​This year, Oxford University Press declared hashtag to be children's 'word of the year' based on 120,000 stories written by children.

"Technology is miraculous, but so is nature" says Macfarlane. "Jackie and I wanted to find a way to release these simple wonder-words back into people's stories and dreams."

In her blog Jackie writes: It grew out of a letter I was asked to sign by Laurence Rose and Mark Cocker.  The letter was a request for the words culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to be returned.  These words included bluebell, conker, heron, acorn and perhaps the one that cut deepest for me, kingfisher.

She contacted Macfarlane, who coincidentally had been thinking about writing a children's book for some time,  Morris persuaded him it should be a book for all ages.

I contacted Jackie Morris at her home-studio by the sea near St. David's, Pembrokeshire.  She explained that Macfarlane had already started sending her material for what will be "a dazzling full-colour book of spells and spellings that seeks to re-wild the language of readers young and old."

They have chosen around twenty of the lost nature words to "start putting nature back into the mouths and minds' eyes of readers through the magical interplay of artwork and text."

Mark Sears, CEO of The Wild Network, an organisation devoted to reconnecting children with nature that has been collaborating in the #naturewords campaign, sees the new book as "the first sign of a counter-movement, a positive move to restore nature literacy."

"There is a real music in the flow of words Rob has sent me" Jackie told me yesterday, having received texts for otter and kingfisher so far.  And this afternoon a Facebook message:  "He's sent me an acorn piece - pure music!"

Jillian Steinhauer, writing for the website hyperallergic.com, reports a conversation with ecological artist Aviva Rahmani who has been working with activists just north of New York City.  Blued Trees is a project that attempts to stop the expansion of the Spectra Energy Algonquin Incremental Market pipeline by using an unexpected legal tool: copyright.

Blued Trees is a musical score painted (with nontoxic materials) onto trees growing in the path of the pipeline. In order to complete the pipeline expansion, Spectra would have to destroy the artwork, thus – it is argued - infringing Rahmani’s legal rights as an artist (“moral rights” in U.S. law).

There is a precedent, if not in the legal sense: in Alberta, Canada artist Peter von Tiesenhausen, fought natural gas pipelines by claiming that his entire ranch was a work of art. The developers eventually withdrew before the copyright idea could be tested.

There are many reasons to suppose the attempt will fail, not least the civil nature of any infringement meaning it may just be a matter of compensating the artist after the fact.  But as an audacious way of drawing attention to the case, it can only be admired.

I asked composer Arlene Sierra when she started writing music that engaged with phenomena such as this.

“It began when I was a student and came across Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture – I discovered a wealth of information on classical forms, small and large scale structures and so on, with all their musical possibilities. Like a lot of texts from Classical antiquity, it was also shot through with odd theories of nature that were as fascinating as they were incorrect.”  One such theory gave her the idea for an orchestral piece Aquilo, named after the NE wind.

Arlene studied East Asian Studies and Electronic Music at Oberlin College-Conservatory, in Ohio, but reading Vitruvius made her want to compose for the orchestra, developing approaches to form and structure in that medium.  “I’d grown up playing the piano and listening to classical music, so this kind of composition was a natural arrival for me, even though I came to it relatively late.”

Having grown up in Miami and New York City, Arlene settled in London.  Starting a new life far from where she grew up prompted her to set a number of Pablo Neruda’s (1904-1973) Odes to Common Things, which reflect on nature and memory.

“The poetry got me thinking about using birdsong, and other associations from nature that I’d experienced as a child. London has its inspirations too: for example, I love the huge scarab beetle sculpture in the British Museum, and when I read about the living insect’s ability to navigate using magnetic fields, that immediately prompted a musical idea for a piece.”  The result was the first of a series of piano works that became Birds and Insects, Book 1. 

Sierra, who divides her time between London and teaching at the University of Cardiff, describes these influences as found objects.  Birdsong and insect behaviour remain a rich seam of ideas but running concurrently is a series of works inspired by military strategy.  Her piano concerto The Art of War is inspired by writings ascribed to the 6th century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, and is also a response to the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent wars.

