Twenty-two years ago, as a keen young devotee of the music of Olivier Messiaen, I attended the posthumous UK premiere of his last completed orchestral work, the 11-movement Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà… (1987–91). The thought never remotely crossed my mind then that one day I might play a part in enabling an orchestral movement by the composer to receive its premiere. Even if it had, I would never have guessed then that the piece would have a link with Éclairs. I am thrilled, therefore, that Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (oiseau Tui) - A bird from the tree of Life (Tui bird) will receive its world premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August.

Un oiseau des arbres de Vie was originally intended as a movement for Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà...  whose ninth movement is called Plusieurs oiseaux des arbres de Vie and whose third, which features his transcription of the Australian lyrebird, was originally to be called Un autre oiseau des arbres de Vie. The new movement is also a transcription of a single bird, the tui, a New Zealand species that Messiaen also evokes in Couleurs de la Cité céleste (1963) and the incomplete Concert à quatre (1991–92).

I found Oiseau Tui to have been fully completed in 3-stave score, Messiaen writing his customary ‘Bien’ along with indications of the desired orchestration. I have realised the orchestration following the sketches, a project generously supported by Birmingham Conservatoire’s French Music Hub and the Faculty of the Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University.

Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (Oiseau Tui) is likely to be the last mature orchestral statement to emerge from Messiaen’s archive. As such, it is fitting that the music consists entirely of his transcription of birdsong, for birds held a lifelong fascination of the composer. In the works of the 1930s and 1940s, this birdsong-based material was more sophisticated than anything found in earlier composers, with the possible exception of Ravel, but it was stylised, and rarely identified with a specific species. That changed in 1952, when Messiaen sought advice from ornithologists and started to learn how to identify what he was seeing and hearing. From that point on, every single one of his works contains transcribed birdsong, with hundreds of species from across the globe named in his scores. Wherever he went, Messiaen took his cahiers, musical notebooks, and would seek opportunities to transcribe local birds. As we have learnt since his death, he also transcribed numerous birds from recordings.

In his music, the sounds of the birds are filtered through Messiaen’s highly attuned, creative ear. Sometimes they are heard in a direct reflection of nature. This might be in portraits, as in the piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–58), or in the form of grand choruses, as in Réveil des oiseaux - Awakening of the birds - from 1953 or in the opera Saint François d’Assise (1975–83) where the saint preaches to the birds. Elsewhere, Messiaen creates artificial aviaries, bringing together species never heard together in the wild, as in Oiseaux exotiques (1955–56).  He uses birdsong as ‘found material’, as symbols and metaphor and even, in the opera, as direct characters participating in the drama. However, it was only with the Lyrebird piece from Éclairs and Oiseau Tui that Messiaen wrote entire orchestral movements using nothing more than the sounds of a single bird.

So why was the tui omitted from Éclairs?  We know that late in its gestation, Messiaen moved around several of the key movements of Éclairs, fundamentally altering the balance of the work in terms of both musical and theological structure. In the new layout of movements, Oiseau Tui lacked a clear purpose. However, Messiaen was clearly very attached to the movement as he resisted omitting it until a very late stage in the composition. Had he lived longer, I am certain it would have appeared in the context of another work. The bottom line is that, unlike many of the rediscoveries since his death, this piece finds Messiaen writing at the height of his powers. Moreover it was fully completed by him, just not orchestrated. While it is clearly by Messiaen, it also says something new. As such, it is a reminder that, for all he lived a long life, Messiaen still had much to say.

....looking forward to the programme, though.  BBC Radio 3 tomorrow 6.15 pm UK time.

Fevered Sleep, the arts company whose Artistic Director David Harradine we featured last week, have responded to this narrative of loss and change with an on-line artwork, launched today, called An Open Field.  Last week Harradine told NATURAL LIGHT "When I read the report, and understood the scale of loss of species and habitats, I wondered what this meant to the people who live and work in those places."

"We invited people from various locations to take a walk with our Associate Artist Luke Pell, he recorded the conversations, and we've turned the words into a poetic landscape.  It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form.” 

Pell found that ordinary and remarkable things were shared and revealed from those places, and from those people’s lives. Memories surfaced and changes were noticed. Each encounter carefully excavated years of detail, unearthing how deeply people know themselves in relation to the places where they live and walk.

The words on-screen at anopenfield.co.uk are the words of the participants, and the final artwork is a poetic expression of the conversations that happened through each encounter as they walked.  





An Open Field is launched today and is produced by Fevered Sleep.  Developed and led by associate artist Luke Pell.  Design by Valle Walkley. Made with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

It's a good sign when you go to an arts company's home page and see they have a category called "bees". Even better when it turns out a couple of hives-full are members of the company, and may perform in a future project.  But then Fevered Sleep, founded nearly twenty years ago by David Harradine and Sam Butler, is no ordinary company.

"I was never interested in doing the normal stuff about human-to-human relationships". David told me, "I am interested in people's relationships with other things, like nature, or the weather, or place." We had chosen our meeting-place well, then: the wild, windy, seabird cliffs near Bempton, in David's home county of Yorkshire.

