In a country which is devoid of birdsong for ten months of the year, and where the sounds of nature often come from the Earth itself, it is perhaps not surprising that Iceland’s equivalent of The Lark Ascending could be the loudest piece of music ever written.

Last week, Jón Leifs’s Hekla was broadcast as part of the Composer of the Week series, devoted, not to a single composer for once, but to a whole country – Iceland.  In 1926 a tectonic shift occurred when the country hosted its first ever orchestral concert, conducted by Leifs who had been studying and working in Germany for the previous ten years.  The result was a long, slow eruption of musical creativity across all genres, and the flow continues, as the four-part series showed.

Hekla depicts the 1947 eruption of the volcano of that name, which Leifs witnessed.  The mountain already had a fearsome reputation stretching back to 1104 when a huge eruption led to a belief throughout Europe that Hekla was the gateway to Hell – a belief that only died out at the approach of the 20th century. 

Programme presenter Donald Macleod describes Hekla - which is scored for a full orchestra with nineteen percussionists and an organ, along with a choir -as “probably the loudest piece of music ever written” and fittingly chooses it to close his survey of the music of Iceland. 

Characteristically, Leifs thought little about the practicalities of his piece, and called for an array of instruments that were either unobtainable – massive church bells for instance – or unplayable, such as rapidly repeating shotguns.  Rocks that ring with musical pitches were found, and ships' chains and steel tubing were scrounged from the Reykjavik dockyards.   Whether or not the exact sounds in the composer’s head made it to the concert hall, the effect at its 1964 premiere would have resonated throughout the musical scene in Iceland, liberating a surge of edge-of-the-world originality which has yet to cease.  

Last week an earthquake swarm occurred in the vicinity of the Bárðarbunga volcano, with over 1600 quakes recorded in 48 hours.  The following day the Iceland Symphony Orchestra made its first visit to the Proms to play Leifs’s Geysir together with Haukur Tómasson’s (b.1960) Magma.  In conversation with the BBC’s Tom Service, members of the orchestra spoke of the anticipation of earth-moving events that currently pervades Iceland; and as I write a small eruption is under way, with official warnings of bigger things to come.

The BBC have just uploaded a audio clip of this, the UK premiere of Magma. Tómasson explained to Tom Service that, while Magma could be heard as a direct evocation of the volcanic forces at work in Iceland, the experience of nature in general is the main inspiration. "I've done many pieces inspired by nature, but for me it's indirect - it's some kind of energy that you get from experiencing sublime beauty in nature".  Both this and the equally original-sounding Geysir, the latter albeit from the previous generation, were performed with the vim of an ensemble excited to bring the sound-world of their countrymen to London.  Programmed with the Schumann Piano Concerto and Beethoven's Fifth the evening promised to resound with the energy of elemental forces.  I got the feeling, admittedly listening on radio, that the Icelanders had opted for safe, rather than fiery readings of these two mountainous works.  For fear of disturbing the trolls, perhaps.

Brief flute solos by Tómasson's composition teacher Atli Heimir Sveinsson (b. 1938) punctuate one of Donald Macleod's programmes, in which he explores the span of Icelandic music from the ancients to the idea-volcano that is Björk.  Sveinsson's Twenty-one Sounding Minutes are one-minute tributes to the sounds, natural, human, spiritual, and imagined, that circumscribe human experience.  They include Sounds of Birds, Sounds of Fish, Sounds of Love, International Sounds and so on.  From this most succinct survey of nature and human nature, the programme selects Sounds of Men, Women, Rain, and finally, Sounds of Sound. 

The pity is, from the original five-part series broadcast last year these repeats do not include episode two, featuring the septuagenarian Sveinsson as Icelandic music's wickedly mischievous provocateur-in-chief.  A composer able and willing to compose in almost any style, from Baroque to avant-garde to hip hop, we sadly do not get hear Sveinsson's postmodernist fantasy, Icelandic Rap.

Laurence Rose


Composer of the Week:  Iceland is available on IPlayer for seven days from each broadcast, therefore expiring in turn between Monday and Friday next week.

Prom 48:  Classical Tectonics was broadcast live on Friday 22 August and is available for 30 days on iPlayer

A conversation between expert in Nordic sagas Eleanor Rosamond Barraclough and novelist Joanna Kavenna looked at Icelandic culture as part of the Proms Plus Literary festival and is available on iPlayer here.

For the first 30 seconds or so the orchestra is silent, as we hear the complex sonic ecology of a Borneo rainforest.  The orchestra enters, picking up the C sharp cued by a serenading gibbon.  The very first moments are – unfortunately to my ear – rendered unnatural by digital filtering to contrive a texture that starts with only the highest frequencies and builds, in a noticeably artificial way, to encompass the lowest; but the eventual tutti forest chorus and its transition into the orchestra is one of the piece’s most effective moments.


