually go together. Apparently a vast car park would make vaster revenues: 'future financial resilience' is a phrase they've used, but it's just bizspeak for more money. This might be used for all kinds of good things, including more music and more musicians. Laudable stuff – but not, I think, at the expense of paradise.

Snape Maltings works because it's a development that sits perfectly into its context: the old buildings, the wonderful concert hall, the sculpture, the gentle walks, the shops, the cafes, the pub, the boats and above all, the wonderful wild East Anglian landscape, the wonderful wild East Anglian skyscape and the wonderful wild East Anglian soundscape. It works because the place has meaning. Soul.

To concrete over such a place would destroy its soul, as surely as bulldozing the concert hall.

Harmony. Harmony was what I heard in Orford Church. It means putting very different noises together in a manner that miraculously sounds nice. It's an important idea: we use it to express all kinds of other things about life. We seek harmony in friendship, marriage and community.

Snape Maltings has managed to keep art, commerce and nature in harmony. Now they want to progress – not realising that there are times when the best progress is made by leaving well alone. Time to stop talking, time to stop even thinking about car-parks and expansion and power and money and destruction.

A delicate thing, harmony. Not enough of it about, and easily destroyed. Aldeburgh Music would do well to remember that.