I first met David at Above Me The Wide Blue Sky in 2013. It was a performance piece that was at the same time an installation, an audio-visual landscape.  It was based on stories collected from the general public that told of "our deep-rooted, deeply felt, easily overlooked and profoundly important connection to the land, the sky, the sea, the weather, and the other living things that surround us".

The event didn't stop when the performance was over. David and the team gathered some chairs together for a discussion session with members of the audience.  It was the kind of extended interaction, the shared exploring of issues, that has become a Fevered Sleep trademark.

"My ambitions have never really been about profile or scale," he explained as we peered over the cliffs at the kittiwakes and puffins, "deeper connections with fewer people seem to me more important than the mass market."  Over the years the company has made works that explore issues ranging from ageing to climate.  A number of recent works have been with, by and for children, such as Dusk.  "We strongly feel children's cultural rights are compromised, we want them to have access to art and be engaged from the start."

“I didn’t grow up in a family that prepared me for being an artist at all, we weren’t going to the theatre or listening to music or reading books.  I spent all my time completely immersed in nature.”  David grew up in Clifford, a small village near Wetherby, where his family were market gardeners.  “I was always in the fields and streams around the village and I feel that connection was what made it possible for me to end up being a professional artist.”  

He moved to London study biochemistry but found he was more in tune with the students reading English and drama. 

“There’s something within people who are interested in and connected to nature that seems to me to be the same thing that is within artists – the same quality of attention, and empathy, and interest in detail, a desire to properly look at things and understand things.  Being interested in things you don’t understand.”   

He made the switch to Middlesex Polytechnic – now Middlesex University – and a Performing Arts degree. After graduating, David and fellow student Samantha Butler formed Fevered Sleep "because we wanted to continue working together".  Looking back, David feels the early years lacked real coherence but things changed when in 2008 they were invited by the Brighton Festival to make a work based around the town's special light quality.  An Infinite Line has since become a long-term series of projects inspired by the quality of natural light in different places. During 2016 filming will take place on the coast and estuaries of Merseyside, recording various light-inspired performances.  In 2017 the film will be presented as "a lasting document of the infinite variability of Merseyside’s light, and a visual poem celebrating Merseyside as a place that is always on the move".

"Our work is about creating a space where people can observe or perceive things differently."  He draws an interesting parallel between our respective professions.  "Conservation and art both try to model the world in a different way, imagining how things could be different."

I wanted to know what David and the team were working on right now, and the answer was closer to home than I was expecting!  Twenty-five organisations, including my own, the RSPB, produced the State of Nature Report in May 2013.  "When I read the report, and understood the scale of loss of species and habitats, I wondered what this meant to the people who live and work in those places" he says.

"We've made an on-line artwork inspired by State of Nature, and we're launching it this month."  "what exactly is an online artwork?" I ask, trying to get him to reveal something ahead of the launch.  "Well... State of Nature is a narrative of change, and so is this new piece, which we call An Open Field.

"We invited people from various locations to take a walk with our Associate Artist Luke Pell, he recorded the conversations, and we've turned the words into a poetic landscape.  It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form.  You drift through the space and encounter experiences in the same unplanned way. There's no designated route, no map, you can get lost, you can get bored with it and leave."

That doesn't seem very likely, but like everyone else, I'll have to wait until next week to know for sure.  An Open Field is launched on 21 July.

Neck of the Woods, for Turner-prizewinning artist Douglas Gordon is a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story.  It brings together an impressive group of talents: Gordon, the pianist Hélène Grimaud, actor Charlotte Rampling and the Mexican-born writer and film-maker Veronica Gonzalez Peña.

Gordon has worked with the piano before:  in The End of Civilisation, he set a piano on fire in the Cumbrian hills and filmed it burning.  Grimaud is a world-renowned pianist and only slightly less well-known as a wolf conservationist, having established a wolf conservation centre in New York State.   And Gordon is also fascinated by wolves, hence this Manchester International Festival commission.    

Gonzalez Peña’s script is, ostensibly, a version of the Red Riding Hood story: playing to a cultural fear of wolves and of evil -  not the depiction Grimaud would champion in her other life.  For many cultures the wolf is a positive, even heroic figure: contrast the reverence given by the American Indians with the loathing and fear imported from Europe by later Americans.  

Neck of the Woods, which opened last night at HOME in Manchester, is at one level a struggle between artistic licence and Grimaud’s conservation agenda:  how to make a balanced portrayal of a species in trouble when so much great art has been built around wolf myth and metaphor?

Hélène Grimaud personifies that struggle, while the other artists had no such dilemma.  A piece about the ecology of a keystone species that evokes powerful and contradictory feelings would be a tremendous creative challenge for someone, but Neck of the Woods turns out not to be that piece.

