During The Long Spring journeys I encountered my favourite mammal in only three places:  a distant sandy-pink coloured dog fox of the race silacea at the SEO/BirdLife reserve near Belchite, Aragón (pictured);   a bright red vulpes fox near Falköping, Sweden, and, during my periodic returns home to Yorkshire, monochrome glimpses of our local crucigera animals captured in infra-red light by my camera traps. This year, with the book safely packed off to Bloomsbury, I have been able to devote more time to my local foxes. 

​For one so ubiquitous in folk stories, myths and reality, it is a difficult animal to know.   Ours is a rural population, nocturnal, rarely seen, unlike the urban foxes that now inhabit many towns and cities in the UK.  Sometimes, it seems they wield strange powers: in 2011 Czech scientists discovered that foxes are somehow able to ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field, and use it for range-finding before pouncing on their prey.   My understanding of my elusive neighbours is almost entirely gleaned from footage recorded while I sleep:  

My two favourite pieces of fox literature are based on direct knowledge and experience of the animal, but make no pretence of understanding.  Instead, mystery and miscomprehension are the starting point for inner reflection, for a teasing out of the authors’ own self-awareness.

Rudolf Těsnohlídek's The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears appeared as a serialised comic-strip in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny – People’s News – in 1920, inspiring the seventy year-old Leoš Janáček to write one of the 20th century’s best-loved operas.  The Czech word Bystroušky, sharp-ears, has a double meaning, synonymous with cunning.  The Cunning Little Vixen, as the opera eventually became known in English, transformed the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death, and desire for a return to simplicity.
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Ted Hughes’s The thought-fox is a poem about writing a poem. In a room late at night the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is dark and silent, but the poet senses a presence ‘entering the loneliness.’  The night is the darkness of the poet’s imagination out of which a vague idea emerges.  It has no clear outline; it is not seen but sensed; it is compared to a fox, delicately sensing its way through the undergrowth.  The fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the night.  The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox:  ‘the page is printed.’  

Today I walked through the meadows of RSPB’s Adwick Washland, in the company of poets Brian Lewis and Matthew Clegg.  It was the final event for 2017 of a Ted Hughes festival based in nearby Mexborough, where Hughes grew up after moving from Mytholmroyd at age seven.  It was also a celebration of wildlife-rich meadows, today being National Meadows Day.  Brian and Matthew led a small group through a landscape whose history is one of change, where coal mining, farming, and wildlife have dominated in turn.  Old and new landscapes is a recurring theme in Brian’s work, in both miniature – Haiku and Tanka – and more extended form.  As the sun climbed higher, the air was suffused with skylark song, lapwings’ skirls, and the occasional ‘long scream of needle’ – as Ted Hughes put it - from swifts.
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Matthew’s exploring of landscape through words does not, as he explained, always involve making a literal connection.  One reading, at a stone-built viewpoint between two areas of marshland, was of his reworking of the rallying speech from Aristophanes’ The Birds, entitled Hoopoe’s Cuckoo-song.  Birds, real and literary, were always close at hand, from recently-fledged avocets – a local success story – to the ones featured in the final short poem of the day.  In this, Matthew described a flock of starlings landing on high tension electricity cable: ‘their song is a kind of current, and the current is a kind of song.’

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.

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.

Described as possessing a “naturalness and a philosophical bent at the same time,” Seattle folk-artist Wren’s haunting melodies evoke the lands and waters of her native Pacific Northwest, as well as Galicia, Spain, where she learned the traditional Celtic-influenced coastal music.

On May 19th, Wren will issue her first release in three years, the ‘name-your-price’ single The Road You Thought You Knew, with a new album of original songs about transformation, love, and the soul of wild lands due out later this year. A Kickstarter for the Galicia-themed album runs until May 27.

Wren, a.k.a. Laura Brady writes exclusively for NATURAL LIGHT, expanding on that deep connection with nature.

Growing up, my entire scope of reference was my backyard, its sunny, grassy center with currants and other fruits for the taking, and the dark, damp corners where earthworms emerged from the moist soil and snails left shiny trails. I delighted in capturing bugs, and stashed a collection of jars on the side-yard in which various gladiator battles took place between confused insects until I remembered, or forgot, to release them.

School simultaneously broadened me; stretching my thinking skills and teaching me about the world, but narrowed my greater awareness. It took me indoors, to factual books and computers and concrete reasoning. I forgot how to play make believe, and hunt for ants, and watch the green, hard ball of a currant slowly catch fire.

The years passed, and as my academic success grew, my talents receiving more and more recognition, my happiness and vitality plummeted. Something was missing. My health was a shambles (having been diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder), and my mental health was suffering. I felt stuck in the same thought processes – an egocentric framework – that I could not escape.

Then, at age nineteen, I went to Quebec for the summer to learn French and work on organic farms and fell in love with the land. It was a euphoric, breath-taking experience of discovering something bigger than myself, something more. I would rush through my farm chores every day, then run out to the wild fields and woods to prance, leap, and collapse in ecstatic bliss, to watch the sky and breathe the sweet, fresh air. 

I road-tripped to Colorado to study primitive skills, and found the name Wren, which would become my stage name. I began to study permaculture, a holistic way of living on the earth. I moved to Galicia, Spain, a place where many of the old ways and traditions of living on the earth are still preserved, though in hiding. And there, on a tract of land with over a thousand years of history, I truly came home to the earth, finding a place that spoke to me deeply.

When I rediscovered nature, I also rediscovered music.  And as I have deepened my songwriting, I see more and more that each song is drawn out of the deep well that is the natural world. Making music is how I tap into the greater system, the web of symbol and form that is the wilderness around us. My singing is how I translate this process and bring it out into the world to share with others. I sing, and dream, that as a people we can ‘stitch an ocean,’ a new vision for our lives in which we are no longer separate from the earth, but instead a beneficial part. 

