Last week I previewed a symphonic work that is the result of collaboration between American soundscape recordist Bernie Krause and Oxford-based composer Richard Blackford.  The National Orchestra of Wales under Martyn Brabbins gave the world premiere of The Great Animal Orchestra last night at the Cheltenham Festival.  I caught it broadcast live on Radio 3 and it is now available on iPlayer, where it can be heard for the next seven days.

For the first 30 seconds or so the orchestra is silent, as we hear the complex sonic ecology of a Borneo rainforest.  The orchestra enters, picking up the C sharp cued by a serenading gibbon.  The very first moments are – unfortunately to my ear – rendered unnatural by digital filtering to contrive a texture that starts with only the highest frequencies and builds, in a noticeably artificial way, to encompass the lowest; but the eventual tutti forest chorus and its transition into the orchestra is one of the piece’s most effective moments.


A dawn chorus-like, apparently aleatoric section in the woodwinds completes an introduction to the full orchestra who then take flight as a five-chord brass chorale underpins the main theme, reprised in various guises throughout the piece.

Then, a jaunty, driving rhythm under a sweeping melody – suggestive of a long film credits sequence - and from here the movement flits from idea to idea like a bird of paradise undecided onto which twig to settle for its display.  This is very filmic music from a composer perhaps best known for his scores to City of Joy and other films. 

The second movement – a scherzo –is introduced by tree frogs and percussion which herald another flighty sequence of riffs.  These are mostly characterised by spiky rhythms and a tour of the percussion section, with some jazzy pizzicato bass for good measure.

Elegy begins with a haunting distant chorus of wolves while muted horns weave their lines around the animals, ranging beautifully between dissonance and consonance.  A pining beaver, his family having been violently killed by a fisherman, finds commiseration in a sad melody introduced on the bassoon and taken up by the strings.  This middle movement hangs together well – the recorded sounds and the orchestra working together on a single purpose.  A lament for a lost beaver family is clearly understood as a metaphor for our collective losses in an impoverished natural world, and the bassoon/beaver lament returns at the end with added poignancy.

Then, a jaunty woodwind motif alternates with the low growl of African elephants and contrabassoon at the start of the fourth movement.  This is a return to the pattern of the first two, where the sampled sound provides an introduction but plays only a minor part in the ensuing score.  An exception is a fleeting, nicely scored moment where a chest-beating gorilla intervenes percussively in a dialogue between woodwind and brass, before the orchestra ends the movement with an energetic brass crescendo.

The final movement is all about the star of piece, the musician wren and his sidekick, the common pottoo.  This songster with his addiction to tritones is a voice made famous by many an Amazonian rainforest documentary (click the button below).  The movement is a quick-fire sequence of variations on the bird’s melody.  First the flute, then clarinet, woodwind and the wren again before the common pottoo, sounding a bit like a Swanee whistle, interrupts, along with a trombone with which it trades microtonal inflections.  Another set of variations over chugging strings with long melodic lines shared between trumpet, strings, then brass, glockenspiel and cymbals followed by horns then strings and the odd whip-bird.  A brief change of mood for a slower variation on the flute and clarinet, equally briefly back to the chugging strings before a coda of forest sounds and an orchestral crescendo to end on.

This would be a good piece to play at a Proms family matinee.  The style will be very familiar to family film-goers and the sampled sounds are all interesting in their own right, and with interesting and poignant stories behind them.  The Cheltenham Festival has been running an education project linked to the piece.  By getting children and young people to compose music and create visual art Krause and Blackford hoped to increase people’s awareness of their own soundscapes, and give them the skills and confidence to express their personal responses through music and visual art.  A website devoted to the project is full of information and resources.

Bernie Krause’s message in his book The Great Animal Orchestra derives from his discovery that animal sounds fill every sonic niche; in his own words,  a highly evolved, naturally-wrought masterpiece.  Richard Blackford’s score gives the sampled sounds – collected by Krause and his colleagues – the junior role in a piece in which the orchestra takes a musical hint and spins it off into a world of man’s making – a possibly unintended metaphor for our headlong rush to destroy the nature on which our civilisation is built?

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’s book The Great Animal Orchestra coined three terms to demarcate the sounds that surround our everyday lives, according the whether they are human, animal or geological in origin.  He 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.  The biophony of animal sounds is itself 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.  Anything else – the sounds of cities, industry, transport for example – forms the anthropophony.

Krause and Oxford-based composer Richard Blackford have taken the idea of species' occupying different sonic niches and collaborated on a new work for orchestra and recorded soundscapes, also entitled The Great Animal Orchestra.  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.  The first few moments take the natural sounds of the rainforest and contrives through filtering technology to have this start in the highest register, with progressively deeper sounds allowed back in according to a mathematical-looking curve; all of which was clear to follow on the screen.  Then, after a few seconds of full natural orchestra, the human orchestra emerges from the complex rainforest soundscape, via a C-sharp on which the gibbon’s dawn song ends, to be taken up by the violins.  The five-movement work includes a part for a heart-rending call from a male beaver whose family had been violently killed by fishermen; the original recording was played to a visibly shocked audience.

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 were 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.

Watson’s credentials are second-to-none; the founder member of experimental music band Cabaret Voltaire went on to become a sound recordist for the RSPB Film Unit before his freelance work took him several times around the world to produce unique, and award-winning, material for ground-breaking BBC series such as Life of Birds and Frozen Planet.  His sound art has been installed in dozens of public places and his soundscape recordings have been released in a number of CDs including In St.Cuthbert's Time, using material from his studies of the sounds of Lindisfarne.  

Chris took his audience on a dizzying sonic world tour to sample some of the fruits of his insatiable curiosity, from the whales calling their kin across hundreds of miles of ocean to assemble in the Dominican Republic, to Japan, where the suzumuchi cricket is revered for the purity of its autumn note.  A touching song to the mountains from a Sami elder in Norway was answered, exactly on the beat I noticed, in a haunting echo.  Finally, the lights were dimmed as he played us the pre-dawn chorus from his own patch, the Northumberland moors, resonating to an orchestra of drumming snipe, bubbling curlew, skirling lapwings and keening golden plovers.

Laurence Rose