For Gordon and González Peña, it is firmly rooted in the tradition of myth-making, which, on balance, has not served the wolf well.   Rather than use art to illuminate and challenge perceptions, it seemed to me to take the easier route – to build on what centuries of ignorance have offered us many times before.  There is an ulterior agenda, for sure.  Gordon has stated that he wanted to show that “men are worse than wolves” thereby once again using wolves to set a benchmark for measuring others’ badness.

So Hélène Grimaud’s personal mission to right all the misperceptions about wolves, and their consequences for the species, has had to take second place. 

The best bit is at the very beginning.  Starting in complete darkness, we hear a recording of a man chopping down a tree.  The darkness forces us to listen intently to the man’s breathing and the cut of his axe.  Over what seemed like several minutes, his efforts grow more desperate, his chopping more irregular, and he seems on the point of giving up when the trunk starts to splinter, and it falls, leaves and branches creating a crashing crescendo, to finish with a subsonic thud that I felt in my chest.  Ninety minutes later this was how the piece ended, also in darkness.

In between, Rampling tells her story, blended with that of Little Red Riding Hood.  Waking from a nightmare about wolves, she takes us through the narrative a few sentences at a time.  She and Grimaud alternate a dozen or more times.  This is two one-woman shows, chopped up and performed in turn.  We hear Rachmaninov and some dark minor-key chords.  A few more lines of narrative and then, as interludes between fragments of text, mini-medleys of Bach-with-Schumann, Rachmaninov-with-Beethoven, Ravel, Chopin. 

Now and again the disembodied and chilling voice of Gordon hints at the real story.  Rampling has complete command of the pace of the narrative, and of her coldly traumatised persona.  Grimaud is, as always, in command of her material, and occasionally dazzles.  The Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir is effective in the dark, behind a black gauze curtain, with wordless vocalisations, and dimly-lit hand gestures in imitation of the wind-blown trees that haunt Rampling’s nightmares (and in which live wolves).

It is, in the end, a story about men (one man) and an evil worse than any wolf.  This is signalled often and early enough for there to be no shocking reveal.  The music is there to pace the narrative, to slow down what is always going to come.  The lighting and the occasional snow, and odd bits of ambient sound from Eno add a bit, but not much, to what is basically a showcase for two talented women and a story; just about the sum of its parts.

Neck of the Woods runs at HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, First Street, Manchester, as part of the Manchester international festival, until18 July.

Over the last year NATURAL LIGHT has featured Australian birds and the music they have inspired several times.  Glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, “and the soulless noise that we’re left with when they’re all gone” are the inspiration for Australian composer Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, which will be paired with Beethoven’s own homage to the countryside at the BBC Proms on 2 August.  

Dean is following in the footsteps of Tate and Sculthorpe, as well as living composers such as John Rodgers and David Lumsdaine, who are among several Australians who appear to have created a modern tradition of celebrating birdsong in their works.  With the dynamic young Aurora Orchestra, who specialise in playing from memory, expect a powerful sense of direct communication with the audience.  

A few days later it is the turn of the best-known musico-ornithologists, Olivier Messiaen.  Little over a year after Peter Hill premiered a newly discovered Messiaen bird-piece, La Fauvette Passerinette, Chris Dingle, Professor at Birmingham Conservatoire, repeats the feat with a new piece for orchestra.   Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (oiseau Tui) - A bird from the tree of Life (Tui bird) - will receive its world premiere on 7 August.  It is an orchestral tour de force featuring a single species, the Tui of New Zealand.  Tui are known for their noisy, unusual call, that varies for each individual, combining bell-like notes with clicks, cackles, creaks and groans. Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes – Sad Birds – is also on the programme.  Ravel is said to have been inspired by the “elegant melancholy Arabesque” of a blackbird singing in Fontainebleau forest.

Later this month Chris Dingle will describe how he brought the piece to life in a guest blog for NATURAL LIGHT.  He will also be speaking at a pre-concert event at the Royal College of Music, which will be broadcast on Radio 3 during the interval.  

The following evening two works remind us of spring.  Mahler’s bitterly beautiful Ninth Symphony is also full of birdsong and, in Alban Berg’s view, “expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature”. The National Youth Orchestra’s annual concert opens with the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s Re-greening, a celebration of spring written specially as a complement to Mahler’s Symphony.

Music and great nature broadcasting are two of the BBC’s biggest reasons to exist, and the Proms is the natural place to bring the two together, in a concert of music from the series Life Story, composed by Murray Gold.  Sir David Attenborough and members of the production team present footage from the series in a Sunday afternoon family concert on 30 August.

And finally, a late night Prom on 10 September is in collaboration with six of the BBC national radio stations and BBC Music.  The Radio 4 show Wireless Nights is brought to the concert hall, pairing music and spoken word inspired by the night. Jarvis Cocker presents an evening he describes as ‘a nocturnal investigation of the human condition’, with Maxime Tortelier conducting the BBC Philharmonic. The blurb says that badgers, stars, elves and lambs may or may not be involved.

You can read NATURAL LIGHT's feature series on the 2014 Proms here, and keep up with the nature featured in this year's festival in a forthcoming series of articles and reviews.