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.

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.

In what may seem like the final leg of a journey towards respectability, street artist Matt Sewell has put the finishing touches to his latest commission:  promotional material for the National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project. 

The three month project, launched today, is set to create the first ever UK coastal sound map, using sounds recorded by the public.  A collaboration between the National Trust, the British Library and the National Trust for Scotland, the project will run throughout the summer of 2015, closing on the 21 September.

It seems a far cry from the Old Moor underpass, where I first came across Matt’s work.  Old Moor is an RSPB reserve among the former coal mining villages of Barnsley.  In 2010 the RSPB brought Matt in to work with art students from local schools and colleges to brighten up a concrete underpass that was part of the nearby TransPennine Trail.  The project was so successful that two more graffiti art projects were commissioned along the trail.

Since then, Matt has gone on to author several bird books in which his unique visual take is matched by succinct descriptions that capture a deep, if offbeat, relationship between artist and subject.

Earlier this year Matt added his voice to the chorus of protest that greeted the deletion of over fifty nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, covered on several occasions by NATURAL LIGHT.  It was then that I called him to try to understand what makes him tick.

“I’d been a street artist since the late 1990s” he explained, “and started working for fashion mags and the like but by 2007 I’d just had enough.  My wife and I were living in Brighton and one day we just left and went to Australia, just travelling around a lot.”

While in Australia he carried on with street art, “some official, some unofficial” but realised that all he really wanted to do was watch birds.  I asked if he had been a birdwatcher up to that point.  “I think it was when I was watching a splendid fairy wren in Australia, a wonderful blue thing, that I had a flash of realisation how much I loved birds.”  He realised he had been passionate about them since growing up alongside his family’s smallholding in Willington, County Durham.

“We came back to the UK and I decided to devote most of my work to birds” he says, “but found we were in the middle of the credit crunch and all my old contacts had moved on.”  His Australian adventures made him look afresh at everyday British birds.  “I saw how blue a blue tit is and thought, wow! it’s a British bird.”  

Matt’s work caught the eye of Jeff Barrett, founder of the website Caught by the River, who asked him to design a logo.  That led to a regular contribution, Matt Sewell’s Bird of the Week.  “I had to start the series with the blue tit, as it has become my favourite bird” he says.  "I painted the bird and added a couple of sentences, it was the first thing I ever wrote."

His commentary on the house sparrow, an early subject of the series, is typical:  As British as chip butties and bramble picking, they even look like they’re wearing a flat cap for Christ’s sake. When you see them abroad they don’t look right, like they shouldn’t be there. Faded, out of place and a bit sad. Like some leathery Brit that’s been in Ibiza/Thailand/Goa for far, far too long and lost their way. Come home!

A book of such gems was inevitable, and Ebury Press published Our Garden Birds in 2012.  “It’s just a collection of musings and memories of encounters I have had with these birds,” he explains, “but at the same time I’m trying to give people a different understanding of the countryside and wildlife.  Trying to open people’s eyes.” 

The National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project, for which Matt has contributed the artwork, including the logo at the top of this blog, now hopes to open people’s ears, too.

It is night. The inside of an old upright piano hangs in a tree.  Film footage of birds is projected onto it and their wing beats generate a continually evolving musical score. Their movement is registered by a computer that responds by activating an array of tiny motors.  These tap the strings at the very spot where the birds’ shadows fall.  It is as if the birds themselves were creating the delicate music that emerges. 

This is Piano Migrations, an installation by Kathy Hinde, one of four artists creating For the Birds a spectacular night-time trail of light, sound and sculpture at the RSPB’s Ynys-hir reserve from 2-5 October.

Using LED and small speaker technology the artists are pioneering a high impact low energy spectacle. A thousand lights will wind their way through the landscape, leading into a unique spectacle of reflections and artistic interpretations on the life of birds. 

I managed to catch Kathy during a brief stop-over at her Bristol studio, fresh from the 90dB Festival in Rome and soon to head off to Wales with a version of Piano Migrations and assorted other bird-related artworks.  “I’m surrounded by weird machines” was her slightly breathless greeting to my phone call.

I wanted to hear more about For the Birds.  “It was Jony Easterby’s idea. He lives near Machynlleth and knows the reserve really well.”

Easterby brought a number of regular collaborators together – Esther Tew, Mark Anderson and Kathy, to co-create a celebration of birds.  “We are all artists who work a lot outdoors, in the midst of nature” explains Kathy.  “We are installing about 26 artworks along a two-kilometre walk.  We’ve worked together for a few years and know instinctively how our works will complement each other.  We’ll be putting the trail together over about ten days and our walk-throughs will enable us all to refine each other’s contribution.”

As for Kathy, her input revolves around the recurring themes of her work: the mapping of migratory routes, the relationship between man and technology and the effects of environmental change on nature.   Piano Migrations is a characteristic fusion of natural processes, low-tech and high tech.  “It changes all the time.  Wherever I take it I ask them to find me a ‘new’ broken piano so the sounds are always different.  And I love it when, as recently in Bavaria, they re-use the piano frame in an entirely different artwork afterwards.”

Using software developed by her partner Matthew Olden, Kathy experiments with different films of bird flight to create new versions.  “The first version used film I shot of house martins on telegraph wires.  It looked like music on a stave and that’s how the idea came to me.  I like to create systems that have their own behaviour – I compose by setting up the system but the actual music comes from the behaviours I can’t control.  The original house martin version of Piano Migrations is completely different to using film of cranes, which produce a much more graceful rhythmic pattern.”

