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.

In October BASCA announced the 35 works shortlisted for the 2014 British Composer Awards. The winners were unveiled at a ceremony at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London on Tuesday 2 December and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now at 10pm on Saturday 6 December.

Congratulations to two composers featured on these pages in recent weeks.  Harrison Birtwistle, whose Moth Requiem launched NATURAL LIGHT back in July, when we celebrated all things moths, won the award in the Vocal category for Songs from the Same Earth.

And Kerry Andrew, interviewed here last month about her involvement in the NORTH project won two awards! Chamber Opera Woodwose, the tale of a wild man of the woods,won in the Community/Educational category, and Dart's Love, a music theatre piece celebrating wild swimming, won in the theatre category.

Click on the button to see the full list of winners.

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir works with large sonic structures and a variety of sustained sound materials.  Her inspiration comes from listening deeply to landscapes and nature: in the case of aequlibria that inspiration came from watching the sky.  

aequilibria begins with its feet firmly on the ground, with a tonic drone shared between the bass instruments.  This groundedness is enhanced by the emergence of an occasional major chord from within a hazy texture, but overall the impression is of light, airy and airborne textures in the flute and violins. A slow progression towards a brief but arresting crescendo suggests a distant tectonic rumble.

"I am deeply inspired by nature when writing music.  I do not seek to imitate actual sounds but search for natural proportions and natural movement and flow" says Thorvaldsdóttir.  Her latest album, Aerial, has just been released on Deutsche Grammophon.

One day left to hear Arlene Sierra's Urban Birds on the BBC iPlayer. Birds and insects are often featured in Sierra's works – including two piano albums entitled Birds and Insects vols. 1 and 2. In . In Urban Birds recordings of blackcap, skylark and cuckoo and responses from three pianists form an intricately-textured piece.  It was broadcast on Hear and Now last Saturday as part of the first New Music Biennial. 

Other new commissions in the same concert included weather-generated sounds from instrument builder Yann Seznec.  Both composers explain to presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch how their pieces came about.

The sounds of the natural world are orchestrated in a similar way to classical compositions, and are as emotionally moving.  This is the message from three people who share a mission to bring these sounds and the world of music together.  I went along to the Barbican in London yesterday to hear a public conversation between soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, composer Richard Blackford and BAFTA-winning sound recordist and sound artist, Chris Watson. 

Krause began by showing graphically how insects, birds and other songsters avoid using the bandwidths that are dominated by what he calls the geophony – the sounds created by the earth itself, of rivers, wind and the like.  And the biophony of animal sounds is divided into clear strata so that each species group makes sounds at the pitches avoided by everyone else.  Put this onto a sonograph and the similarity with a musical score is striking.

Krause and Oxford-based composer Richard Blackford have taken this idea and collaborated on a new work for orchestra and recorded soundscapes The Great Animal Orchestra, which is also the title of a book by Krause.  This work is premiered at the Cheltenham Festival on 12 July, and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. We were given a brief preview of the opening, with a projected sonograph to follow rather than a score.  This showed neatly how the orchestra emerges from the complex soundscape of the rainforest, via a C-sharp on which the gibbon’s dawn song ends, to be taken up by the violins.

Chris Watson - Northumberland based globe-trotting sounds man for the likes of David Attenborough - has been reflecting lately on the sounds that would have surrounded Eadfrith as he made his fabulous illuminations in the Lindisfarne Gospels.  It is hardly surprising, he says, that the island's creatures such as eider ducks and grey seals should feature in the manuscript; the human song-like sounds they make would have been unpolluted by the machines and traffic that was over a thousand years into the future.  He played his own recordings to make the point, and conjured a picture of grey seals singing in the misty distance, originating the many legends of half-human sea-creatures.

The previous evening, Arlene Sierra’s Urban Birds  for three pianos, electronics, sampled bird song and percussion formed part of a concert at the South Bank Centre.  Sierra, an American working in the UK and lecturing in Cardiff, is another composer for whom birds and insects are an important element in many of her works. In Urban Birds recordings of blackcap, skylark and cuckoo and responses from the pianists form an intricately-textured piece.  I was unable to get to the concert, but Radio 3’s excellent contemporary music programme Hear and Now features the whole concert later on the 12th, so radio listeners will be in for an evening of nature-inspired music next Saturday.

Music of the Wild - the sound of the living world took place at the Barbican on 6 July - click the button for a full review