A dawn chorus-like, apparently aleatoric section in the woodwinds completes an introduction to the full orchestra who then take flight as a five-chord brass chorale underpins the main theme, reprised in various guises throughout the piece.

Then, a jaunty, driving rhythm under a sweeping melody – suggestive of a long film credits sequence - and from here the movement flits from idea to idea like a bird of paradise undecided onto which twig to settle for its display.  This is very filmic music from a composer perhaps best known for his scores to City of Joy and other films. 

The second movement – a scherzo –is introduced by tree frogs and percussion which herald another flighty sequence of riffs.  These are mostly characterised by spiky rhythms and a tour of the percussion section, with some jazzy pizzicato bass for good measure.

Elegy begins with a haunting distant chorus of wolves while muted horns weave their lines around the animals, ranging beautifully between dissonance and consonance.  A pining beaver, his family having been violently killed by a fisherman, finds commiseration in a sad melody introduced on the bassoon and taken up by the strings.  This middle movement hangs together well – the recorded sounds and the orchestra working together on a single purpose.  A lament for a lost beaver family is clearly understood as a metaphor for our collective losses in an impoverished natural world, and the bassoon/beaver lament returns at the end with added poignancy.

Then, a jaunty woodwind motif alternates with the low growl of African elephants and contrabassoon at the start of the fourth movement.  This is a return to the pattern of the first two, where the sampled sound provides an introduction but plays only a minor part in the ensuing score.  An exception is a fleeting, nicely scored moment where a chest-beating gorilla intervenes percussively in a dialogue between woodwind and brass, before the orchestra ends the movement with an energetic brass crescendo.

The final movement is all about the star of piece, the musician wren and his sidekick, the common pottoo.  This songster with his addiction to tritones is a voice made famous by many an Amazonian rainforest documentary (click the button below).  The movement is a quick-fire sequence of variations on the bird’s melody.  First the flute, then clarinet, woodwind and the wren again before the common pottoo, sounding a bit like a Swanee whistle, interrupts, along with a trombone with which it trades microtonal inflections.  Another set of variations over chugging strings with long melodic lines shared between trumpet, strings, then brass, glockenspiel and cymbals followed by horns then strings and the odd whip-bird.  A brief change of mood for a slower variation on the flute and clarinet, equally briefly back to the chugging strings before a coda of forest sounds and an orchestral crescendo to end on.

This would be a good piece to play at a Proms family matinee.  The style will be very familiar to family film-goers and the sampled sounds are all interesting in their own right, and with interesting and poignant stories behind them.  The Cheltenham Festival has been running an education project linked to the piece.  By getting children and young people to compose music and create visual art Krause and Blackford hoped to increase people’s awareness of their own soundscapes, and give them the skills and confidence to express their personal responses through music and visual art.  A website devoted to the project is full of information and resources.

Bernie Krause’s message in his book The Great Animal Orchestra derives from his discovery that animal sounds fill every sonic niche; in his own words,  a highly evolved, naturally-wrought masterpiece.  Richard Blackford’s score gives the sampled sounds – collected by Krause and his colleagues – the junior role in a piece in which the orchestra takes a musical hint and spins it off into a world of man’s making – a possibly unintended metaphor for our headlong rush to destroy the nature on which our civilisation is built?

Krause and Oxford-based composer Richard Blackford have taken the idea of species' occupying different sonic niches and collaborated on a new work for orchestra and recorded soundscapes, also entitled The Great Animal Orchestra.  This work is premiered at the Cheltenham Festival on 12 July, and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. We were given a brief preview of the opening, with a projected sonograph to follow rather than a score.  The first few moments take the natural sounds of the rainforest and contrives through filtering technology to have this start in the highest register, with progressively deeper sounds allowed back in according to a mathematical-looking curve; all of which was clear to follow on the screen.  Then, after a few seconds of full natural orchestra, the human orchestra emerges from the complex rainforest soundscape, via a C-sharp on which the gibbon’s dawn song ends, to be taken up by the violins.  The five-movement work includes a part for a heart-rending call from a male beaver whose family had been violently killed by fishermen; the original recording was played to a visibly shocked audience.

Chris Watson - Northumberland based globe-trotting sounds man for the likes of David Attenborough - has been reflecting lately on the sounds that would have surrounded Eadfrith as he made his fabulous illuminations in the Lindisfarne Gospels.  It is hardly surprising, he says, that the island's creatures such as eider ducks and grey seals should feature in the manuscript. The human song-like sounds they make would have been unpolluted by the machines and traffic that were over a thousand years into the future.  He played his own recordings to make the point, and conjured a picture of grey seals singing in the misty distance, originating the many legends of half-human sea-creatures.

Watson’s credentials are second-to-none; the founder member of experimental music band Cabaret Voltaire went on to become a sound recordist for the RSPB Film Unit before his freelance work took him several times around the world to produce unique, and award-winning, material for ground-breaking BBC series such as Life of Birds and Frozen Planet.  His sound art has been installed in dozens of public places and his soundscape recordings have been released in a number of CDs including In St.Cuthbert's Time, using material from his studies of the sounds of Lindisfarne.  

