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.

The third in our feature series Nature at the Proms is on Sibelius, his love of nature, and the swans that inspired his most popular symphony.

Symphony no. 5 and The Swan of Tuonela are at the Proms tomorrow night.  During the interval two academics, Daniel Grimley and Simon Shaw-Miller talk to Martin Handley about Sibelius the nature-lover.  

Following the death of Peter Sculthorpe on Friday, our Music page now has a fuller appreciation of his life and work, and some reflections from people who knew him.

Today is Hen Harrier Day.  Much is made of the so-called glorious twelfth, the start of the grouse-shooting season.  People can make their own minds up about the self-evident fact that if you want to eat grouse, grouse have to die.  But this year Hen Harrier Day, two days before the start of the grouse season, has been convened to celebrate and mourn the beautiful hen harrier, the legally protected bird of prey that also has to die to bring grouse to your table, and as a result is almost extinct in England.

Hen harrier day is marked by four major events and one minor one.  At 10 am there will be a thunderclap (I added my tweet but don’t ask me to explain how it works) and throughout the day people will be gathering at three beautiful locations:  South Tyne Trail at Lambley near Haltwhistle to create and assemble a ‘selfie trail’, the Upper Derwent Valley, Derbyshire, but this is now fully subscribed, and the Forest of Bowland, Dunsop Bridge, Lancashire.  More details here.

The minor event is me posting the score to Skydancer off to the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra who give its premiere in October (see What’s On).  It’s a short piece that tries to capture the bleak landscape of our heather moorlands and the bouncing, dancing flight of a pair of skydancers – the other name for hen harriers.  That’s also the name of an RSPB project to raise awareness of their plight and highlight the public support this species enjoys, even in grouse-shooting hotspots where a tiny minority threatens the future of this symbol of the British uplands.

Hen Harrier Day sees us launch an occasional series of features and blogs linking uplands, rivers, and sea, that will run through August, September and October.

Martha being, of course, the last of the billions of  passenger pigeons that inhabited North America until a few decades before she died in Cincinnati Zoo a hundred years ago this year.  My former RSPB colleague Mark Avery has written a book about Martha, her super-abundant ancestors and her message to those prepared to heed the warning of where today's mass bird declines might lead.

So I was fascinated to read in Mark's blog, taken over briefly by Bay Area musician Karla Kane, about a song Karla and her band the Corner Laughers have written in honour of this sad centenary.  She mentions another track dedicated to the critically-endangered California condor, which she studied for her masters; and a glance at their website reveals a lot of music inspired by birds.

The comments on Mark's blog mentions Texas-based band Shearwater, co-founded by another ornithologist, Jonathan Meiburg.  Indie-pop and Indie-rock being a little outside my normal universe (no sniggering at the back of the orchestra...), I'm wondering what else I'm missing out on and whether there is an eco-rock genre out there. Recommendations welcome!

Producer Robin Perkins's idea for a music fund-raiser to help endangered birds in South America has reached a key milestone.  The Kickstarter project to raise the production costs has been successful, and the project will definitely go ahead!

Robin, who wrote a guest blog about the project two weeks ago says: "thanks to dozens of supporters who donated through Kickstarter, we actually exceeded our target by 1200 euros, which means we can go ahead, and provide even more support for endangered species. Please pass on my thanks to readers of NATURAL LIGHT for their support".

The project involves getting musicians from seven different South American countries to record a track in response to the songs of eleven different endangered birds.  The resulting album will be sold to raise money for conservation in Ecuador.

As composer Jonathan Dove prepares for the premiere of his 'Gaia Theory' at the BBC Proms this week, he took time out to explain how his recent work has been inspired by an Arctic voyage that proved something of a wake-up call about the future of the planet.

In the second in our Nature at The Proms feature series we talk to Jonathan about that voyage, the works it has inspired, and his future plans.

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.

Happy birthday to Sir Harrison Birtwistle, our most important living composer, who is 80 today.  Sir Harry is prominently featured in this year’s Proms, which start at the end of the week.  He was also featured on this site when we launched a couple of weeks ago.  You can hear him talking about his boyhood interest in moths and watch a performance of the Moth Requiem from last year’s Proms here.

The Proms – at its fringe festival Proms Plus – will also mark the centenary of Gavin Maxwell, born exactly 100 years ago today, when two leading nature writers discuss his legacy.

Our feature series Nature at the Proms starts with a full run-down of new and familiar pieces influenced by environmental concerns, wildlife and landscape, along with interval features and literary discussions.