I've been working with some pupils from Gresham's school on a special Festival edition of their regular Music and Munch series of lunchtime concerts. This Thursday at 1.20pm they will be performing some well-known pieces inspired by nature.

The concert will begin with a brand-new piece built around the sounds of nature.  Today, we had a run-through and I was hugely impressed by these young musicians' ability to create a true ensemble piece out of fragmentary ideas - just like the "music" that emerges from the individual flourishes that make up the dawn chorus.  And as with birds, it's about listening to your fellow performers and responding.

We'll be using the performance space to explore the spatial dimension of music and sound.  If you think about it, having everything on a stage facing an audience is about as unnatural as can be.  We'll be making our music the way nature intended - everywhere.  Only indoors!

This morning, on Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day, Chris Packham presented the whooper swan, and you can hear the broadcast again by clicking the button below.

Sibelius’s diary note goes on:  ...a low-pitched refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature mysticism and life’s angst! The Fifth Symphony’s finale-theme: legato in the trumpets!

Sibelius had found the inspiration for what was to become one of the most celebrated features of his most popular symphony:  the so-called swan theme.  It appears in the third and final movement, and is hinted at elsewhere.  This movement begins with a rapid melody in the strings, followed by a swaying, triple-time motif in the horns, the swan-theme, inspired by the sound of their calls, and the sight of those sixteen whoopers. 

Sibelius’s love of nature is well documented.  The Finnish landscape often served as material for his music. His biographer, Erik Tawaststjerna, noted that "Even by Nordic standards, Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: he scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds just below Ainola. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours”

Two generations on, and Finland’s current Grand Old Man of music, Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), has his own special relationship with the sound-world of birds, and that of whoopers in particular.  His Cantus Arcticus of 1972 is probably his best-known work, and incorporates his own tape recordings of birds made in the Arctic and in the bogs of Liminka region.  The third movement, Swans Migrating, is a long orchestral crescendo that starts with an approaching flock of whooper swans and ends with both recording and orchestra fading into the distance.

There seems to be something of the naturalist in how Rautavaara views his own music.  In a 1997 interview he said:

“I like different points of view, different aspects on the same work. For instance, Cantus Arcticus, the Concerto for Birds and Orchestra has been recorded many, many times, and the recording in Ondine by Pommer is very, very good indeed.  I like it very much.  But there is also a recording by BIS, the Swedish company, where the birds really are a soloist of the concerto.  They are much more in foreground, so it sounds really different, entirely different in the basic attitude to the music.  And that I love very much, too!"

Last week the National Orchestra of Wales played the whole of Cantus Arcticus, with its first movement depicting the curlews, cranes and other birds of the bog; and its peculiar second movement, Melenkolia, based on the slowed-down call of the shore lark.  It is available to hear for the next three weeks by clicking the left hand button below.  Finally, on the right-hand button, is Swedish composer Klas Torstensson's swan-inspired soundscape, Fastlandet, also played by NOW.

It has been a week of wordplay.  On Monday I took the day off from the day job to travel to Oxford, a city with a university press and a red kite hanging over it.  I did a bit of train-spotting: that is, bird-spotting from the train, which makes me doubly nerdy and therefore entitled to look down upon those who merely spot trains from trains.  It was red kite number twenty-two, the other twenty-one being spaced roughly evenly between Maidenhead and the dreaming spires.

I made me feel old, and excited that only by being old can I remember the effort it took to see my first red kite:  a distant, fleeting view from across Tregaron Bog; and in the rain and through cheap binoculars.  I can see that bird vividly as I write this.  In a week’s holiday in Wales it was the only kite we saw, and I imagine my parents were as relieved as I was thrilled.  Now that you can see kites alongside the 13:20 from Paddington to Oxford, or from the A1 anywhere between Stevenage and Newark, the excitement should have lessened by now.  But no, I ritually record every RK sighting, each bird a monument to conservation success.

The return trip was in the dark, so I opened the New Statesman to read Lucy Purdy’s (a Twitter friend I know mainly as @loosepea) article about Dominick Tyler (whose Twitter handle @TheLandReader tells you all you need to know).  That’s how I learned a new natureword:  witch’s knickers – about which (ahem), more anon.

I was in Oxford at the invitation of OUP to talk about their Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Regular readers will know why, and newcomers can read all about it here.  I have been calling for the OUP to put back the valuable nature vocabulary they have removed to make way for some cyber-celeb chat (I’m coining here) that any dictionary needs to recognise at some stage.

The meeting started with a bit of wordplay:  the OJD had not been amended, it had been repositioned it seems, which I understood meant it was a different dictionary with the same name.  Whatever, you won’t find acorn, bluebell, conker or another 51 nature words once, but no longer, deemed fit for inclusion.

So we moved on, and into more encouraging territory.  The lexicographical rigour that led to the nature word cull includes the ability to interrogate the corpus, a nice old Oxfordy word that refers to an enormous database of usage.  It includes some 400,000 essays and stories written by children, along with the books written for them.  I have been invited to suggest some words that can be more closely investigated, to see whether the corpus reveals an importance hitherto overlooked.  

I don’t know whether to raise my hopes that this may lead to some nature words being reinstated when the OJD is next repositioned, but I gather that is a possible outcome of the process.