I’ve noticed that cranes seem to feature a lot in her work, and I ask which came first, an interest in birds, or did that emerge through her art?

“I always spent a lot of time outdoors as a child, always in the woods.  But really my interest in birds has grown around my artistic practice.” 

And what is it with cranes?  “We made origami cranes at school and I loved it, I’ve been doing it ever since, making them flap their wings and everything.  Then in 2010 I spent sixteen hours in a hide in Hornborga, Sweden, with real cranes all around doing their dancing displays a few feet away from me.  One of my installations at Ynys-hir will be stainless steel ‘origami’ cranes with motors to make them move and lit up with special lighting.”

 “I love the whole idea of migration, and there being no borders.  There are lots of lovely metaphors.” Kathy then reveals that her great-grandmother was a migrant - arriving in Britain from Lithuania in 1901. “And my grandmother sold pianos in Wigan, so these connections mean a lot to me.”

So what other weird machines will she be taking to Wales? “I’m working on a bird imitating machine using Swanee whistles whose tails are controlled by computer.  I’m composing a piece for this machine but the prototype still needs improvement.”

It is only late in the conversation that I realise the Ynys-hir installation is for visiting after dark. “Ynys-hir has these amazing vistas over the estuary but we want to bring it to life at night, and create a different feel.

“I want people thinking about the sights and sounds of nature in different ways...”

“You seem to want to magnify everyday experiences of nature” I suggest. 

“Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it.  My motivation is to imbue a desire to care for the environment, but it’s implicit in the work that I make, it’s not something that I preach.  People have to get there themselves.”

For the Birds, a nighttime journey into a wild avian landscape.  New Site-specific works by sound and visual artists Jony Easterby, Mark Anderson, Kathy Hinde and Esther Tew at Ynys-hir RSPB reserve, Wales 

2-5 October, Ynys-Hir, nr Machynlleth, SY20 8TB

Passionate about the natural world, obsessive about using images from nature to paint the darker side of human nature.  NATURAL LIGHT caught up with French-Welsh poet Pascale Petit ahead of the launch of her sixth collection, Fauverie.  A series of launch readings begins next week in Norfolk, taking in events as diverse as London Zoo’s first ever Poetry Weekend and the Resurgence and Ecologist Festival of Wellbeing.  
(See What’s On for full details)




Petit was taking time away from her home in London and back in her native Paris on a writing retreat, so we agreed to converse by email on this occasion.  I’d read that Fauverie is inspired by the big cat house of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and celebrates the ferocity and grace of endangered animals.  But I wanted to check my understanding: whereas her fourth collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale, displays an intense feeling for nature in its own right, the new collection invokes nature metaphorically, to tackle the darker aspects of human nature. 

“Yes I think that’s fair. The natural world is my passion, but my subject has often been my parents and human nature. I’ve written two books about my father (The Zoo Father and Fauverie) and one about my mother (The Huntress) and I’m working on another sequence about my mother Mama Amazonica.  So I guess on the one hand there’s my passion – the natural world – and on the other my obsession – to write about my strange parents.”

I’m keen to know how – indeed if -  Pascale separates these two very different ways of viewing nature;  or  is it a single, much more complex relationship? 

“I write intuitively and don’t analyse much as the poems come but I do know that when I write about the natural world just for its own sake it makes me happy. I also think that it’s harder for me to do that successfully. 

“When I write about my parents it’s not because I think anyone’s interested. As Sharon Olds has said, no one is interested really, why should they care? What I’ve tried to do with my father is to turn him into two books (he was an absent father), so I have these two books instead of him, and in them I deal with the evil things he did, and I change them by bringing in the natural world, especially animals, so that the recreated father I end up with is one I love, because he’s all these amazing animals. 

“It is a complex relationship. I am fascinated by the primitive and ferocity. I’m very drawn to Amazonian animals in particular, though others that are fierce, such as snow leopards and North China leopards, do it for me too. How could they not? North China leopards are especially savage and hard to keep in zoos, they keep their fierce natures and snarl a lot!” 

Why Amazonia?

“My fascination with Amazonian animals, anything Amazonian actually, the plants and peoples too, came from two trips I made in the Venezuelan Amazon in the 1990s. I went in 1993 and 1995, just two years before my father contacted me. I hadn’t heard from him for 35 years! So I visited him in Paris as he was an invalid, dying of emphysema. I took time out from those claustrophobic visits to go to the Ménagerie zoo in the Jardin des Plantes where I discovered there were many Amazonian species. So those two things – the Amazon and my father – became intertwined in my mind. I found I could only write about him through those animals. I read everything I could find about the Amazon, the flora and fauna, the landscape, its tribes, their rituals, and especially their mythologies and spiritual lives. When I started writing my second book about my father, Fauverie, I avoided going to the zoo and concentrated on Notre-Dame and the city of Paris, but I soon broke my veto and started going there more than ever, almost every day!”

Pascale Petit’s previous collection What the Water Gave Me:  Poems After Frida Kahlo, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.   Reading dates for Fauverie are listed in the What’s On section and start on 19 September at the Wymondham Words Festival.

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