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You are here: Home / Cycle-of-Life Season / 3 Growth / Chronicling Nature

Chronicling Nature

Ansel Adams, Tetons (1942)

Others have focused on chronicling nature, mainly through the written word and pictoral images.

Real

Documentary and Educational Films

  • The Silent World, a collaboration between Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle
  • Sweetgrass: on herding sheep in Montana

True Narratives

The air varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating odours from earth, grass, and sprouting leaves. The air of midsummer is dense, saturated, or dry and burning, as if it came from a furnace. When a cool breeze brushes the sultry stillness, it brings fewer odours than in May, and frequently the odour of a coming tempest. The avalanche of coolness which sweeps through the low-hanging air bears little resemblance to the stinging coolness of winter. The rain of winter is raw, without odour, and dismal. The rain of spring is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the hills abundantly, makes the furrows soft with showers for the seed, elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough. Spring rain is beautiful, impartial, lovable. With pearly drops it washes every leaf on tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths, searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence. [Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1907), chapter V, “The Finer Vibrations”.]

Chroniclers of nature:

  • David Neilson, Southern Light: Images from Antarctica (Abbeville Press, 2013): the book is “. . . a blast of beauty.”
  • Lauren Redniss, Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House, 2015): “She is, to use a contemporary word, a curator: arranging information with a distinct aesthetic and a point of view.”
  • Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War (Penguin Press, 2020): “He shines an unsparing light on his subjects, and he finds unnerving similarities between the Frémonts’ America and our own.”
  • Barry Lopez, Horizon (Knopf, 2019): “With a very real environmental and existential crisis at hand, Lopez takes us back to the Arctic, as well as to other far-flung places where he has spent time over the years — searching both memory and meticulously recorded field notes to reconstruct his experiences, mining their accumulated wisdom, seeking glimmers of hope.”

Imaginary

Visual Arts

  • Camille Pissaro, Autumn, Poplars (1893)
  • Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cornflowers (1890)
  • Claude Monet, Poplars at Giverny (1887)
  • Paul Gauguin, The Forest Edge (1885)
  • Vasily Perov, Botanist (1874)
  • Gustave Courbet, The Oak of Flagey (The Oak of Vercingetorix) (1864)
  • Ivan Shishkin, Beech Forest in Switzerland (1863)
  • John Constable, Weymouth Bay (1816)

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Nature as music:

  • Thunderstorm
  • Varieties of rainfall
  • Rain
  • Waves
  • Rain and thunder – high quality
  • Rainfall with distant thunder
  • Heavy rainfall and thunder
  • Gentle thunderstorm and rain under a tree with birds

Gary Stroutsos was a jazz flautist before taking up the Hopi Long Flute, an instrument that had been lost for many centuries. The music evokes the movement of clouds.

  • “Songs for Leena: Improvisations on the Hopi Long Flute”
  • “Öngtupqa; Sacred Music of the Hopi Tribe”

Spell Songs is a group that is creating songs about nature. “Spell Songs is a musical evolution of both The Lost Words & The Lost Spells books by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator Jackie Morris; creating a listening experience that intersects music, literature, language and art, as a call to reawaken our love of the wild.”

  • “Spell Songs I: The Lost Words”: “Singing nature back to life through the power of poetry, art and magic”
  • “Spell Songs II: Let the Light In”: “a magical return to nature”

Arnold Bax tone poems:

  • November Woods
  • The Happy Forest
  • The Garden of Fand

Other compositions:

  • Chuck Owen & The Jazz Surge, River Runs
  • Vella Gregory, Wind (excerpts from A Valetta Symphony)
  • Long: Pianobells (2012): musical images of bells that ring without being struck
  • David Fulmer, Sky’s Acetalyne (2017): evoking noonday Sun falling on the street in Brooklyn
  • Evan Ziporyn, Frog’s Eye (2006)
  • Donald Crockett, Blue Earth (2002)

Albums:

  • Jonas Cambien Trio, “Nature Hath Painted the Body”
  • The Michael Jefry Stevens / Dominic Duval Quintet, “Elements”
  • Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp & Whit Dickey, “Butterfly Whispers”

Poetry

  • William Wordsworth, “Airey-Force Valley”

Music: songs and other short pieces

  • Franz Schubert (composer), Mutter Erde (Mother Earth), D. 788 (1823) (lyrics)

August 23, 2010

Previous Post: « Appreciating Nature
Next Post: Preserving and Stewarding Nature »
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