“That all sounds very different to butterflies and mountains” I suggest.

“But strategy and struggle are part of nature”, she responds. “When I write a piece about nature, it’s unflinching.  It’s not meant to be idyllic or a simple pastoral reflection.  It’s underpinned by a modern understanding.  Of course I want to get the beauty across too.  I’m moved by the beauty of nature, but there’s beauty in the complexity of nature and in the modern scientific understanding that earlier composers had no access to. In our time there’s also a sense of urgency, because humanity is altering nature in ways that may well be irreversible.”

2009 was a milestone in Arlene’s career, and the point at which two interests – nature and military strategy – started to merge.  “I got a commission from the New York Philharmonic and decided I wanted to explore Darwin and the Origin of Species.”  The result was Game of Attrition, an orchestral struggle for survival in which some species – or rather instruments – are selected out according to Darwinian rules, ultimately leaving the ones best fitted for survival.

It is a subject that, Arlene observes, is not without controversy in some parts of the world, including back home in the U.S.  “It amazes me that parts of the States still have to contend with the denial of mainstream science, but it means a lot to me as a composer, to try to capture something of the power, and truth, of evolutionary theory through music.” Following performances of the work in New York, and the CD release by Bridge Records in 2014, Game of Attrition will be performed by the Alabama Symphony in October of this year.

Last year saw a major commission, Urban Birds, now available on the NMC label, in which three piano soloists play music in response to pre-recorded birdsong.  Future plans include completing her opera Faustine, scoring a series of silent films by Maya Deren, and continuing to explore material for future volumes of Birds and Insects piano pieces.  One such, Painted Bunting, was premiered by dedicatee Xenia Pastova in Leeds last week.  

Currently Arlene is analysing the complex song of the bobolink, a bird of the American prairies, for another new piano work. “I’m amazed at the huge leaps in tessitura that can barely be detected at the song’s normal speed.”  This leads us to ponder the very different way birds must perceive each others’ voices, compared to the sounds that we hear; we talk about the American hermit thrush and its ethereal and overtone-rich song somehow untypical of European birds.  

“The natural world has become part of the environment in which I work, even though I’ve always been a city dweller” says Arlene. “With so many fascinating concepts and sources to draw from, I’m sure the natural world will continue to be an important part of my music.” 







This is an updated version of a conversation that first appeared here on 4 September.

John Luther Adams's music has a profound connection with the natural world.  He was born in 1953 in the American Deep South and brought up in the suburbs of New York.  His music is mostly closely associated with the culture and landscape of Alaska, where he moved in the 1970s and lived for 40 years.

Tom McKinney writes a blog that includes a 52-part weekly feature on birds that have influenced music.  He writes “as a way into the music Adams wrote in Alaska, have a go at Dark Waves, inspired by the Pacific Ocean of the Bering Sea. It was the first piece I heard by him, and I think it's pretty incredible.  It's massive music, slow moving blocks of sound, gradually changing textures that rise and fall with intensity. It's as big and slow as the Alaskan landscape and ocean.”

During Hear and Now, Adams describes his Earth and the Great Weather as “a sacred work of some sort” and “a kind of sonic geography; I’m still not sure what that means but is has something to do with the interrelationship between place and the human imagination.”  Written in collaboration with four native Alaskans, it includes natural sound, native drumming and Aeolian harps.  Adams reveals that, in his sixties and now living mainly in Mexico, he has returned to bird song as a major influence, decades after songbirdsongs.

I knew from previous conversations over the years that Tansy loved the outdoors, and I wanted to know how important this is in her work.  In front of her on the table was the score of Nature, her 2012 piano concerto.  “Nature has many meanings, and they are all in my concerto”, she explained.  “What is the nature of the piano in this concerto?  Possibly a maenad, a wild woman who connects with her environment.”