Chris took his audience on a dizzying sonic world tour to sample some of the fruits of his insatiable curiosity, from the whales calling their kin across hundreds of miles of ocean to assemble in the Dominican Republic, to Japan, where the suzumuchi cricket is revered for the purity of its autumn note.  A touching song to the mountains from a Sami elder in Norway was answered, exactly on the beat I noticed, in a haunting echo.  Finally, the lights were dimmed as he played us the pre-dawn chorus from his own patch, the Northumberland moors, resonating to an orchestra of drumming snipe, bubbling curlew, skirling lapwings and keening golden plovers.

Laurence Rose

The Forestry Commission, perhaps a little surprisingly, is taking the arts seriously as a way to connect people with nature.  A new and deceptively sophisticated installation has been touring four Forestry Commission sites, and I went along to its first venue - Thetford Forest.

I approached a patch of forest several hundred metres from the visitor facilities, enjoying the spring songs of goldcrest and – a nationally scare species – firecrest.  Trying to tell them apart proved a good aural warm-up for what was to come.   Soon I became aware of a new set of sounds, somehow as integrated into the forest as the birdsong and the breeze.   I followed bell-like harmonics, deep, quiet drum rolls and occasional bursts of sonic energy, until I found myself on the edge of a natural amphitheatre populated by tall trees. 

This is Living Symphonies, the brainchild of artist/composer duo Daniel Jones and James Bulley.  Descending into the amphitheatre I felt I was surrounded by a gamelan – like ensemble of hidden speakers playing what at times sound like oriental gongs and prayer bowls.  Now and then strings and flutes join them.  The sounds are coming from the ground and the tree-tops, melding across the whole 30-metre diameter sonosphere and always accompanied by the resident ensemble of chaffinches, wrens and chiffchaffs.  

From time to time the mood changes, sometimes sounding more orchestral, darker, sometimes lighter and more rhythmic.  I sought out the composers to find out just what was governing the sounds I could hear.   

I dictated my notes on a simple portable device, and playing them back reminded me 
of my own real-time response, which you can hear, too.

Ecosystem model

I found Daniel Jones at a computer in the cramped trailer that is the Living Symphonies’ nerve-centre.  On the screen was a schematic of the amphitheatre, each tree and speaker mapped.  At first, there did not seem to be much going on but then a triangle appeared, moving in a slightly curved line across the screen.  “Ah, there’s a buzzard overhead” says Daniel, and shortly afterwards a bee moved a few screen-inches and a wren arrived from somewhere off-screen to the south.

It took me a few seconds to realise that we were not tracking the lives of real creatures – not exactly anyway.   We were witnessing digital scenarios constructed from careful observation of the wildlife that inhabits the forest:  the species composition, relative abundance and even behaviour patterns.  The daily lives of creatures are modelled, including their interactions with each other, with their ecosystem and even the weather.  Governing the whole symphonic experience from its overall architecture to its finest motivic detail is a sophisticated software model of the very ecosystem in which the performance takes place.  A portable weather station provides real-time data that influences every detail of life in this virtual microcosm. 

During the year-and-a-half it took to set up the model, Daniel and James, working alongside ecologists and wildlife rangers from the Forestry Commission, studied animal habitats, food sources and movement patterns, building up an intricate map of the forest. 

Real musicians

Each species is depicted by a unique set of musical motifs that portray its changing behaviours.  “I didn’t want to imitate natural sounds, like Messiaen [the French composer 1908 - 1992, renowned for detailed musical notations of bird songs]” said James Bulley.  “I composed the sounds as abstact musical motifs, it’s the way they relate to each other that is determined by nature.”  The sounds are mixed and spatialised in unrepeatable combinations via twenty-four hidden, weather-proof speakers.  James describes this as “generative” art – once the artists have created the sonic material and the computer model, they cede control to nature and circumstance.  “Using real musicians to record fragments of composed material on acoustic instruments helped create an organic feel and maintain authenticity” he explained.  It certainly had the feel of a live performance, with enough expression, improvised detail, and idiomatic technique to give a feeling that musicians, composers, audience and nature itself were connecting in real time.

Laurence Rose 7 June 2014

Living Symphonies is commissioned by Forestry Commission England and tours FCE sites in Northamptonshire, Staffordshire and Kent for a week each during June to September:  details in the What’s On section and on the Living Symphonies website.   Preview the experience with the video below.

Laurence also reviewed Living Symphonies for The Ecologist – you can read this review here. 

Also by Jones/Bulley:

Variable 4 is an outdoor sound installation which translates weather conditions into musical patterns in real time. Every aspect of the piece, from broad harmonic progressions down to individual notes and timbres, is influenced by changes in the environment.  5-14 September, Portland Bill, Dorset