Elaine and Vineeta wanted to persuade me that their children’s book catalogue included some great nature literature.  I wanted to persuade them that they didn’t need to.  I was already persuaded.  In fact, my big problem, as I explained, is that I think the OUP is great.  It just made one mistake, in the routine course of its work; and that was to allow itself to be swept along by one of society’s most alarming trends: the decline in connectedness between children and nature.  To be a symptom when I dearly want it to be part of the cure.

I was writing this piece when I heard the news that Oliver Rackham had died. I was in my first year at university when his Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape (1976) was published.  From prehistoric times, through the Roman period and into the Middle Ages, Rackham describes the changing character, role and history of trees and woodland. It immediately became required reading for ecology students, but, as well as being a solid scholarly basis for understanding the British countryside, it is a masterpiece of nature writing.

A few years later his History of the Countryside set a new benchmark for communicating a passion for nature.  Exploring the natural and man-made features of the land - fields, highways, hedgerows, fens, marshes, rivers, heaths, coasts, woods and wood pastures - he gives a fascinating account of the ways in which people, fauna, flora, climate, soils and other physical conditions have played their part in the shaping of the countryside.

The temptation to link the passing of a great authorial champion of of the countryside with the concerns of a new generation of writers is unavoidable.

And so back to Lucy Purdy and her conversation with Dominick Tyler.  Tyler is part of that successor generation to Rackham’s – a writer with a photographer’s eye for detail and a forensic examination of the language of the countryside.  His Landreader project is busily cataloguing words that are falling into disuse, or that served the minute distinctions most people no longer feel the need to make.  But he also celebrates new coinings.  As he and Lucy take a stroll through a stagnal London, he points out a pair of witch’s knickers – a term that he believes originated in Ireland; a plastic bag caught in the upper branches of a tree.

For Lucy there is a link with the #naturewords campaign.  For me, one passage in particular leaps from her article: Not knowing the names of things makes them easier to discard. If our politicians know only “rain”, “silt” and “dredging”, the complexity of the flooding in Britain will never be understood.

Now there's a bullseye of an observation. It was precisely this lexical vacuum that enabled Eric Pickles to invent hydrological orthodoxy in the space of a TV soundbite.  In the Somerset Levels it risked undoing years of relationship-building and ensuring that whatever long-term policies are established, they will probably be wrong.  

It is a specific example of the fear expressed at the start of the campaign by Mark Cocker:  “if we lose the language we will eventually lose the land itself”.  Mark is another author who shares Oliver Rackham’s explorer’s zeal for land and language.

The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, more than any other species:  Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.  Undoubtedly its familiarity and bright colouration are part of the reason, but it is also one of the most loved songsters in North America.  Both sexes sing clear, whistled song patterns, which are repeated several times, then varied.

According to Olivier Messiaen who has featured many times on these pages, it was his teacher Paul Dukas who told him, “Listen to the birds; they are great masters.”  He took the advice, and turned it into a life-long obsession, becoming an expert on bird song in the process.  Most of Messiaen's style oiseau music is the product of careful notation of the birdsong he encountered in the field.

However, Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56) cites no fewer than 40 different birdsongs from far-flung lands, all transcribed from recordings.  The work, in a single continuous movement, may be regarded as a sort of avian fantasy, but is really a sound fantasy—an exploration of timbres and rhythms where birdsong meets ancient Karnatic and Greek rhythms. The northern cardinal has a prominent role almost from the start.

Robert Fallon is a musicologist based at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.  He has made a study of Messiaen's transcriptions of birdsong and compared them with spectograms of the real thing.

In this superb performance of the first part of Oiseaux Exotiques, with Messiaen's one-time student Pierre Boulez conducting, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the piano, the first two fragments above are about 3 minutes in, and the third about twenty seconds later.

Finally, a chance to hear the bird for yourself:

I am grateful to Robert Fallon for permission to use the spectogram comparison diagram.  Rob's website contains a lot of interesting information and further examinations of other species.  Another comprehensive site for fans of Messiaen is run by Malcolm Ball at www.oliviermessiaen.org

With just over two weeks to go before the first event, the Norfolk Festival of Nature will be the first festival to view nature through the eyes of writers, artists, composers and scientists.

The Festival team have produced a leaflet for the launch programme - click on the logo to see it and share it.  See you there!

Norfolk Festival of Nature, Gesham's School, Holt 24-28 February.

For the past two years I have been privileged to work in one of the great wetland areas of the UK - the stunning North Norfolk Coast. During my time working with RSPB colleagues based at the Snettisham and Titchwell nature reserves I have witnessed the greatest tidal surge in living memory, marveled at spectacular flights of massed waders and geese, been excited by the appearance of rare visitors, and delighted in the commonplace.

Despite thirty years in a wide variety of conservation roles, from fundraising to international advocacy, I had never worked at the sharp end, on the ground.  So I jumped at the opportunity to be seconded to work at two of our top wetland nature reserves.

World Wetlands Day, on 2 February each year, unites all such places around the world.  It is a reminder that wetlands are among the most beautiful, vital and threatened places.  My secondment comes to an end in two months’ time and I have been reflecting on a host of memories.  I have a favourite, and it’s a simple one that could easily have passed me by on any other day:

A month later, the air over Titchwell was again the stage for a balletic battle, but this one an epic contest between two perfectly matched protagonists: