Late in 2015, NATURAL LIGHT reported a remarkable case of environmental protest art that helped in the fight to save the magnificent beechwoods of Zilbeti, in the foothills of the Navarran Pyrenees. 
 
Mining company MAGNA, supported by the Government of Navarra, proposed to fell 54,000 trees to enable the extension of a magnesite mine.  People from the tiny village of Zilbeti and their supporters in neighbouring areas, local conservation groups and national NGOs such as SEO-BirdLife Spain resorted to guerrilla art to highlight the injustice, and the environmental damage, that would be caused by such a fragrant breach of EU law.

While SEO-BirdLife led a legal fight in the Navarran High Court, the local activists created Guernica de Zilbeti - a 25 metres wide by 15 high reproduction of Picasso’s Civil War protest painting, using harmless pigment on the trees themselves.  In October 2015, we reported a High Court victory, but that proved not to be the end of the story.  MAGNA, along with some local authorities, challenged the regional High Court’s decision in Spain’s Supreme court.  Two weeks ago, on 29 March, a definitive decision was made, once and for all, confirming full protection for the forest. 

Last week I passed along the French Mediterranean coast on the latest leg of my writing project The Long Spring.  I crossed the border on foot from Portbou in Spain, walking over the Colls dels Belitres, into Roussillon.  This is where Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) found the inspiration for two of the masterpieces in his collection of solo piano pieces Catalogue d’Oiseaux. 

Messiaen’s introductory notes to Le Merle Bleu (Blue Rock Thrush) and Le Traquet Stapazin (Black-eared Wheatear) describe the landscape on the coast near Banyuls-sur-Mer in vivid detail, along with the birds he heard, and whose voices he transcribed, and the impressions he gained from the colours and sounds of the sea and the cliffs.  I decided to devote a day of The Long Spring to finding the very places he describes, and listening out for the birds he found in June 1957.

Messiaen is specific in naming where on the coast he based himself:  “Near Banyuls:  Cap l’Abeille, Cap Rederis.”  I set out on Tuesday morning and walked south from Banyuls.  I was looking for a cliff face among the many minor capes and inlets that make up the main headlands he mentions.  “In an echoing rock crevice, the blue rock thrush sings....his song blends with the sound of the waves.”

​I wasn’t at first even sure there would still be blue rock thrushes there, sixty years on, but I need not have worried about that.  They were there, and singing away.  Just inland from the cliff edge, in the heathy garrigue vegetation, a Thekla lark sang, just as it did in Messiaen’s day, playing the same accompanying role as it does in the piece.  And the herring gulls he noted (today we would call them yellow-legged gulls) were there, too. 

​I was struck by the way distance, and the angle of the cliffs, and the way the sea masked certain pitches at times, made a big difference in the sounds that reached me.  The blue rock thrush song in particular, varied in timbre from rich and bell-like, to thin and dry. 

Having travelled through Spain without seeing one, I suspected that black-eared wheatears were late this year, and I was certainly too early for the swifts that feature in both pieces.  But I wanted to explore inland a little, where Messiaen worked among the terraced vines and cork oak woods, notating the wheatear’s song.  I found the place he describes easily enough:  “vineyards in terraces....the garrigue: a jumble of low, spiny shrubs, gorse, rosemary, cistus, kermes oak....cork-oak....”  As well as the birds that had not yet arrived, I missed the spectacled warbler, which Messiaen features in Le Traquet Stapazin. It should have been there, and I wonder if its absence is the main change in the last sixty years, along with evident erosion due to visitor pressure; and the two are probably linked.

The extraordinary mimcry of Australia’s lyrebird has inspired artist Zoë Palmer to create an extraordinary opera, or, as she describes it, an interactive musical adventure made especially for 0-2½ year-olds.  Musical Rumpus:  Lyrebird has toured venues in the East End of London, culminating on 4 and 5 December in the final performances at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Road, as part of the Spitalfields Festival.

I asked Zoë why she chose the lyrebird to provide very young children with their first music theatre experience. Like many of us, Zoë first discovered the lyrebird through David Attenborough’s Life of Birds.  “Ever since I saw that clip on YouTube I knew I wanted to work the lyrebird into one of my shows.  I was inspired by the incredible mimicry, this bird that could imitate anything from other species to camera shutters.

“It was also very moving, because this particular bird was imitating chainsaws, too, creating a record of the destruction of its own habitat.”

So how did this become the inspiration for Musical Rumpus?  “I’ve been specialising in early years music, but I’ve also recently completed a Masters in Human Ecology, and I realised the lyrebird is some kind of metaphor for creative development.
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“It’s an abstract piece, but it is based around the idea of the bird doing what children do, borrowing material and creating their own language.  Eventually it comes together in a developing language of words and song.”

She also sees a deeper, primeval connection.  “Before words and music were natural sounds, which blossomed into beautiful loops and patterns and sang the world into being.”

The 50-minute work casts the children as a “roving chorus”, gathering sounds from three different environments: home, city and forest, and creating their own song.  Parents are invited to engage, too.  Some, Zoë says, are a bit frightened, uncomfortable with letting go and simply being, but most get wrapped up in a shared experience with their babies.

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.

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.

The three participants were united by their anger.  Jeremy Deller is the artist whose six-room exhibition English Magic at the 2013 Venice Biennale included a painting of a giant hen harrier clutching a Range Rover.  As symbols of the unequal struggle between oppressor and oppressed, they were well chosen, not least because the painting was a direct response to Deller's anger at the news of the shooting of two hen harriers at the royal estate in Sandringham.

Presenter Chris Packham is well known for stepping into the firing line over illegal bird killing, on behalf of both hen harriers and migrant birds in Malta.  George Monbiot's assessment chimed with Deller's skillfully-wrought artistic response:  the only people who want hen harriers to go extinct are the landowners who have the means to make it happen, but no popular support.  The ones with all the popular support have no power to stop them.

The trio went on to critique Packham's own artistic efforts - good third year stuff according to Deller - and the role of the BBC and Sir David Attenborough in projecting the reality - or otherwise - of the threats facing the planet.  The programme is available on the BBC iPlayer, and well worth an hour of anyone's time.

Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales may seem like a strange inspiration for an artwork.  But a Pontypridd artist has chosen to interpret the story of the dipper, and research by one of the UK’s leading pollution scientists, in a new and very personal work. 

River Canary is Tara Okon’s response to the discovery that decades after we thought Wales’s rivers had been cleaned up industry’s legacy is having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds.

Tara, whose ink drawings have a geometric complexity reminiscent of her artistic hero M.C. Escher, uses a similar tessellation style to tell contemporary stories.  “I read about the impact of pollution on the dipper in an article by Professor Steve Ormerod, and something clicked.” 

Ormerod’s 35-year study of dippers showed that decades after the worst industrial and mining effluents had been cleaned from rivers like Tara’s local Taff, there is a lingering legacy.  The addition of newer chemicals creates a cocktail with surprising results.  Tara has noticed there are now more dippers on the Taff compared with years ago.  But Steve and his team at Cardiff University have found that urban dippers hatch fewer female chicks than those nesting in rural rivers nearby, while urban chicks are underweight compared with their rural counterparts.