We are soon on a conversational journey through a whole ecosystem of interconnected concepts, from shamanism to the theatricality of birdsong.  “Lately I’ve been haunted by Carlos Castañeda and his descriptions of shamanic practices.”  She explained how this entails a developing a deep understanding of the Earth and traditional knowledge of such things as medicinal plants.  This, in turn, demands a deep respect for plants and animals and the land, born of a long initiation described in great detail in Castañeda's writing.



“There doesn’t seem to be a language in western culture for this blend of the ecological and the sacred”, I suggest. Tansy’s reply was immediate.  “It’s why we have art.  Art helps us to connect with nature and with our own nature in a way that we don’t have words for.”  So how, I wondered, does Tansy connect these things together?

“I need to spend time in open spaces,” she emphasises, “my most vivid childhood memories are about the natural environment.”  She grew up in rural Kent, “waking up every morning to birdsong and the light streaming through my attic bedroom window.  I could see these really tall trees that formed a kind of amphitheatre.  Every morning in spring I took in this theatrical dawn chorus - hearing it like it was an orchestra.”

“So you were also becoming a musician by then, too; thinking in theatrical or orchestral terms?”

“Yes, I suppose it was my early teens, and I was getting used to listening deeply into sound, listening with perspective.”

"I was rather unhappy when I moved to a town - Colchester - to study.  Instead of doing the normal Friday night student things, my friend and I would escape for an evening in the countryside, to get a vital sense of renewal."

Now that she is working with a new generation of young musicians, does any of this longing for the countryside translate into Re-greening, the National Youth Orchestra commission that had its premiere last Thursday in Aldeburgh?

"At the moment the musical landscape in my head is very forest-like", she says.

"I loved the poetic ideas that the NYO came to me with: it had to be about the essence of Spring and youthfulness in the wider context of the cycle of life and death.  Part of my inspiration was the orchestra itself - a large body of people and sound that is organised in both horizontal and vertical layers.  The music is organised similarly.  I also found inspiration in a shamanic wheel of the year; a system with an ancient, nature-based mythology.

"For a few weeks the piece was going well.  Then at some point I felt it was stuck, something was missing.  I gave myself a day away from the composing to browse the books on my bookshelf and came across one about the Wildwood Tarot. I was able to use this to conjure up environments and situations and characters that give shape to the work."  Characters, including The Stag, The Forest Lovers, The Archer appear at various places in the complex, forest-like structure of the seven-minute piece.  There is a link back to an earlier Tansy Davies Proms commission, Wildcard of 2010, which was a more explicit depiction of Tarot characters.  The Wildwood Tarot rewrites the Tarot around the natural world.  "I particularly wanted to use the idea of seeds that lie dormant in the winter bursting with life in the summer."

It seemed a long way from Tansy's most recent work, the highly acclaimed opera Between Worlds.  I assumed working on a monumental piece set in New York's Twin Towers during 9/11 must have affected her in some way.

"Profoundly.  I was entering a dark world, in terms of subject matter, and it caused me to reflect on my own dark side.  I felt like I was becoming the opera.  I dreamed about it every night.  Every few days I had to do something different, but I really had to tear myself away.  I'd watch a film, but it couldn't be a film involving people.  I found the only thing I could watch was David Attenborough programmes.

"I was very affected by extreme situations in those programmes - penguins enduring months at 50 degrees below zero in order to bring up their young; or antelopes spending hours in 50 degree heat, hoping to attract a mate.

"Re-Greening is about the interconnectedness of nature, human nature and the cosmos.  It's about our inner space and the space outside us.  I'm trying to give the listener a 3D experence in a way."

After the first rehearsal Sarah Alexander, the National Youth Orchestra's Chief Executive recognised that Re-greening was a kind of epilogue to Between Worlds.  "You're re-greening the Earth after 9/11." She told the composer.


This is an expanded version of a conversation that first appeared here on 6 August.

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.