Each weekday morning the UK's BBC Radio 4 devotes two minutes to Tweet of the Day, featuring a different bird each time. Every now and then, NATURAL LIGHT Re:Tweets later that day, featuring the responses that day's bird has engendered in composers and other artists.
Click on the pictures for the most recent Re:Tweets, or on the button at the top of the page for the whole set.
Click on the pictures for the most recent Re:Tweets, or on the button at the top of the page for the whole set.
Andrew Dawes, Producer of Radio 4's Tweet of the Day - World Birds muses on the relationship between birdsong and our response to it:
For millennia each spring birdsong has echoed around the world, highlighting the revolution of the Natural World on its cyclical journey of birth, life and death. Long before humans walked the forests, long before James Maxwell’s fundamentals of electromagnetic radiation were developed by Guglielmo Marconi into the radio broadcasts we know today, the natural world awakened each year to the call of the wild. That call is not for homo sapiens to respond to, we are just in the way, and yet we do respond.
Firstly in a passive way as we listen and let the sound reverberate within us, all the while subliminally connecting to a deeper emotional experience. That emotional experience can come in many forms. I remember listening to Aerial, the long awaited Kate Bush album. Amongst the myriad of wonderful compositions, I stopped as I heard her singing along to a blackbird on the track Aerial Tal. A fusion of artistic endeavour, human voice and composition, all underpinned throughout by the natural song of the blackbird itself. Later in the album, song lyrics talk of the blackbird singing at dusk, it is the song of colour. Birds predominantly use calls and coloration to communicate between each other, yet we humans intercept that process within our artistic and cultural mind, and it is that which awakens a deep passion for the natural world about us.
For more musings from Andrew, read his NATURAL LIGHT guest blog and visit his website The Wessex Reiver.
For millennia each spring birdsong has echoed around the world, highlighting the revolution of the Natural World on its cyclical journey of birth, life and death. Long before humans walked the forests, long before James Maxwell’s fundamentals of electromagnetic radiation were developed by Guglielmo Marconi into the radio broadcasts we know today, the natural world awakened each year to the call of the wild. That call is not for homo sapiens to respond to, we are just in the way, and yet we do respond.
Firstly in a passive way as we listen and let the sound reverberate within us, all the while subliminally connecting to a deeper emotional experience. That emotional experience can come in many forms. I remember listening to Aerial, the long awaited Kate Bush album. Amongst the myriad of wonderful compositions, I stopped as I heard her singing along to a blackbird on the track Aerial Tal. A fusion of artistic endeavour, human voice and composition, all underpinned throughout by the natural song of the blackbird itself. Later in the album, song lyrics talk of the blackbird singing at dusk, it is the song of colour. Birds predominantly use calls and coloration to communicate between each other, yet we humans intercept that process within our artistic and cultural mind, and it is that which awakens a deep passion for the natural world about us.
For more musings from Andrew, read his NATURAL LIGHT guest blog and visit his website The Wessex Reiver.
