Two years ago I interviewed Arlene Sierra for this blog, ahead of a BBC Proms concert featuring her Butterflies Remember a Mountain.  It is inspired by the annual mass migration of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico:  each delicate insect making its infinitesimal contribution to the shimmering swarm; an unchanging annual cycle millions of years old; the sheer unimaginability of the scale of the endeavour, and a mysterious kink in the migration route are the source material for an intricate piece for piano trio.

Premiered on Saturday, Sierra’s Nature Symphony is another example of her fascination with the natural world and the first of its three movements draws directly from the earlier work. Set in a fast 5/4 time the rhythmic drive of the earlier trio is maintained, while continually reusing and developing its material, and using the larger forces of the orchestra to introduce minute detailing into the texture.  This gives a sense of a stream (of migrating butterflies) moving inexorably forward, but in such a swarm that the whole presents an image in stasis, until suddenly they are at their destination, the Butterfly Mountain that gives the movement its name.

There is a satisfying symmetry in the overall shape of Nature Symphony: the third movement, Bee Rebellion, matches the first in rhythmic energy, and is in a similar tempo, but in 3/4 time seems busier. The pulse is destabilised by an insistent but irregular undertow of plucked double basses, while the violins and winds share a dialogue comprising short phrases that develop imperceptibly through the movement.​ Likening the life of the hive with elements of game theory - another favourite influence - Sierra creates a sense of frenetic but ultimately fruitless activity, and the movement ends with a sudden percussive crescendo and silence, a reminder of the colony collapse that bees are increasingly prone to, perhaps.

In the middle is a movement, titled The Black Place (after O'Keeffe), that is contrastingly song-like, with a long, slow melody shaped by fragments passed between horn, cor anglais and piccolo, and on through the orchestra, accompanied by long, held notes in the low strings. The rhythmic element is again there, but as a quiet, irregular pulse of plucked strings, harp and marimba, later taken up by piano, timpani and low brass. Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of the austere landscapes of New Mexico, the sharing out of these rhythmic, melodic and harmonic ingredients leads to a musical landscape whose tints, rather than colours, are constantly shifting.

This middle movement is a reminder of the composer’s concern at the fragility of nature: O'Keeffe's 'Black Place' - the Bisti Badlands - is under threat from fracking.  The movement borrows melodic figures from Sierra's own 2008 setting of Hearing Things, a passionately environmentalist poem by Catherine Carter.  In a recent interview Arlene Sierra told Rhinegold’s Katy Wright ‘I don’t see how anyone living today can fail to realise the urgency of what is going on with the natural world and what we human beings are doing to change things. I have a little boy now, who’s five, and I’m so conscious of how different the environment is from when I was a child. It’s a personal sense of urgency.’

Nature Symphony was performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Ludovic Morlot.  The concert, which includes Bartók's 1st Piano Concerto and Dvořák's 8th Symphony, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 7.30pm on 1 December.

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.

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. 

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.

In 1894 the Australian Musical Album published "The Bell Bird, composed by Reene Lees who is not yet eleven years old". It is a piano exercise, and suggests she was doing well in her piano studies as well as showing promise as a future composer.

The National Library of Australia holds two other compositions by Reene Lees, but I have been unable to find any further reference to her, or to her music.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's premiere of my Skydancer, a short piece written for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra. 

It's at 7.30 on Saturday at St.George the Martyr, Borough High Street

...to a new occasional series that takes the subject of the morning's Radio 4 Tweet of the Day and explores music inspired by that species.  This morning, Sir David Attenborough introduced us to the Australian Magpie.

It is difficult to imagine a composer taking our magpie’s song as a starting point for a piece of music, but the Australian version’s melodious song with its clearly pitched notes is celebrated by several including John Rodgers and Ross Edwards, two Australian composers who often feature bird songs in their works.  British composer David Matthews describes how friends he was staying with introduced him to the song of their resident magpie.  He wrote down this haunting song, hoping to use it in some way. Later he noted down three more songs, two of them distinctively melodic. The koel, a large Australian cuckoo, had just arrived for spring - and sang day and night.  The pied butcherbird sings three notes on different distinct pitches. Lastly, the eastern whipbird has a crescendoing high note followed by an extraordinary, loud whip-crack.   From this material Matthews wrote Aubade, for chamber orchestra. It develops the initial eight notes of of the Australian magpie’s song into a long violin melody which is later reprised on the cello.

Matthews says "My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music".

Michael Kennedy, writing in the Sunday Telegraph in 2001 described Aubade as “an appealing essay in the honourable English tradition of short nature pieces – rather like a present-day equivalent of Delius’s First Cuckoo.”

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