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.

Traditional melodies collected from Nordic countries and filtered through the unique sonic imagination of MajiKer – also known as producer, composer and vocalist Matthew Ker – have been released to raise awareness and funds for nature conservation. 


The NORTH Project interprets traditional tunes and calls on the vocal skills of a particularly eclectic range of singers. Layers of harmony, vocal samples and human beatbox combine to evoke and celebrate the natural world.   

MajiKer gleaned folk melodies from Sweden, Iceland and Norway and gave them new English-language lyrics on the theme of nature, to create what he describes as “a compelling love-letter to both the Nordic folk tradition and the environment which gave birth to it”

MajiKer’s collaborators include artists as diverse as Mercury-nominated folk star Sam Lee, acclaimed jazz-soul diva China Moses, female punk choir Gaggle, Swedish singer-songwriter Jennie Abrahamson, and British vocal ensemble juice.

juice’s Kerry Andrew explained how her trio were attracted into the project.  “We were already a fan of MajiKer’s work with French experimental pop singer Camille.  We love how he created his words for Rocks of Ritual – the track we’ve contributed - by listening to the original Swedish lyrics and coming up with new English text that sounded as close to the Swedish as possible, but with a totally new meaning! He also got us to create vocal effects that you'd normally only be able to do in a studio, such as singing the tune whilst detuning over its length until we meet in the middle, which was a fun challenge!”

MajiKer explained his working methods: “each of the melodies was a folk tune from Norway, Sweden or Iceland, introduced to me by someone who had a personal or emotional connection to it.  I tried to capture the sound of the lyrics whilst writing in English.

“All the new lyrics are about the natural world, with each song evoking a different element of nature. I was imagining what these natural features would sing if they could tell us of their past; a sort of folkloric history of the landscape itself.”

Given Majiker’s success as a beatboxer, it is perhaps not surprising that every sound on the album is derived from the human voice. “I sampled guest artists and created electronic instruments of their voices which sat alongside layers of sung harmony and human beatbox – for once not by me, only by the vocalists themselves!”

It took almost four years from the first recording session to the album mastering. “I don't usually spend this long on any one project, but as I uncovered more and more beautiful folk tunes and met new artists with whom I was keen to work on NORTH, the process blossomed and sprawled into unexpected territories.  Piecing together a final tracklist was tricky, but the idea of a journey through the four seasons fitted perfectly.”

At the project's heart is a message about the beauty of nature and a plea to support its conservation.  "So the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle was the decision to work with Naturskyddsföreningen" Majiker says. "They will receive all profits from sales and streaming of the album."

To download or stream the album - click here.

Meeting one with Director Kerry Greenwood.  A lovely meal, followed by a comprehensive destruction of every scene, every idea. There were funny scenes, clever ideas. But Kerry clearly identified the problem- it was a generic script, exploring different time periods and various animals and situations. But it wasn't rooted in truth. She gave me one principle to follow which made all the difference "Make it specific to the place. Make it true. Go back to how you felt when you visited the marshes"

When we visited the marshes, my first impression was of a big flat empty field. But as we walked around, I began to notice small things: frogs underfoot, hovering dragonflies, beautiful blue unnamed insects, lapwings flying overhead. And suddenly, I was lost in a world within our world. Here was a universe beneath our feet and over our heads. I loved the feeling that the world was shifting around me and growing wider and deeper by the second. I wanted to recapture that emotion- like falling into a microscope and feeling a tiny being in an infinite cosmos. 

But a play has to be about stories and people. So the research began. Local history, websites, records, talking to local people.  What was the story I wanted to tell? What needed to be told?

What struck me was that almost every story about the relationship between Man and Nature was about Mankind's destruction of the natural order. But here, here in Beckingham Marshes, the reverse is the case- the development of flood plains (to protect Mankind) had enabled the creation of a wetland reserve, bringing back ancient habitat and ancient animals. A true kind of symbiosis. Real progress.

The next meeting with Kerry was electric. We both knew we had found the key. Real history, combined with poetry and magic would create a timeless piece of drama. Time to get to work. 

Then the local Performing group PACS to represent the animals, then local writers and poets to have their poems read.

The second half moves into the Twentieth and twenty first century. In a swift succession of scenes we visit the Marshes in 1940, 1947, 1977, 2000 and 2007. We see the devastating impact of floods and storms over the years, and how Marsh Folk cope. 

And finally, a reminder of the devastating impact destruction of habitat has on the natural world.  We don't want the audience to be spared the realities. And then end with a joyous celebration of the renewed Marshes as a partnership between Man and Nature.

MARSH: Life is born, life ends. That’s the way of things. I don’t overcomplicate. The small things live in me, they grow. Look closely- you will see a world within the world.  A daily struggle for survival.

The world of the insects, the microscopic world. You need to see with new eyes. Here’s warfare, kill or be killed. Progress.

Mankind builds. They make. They construct. And they call this progress. They build walls and fences, to close me in. They call this ownership.

That's the plan - a show that begins in prehistory and ends in 2014, a show that is specific to the history of people and places around Beckingham- but which touches on the transcendental and universal. A combination of music, movement, drama and poetry which might just make people feel the way I did, stood in a muddy field in silence, touching hands with the infinite.

Michael Hatfield

Michael Hatfield is a local writer who has written adaptations of Mediaeval Mystery Plays, a seventh century Spanish drama, pantomimes, Youth Theatre plays, and song lyrics.

Marshsongs will be performed on Friday and Saturday 19 and 20 September, 7.30 pm at Beckingham Village Hall, Notts and on Friday and Saturday 26 and 27 September, 7.30 pm at Gainsborough Old Hall, Lincs.  Booking recommended 07756 500292

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.