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.

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.

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.

On a cold November morning in the late 1970s a small group of us assembled on the shores of Morecambe Bay, near the village of Hest Bank.  We were there to meet the high tide wader roost, a host of oystercatchers and ringed plovers, in order to net them, ring them and release them as part of a long-term research project into long distance migration.

One of my fellow ornithologists was Edward Cowie, then Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Lancaster, where I had just enrolled as an undergraduate in biology.

From then until Edward’s move to take up an academic post in Australia in 1983, we would encounter each other at bird club meetings, in the field and at concerts.  Our conversations were most often about birds, but sometimes about music.

As for Hest Bank, it was to be the inspiration for an early but already characteristic Cowie piece – an eponymous movement from his Gesangbuch, a cycle of virtuosic choral works written for the BBC Singers.  Cowie’s Hest Bank captures in sound a rippling, surging, swirling, murmuring, flowing and ebbing of vast flocks of knot, dunlin and other waders; of water, surf and flotsam; of light and of landscape.  

I caught up with Edward as he was preparing for a trip, with his partner, the artist Heather Cowie, to a very different wetland.  They are spending the rest of September in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where Edward will be researching new pieces with the support of a Leverhulme Emeritus fellowship.  Surprisingly, it is Edward’s first visit to tropical Africa.

“One of the things I like about being a composer is it always takes me somewhere strange.  I don’t know how I will react but I know it will be the whole interlocking tapestry that will impress me:  the sky, the flatness, the wetness.”

He knows enough about what to expect to have decided how he intends to work.  One of the main outputs from the trip will be Okavango Nocturne.  It will be the second in a cycle of orchestral works with the overarching title Earth Music.  The first was Great Barrier Reef, commissioned by the BBC Proms and premiered there last year.

“I’ve heard that the Okavango has a very special night-time atmosphere, full of sound coming from millions of animals of all kinds.  I’ll be out there listening very carefully to a habitat that can’t be seen, only heard.”   Okavango Nocturne will be premiered in the 2015/16 season.

I remark that his search for some special magic in the Okavango is characteristic, something he has been doing for years in the wild places of the world.  He agrees and explains that in Australia he often spent long periods alone in wild areas, contemplating and exploring nature and the sonic and visual experiences it affords.  He describes an evening sitting at the edge of a cliff overlooking the King Valley in Victoria. 

“Just as the light finally dipped towards an inky darkness, several male lyrebirds began to sing in a series of interlocking but combative ensemble performances”.   He was captivated by the sounds, but also by the whole experience:  the changing light as dusk falls; tracing wisps of smoke that perforate the forest canopy, the valley landscape enclosing this world of sound and atmosphere.

The result of that experience was one of his best-loved pieces, Lyre Bird Motet (2003), written for the BBC Singers.  A return trip to Australia a few years ago led to a companion piece, Bell Bird Motet, premiered in 2011 by the BBC Singers at the festival Earth Music Bristol which Edward founded.  

For Edward, drawing is an integral part of music composition.  “I’ll be taking a manuscript book to note down the sounds that I hear, but the visual dimension is important – even in the dark.  Composition is for me ‘multi-sensing’ – I draw to capture shape, form, complexity versus simplicity, colour and ‘event.’  I add real musical notes in the drawings if I need to, and then start translating it all into the music."

Our conversation runs like a river in spate, with unexpected turns and splashes.  Suddenly we are discussing the recent discovery of the phenomenal song repertoire of the spiny lobster.  It turns out Edward is working on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio series called Singing Planet.  It’s a natural history of song “from crustaceans to the contemporary chorus.”

We return to the calmer waters of the Okavango and Edward reveals plans for another Botswana project - researching big cats for a piece for clarinet quintet.

“I recently got to know [British clarinettist] Julian Bliss and have been bowled over by his playing – it’s great to hear someone so young display a totally unmediated love of sound”  he enthuses, "and it turns out Julian is seriously keen on wildlife.  I’m writing a clarinet quintet for him, so I asked him what subject he’d like me to focus on and he immediately said ‘big cats’.  So the piece will be called Big Cats.

“I have millions of reasons to compose music, and they are mainly, if not totally, found within the way the natural world works.”

Laurence Rose

On 19 August an earthquake swarm began in the vicinity of the Bárðarbunga volcano, with over 1600 earthquakes recorded in 48 hours. Yesterday Iceland issued a red alert to the aviation industry, and confirmed that a small sub-glacial eruption is under way.  On Wednesday, authorities evacuated an area close to the volcano over fears it could erupt.

In the world’s youngest – geologically speaking – country, such dramatic-sounding news is not that unusual.  Geysers, magma, glaciers and the flooding, often catastrophic, that occurs when so much ice and fire combine, are at the heart of Icelandic culture.

So it has been timely that our airwaves experienced a minor eruption of Icelandic music last week.  There is still time to catch Donald Macleod’s four-part series on Icelandic composers on iPlayer (though last Monday’s programme expires this Monday), while the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s Proms performance is available for another four weeks.  As part of the Proms Plus literature festival, expert in Nordic sagas Eleanor Rosamond Barraclough joined novelist Joanna Kavenna to discuss Icelandic culture in a conversation that ranged from trolls and the myth of Thule to Nordic Noir, from the 19th century British visitors who included William Morris and Anthony Trollope to modern poets Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage.  

NATURAL LIGHT reviews the whole package in our Reviews section, which contains links to additional material exploring the inextricable link between Iceland’s dramatic natural environment and its music.

Monumental soundscapes – the volcanoes and geysers of Iceland - are brought to London this week by Ilan Volkov and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.  On Friday Geysir by Jón Leifs (1899-1968) will erupt into the Albert Hall, following Haukur Tómasson’s Magma which receives it UK premiere.

Leifs studied and worked in central Europe but on returning to Iceland in the 1940s he set about creating a new Icelandic sound – based, inevitably, on the unique folk music and tectonic geology of his country.  He started to concentrate on orchestral works, the better to portray the monumental landscapes and forces of nature that were to be his main subjects.  Geysir, from 1962, epitomises this style.  Other works include Hekla which depicts the eruption of the volcano (pictured) which he witnessed in 1947, and Dettifoss was inspired by Europe’s most powerful waterfall. 

Volkov brings Geysir together with Tómasson’s (b.1960) Magma and two other works that are tectonic in scale:  Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Schumann’s A minor piano concerto, in what seems to be an inspired piece of programming, unlike the awkward juxtaposing of contemporary and familiar works that we often expect from the Proms.  Hence the title of Thursday’s Prom:  Classical Tectonics.  I’m not familiar with Tómasson but the Iceland Musical Exchange says that “Tomasson has a keen ear for sonority and can evoke the gargantuan in music just as easily as he can the ice-delicate”.  If that’s a fair description, he will be a perfect successor to Leifs.

This morning on Radio 3 CD Review includes (about 30 minutes into the programme) a portrait of Leifs.  The programme is available for the next 7 days, and the Proms composer portraits are also available as podcasts.  The Prom is broadcast live at 7.30 on Friday, and can be heard for 30 days on iPlayer.

And all next week, Composer of the Week will be a repeat of the series first broadcast last year, which covers some of Europe's most innovative voices, from Bjork to, well, Leifs.  As the programme website puts it: For more than a millennium, Iceland's composers have drawn upon the sounds of its unique geology: sounds created in a glacial, geothermal landscape like nowhere else on earth. Searing water explodes from fissures; the earth steams spongily underfoot; vast, electric-blue hunks of solid ice crack and collide as they bob down otherwise silent fjords.

The third in our feature series Nature at the Proms is on Sibelius, his love of nature, and the swans that inspired his most popular symphony.

Symphony no. 5 and The Swan of Tuonela are at the Proms tomorrow night.  During the interval two academics, Daniel Grimley and Simon Shaw-Miller talk to Martin Handley about Sibelius the nature-lover.  

As composer Jonathan Dove prepares for the premiere of his 'Gaia Theory' at the BBC Proms this week, he took time out to explain how his recent work has been inspired by an Arctic voyage that proved something of a wake-up call about the future of the planet.

In the second in our Nature at The Proms feature series we talk to Jonathan about that voyage, the works it has inspired, and his future plans.

Happy birthday to Sir Harrison Birtwistle, our most important living composer, who is 80 today.  Sir Harry is prominently featured in this year’s Proms, which start at the end of the week.  He was also featured on this site when we launched a couple of weeks ago.  You can hear him talking about his boyhood interest in moths and watch a performance of the Moth Requiem from last year’s Proms here.

The Proms – at its fringe festival Proms Plus – will also mark the centenary of Gavin Maxwell, born exactly 100 years ago today, when two leading nature writers discuss his legacy.

Our feature series Nature at the Proms starts with a full run-down of new and familiar pieces influenced by environmental concerns, wildlife and landscape, along with interval features and literary discussions.