With a concept of justice in hand, we step back to consider suffering, the bane of our existence as living beings. We have identified our aim, to seek, promote and realize the well-being of living beings. Yet suffering persists, and characterizes much of the human condition. Our understanding of it is an important weapon in our struggle against it. As…
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Value for Tuesday of Week 17 in the season of Growth
Chronicling Nature
Nature tells a vast, fascinating story.
- A good photograph is knowing where to stand. [attributed to Ansel Adams]
- The Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the range of light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen. [John Muir]
- I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. [attributed to Claude Monet]
Real
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.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- The Silent World, a collaboration between Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle
- Sweetgrass: on herding sheep in Montana
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Poetry
- William Wordsworth, “Airey-Force Valley”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Nature as music:
- Thunderstorm;
- Gentle rain;
- Hard rain;
- Rainfall with distant thunder;
- Rain in the woods and birds;
- Howling wind;
- Blizzard;
- Jungle;
- Rainforest;
- Night sounds;
- Large river;
- Gentle river;
- Gentle stream;
- Mountain stream;
- Waterfall;
- Ocean waves;
- Forest birdsong;
- Meadow;
- Mountain forest breezes;
- Prairie;
- Desert;
- Canyon;
- Wind in the trees.
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” (2021) (59’)
- “Öngtupqa; Sacred Music of the Hopi Tribe” (2019) (53’)
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” (2019) (52’): “Singing nature back to life through the power of poetry, art and magic”
- “Spell Songs II: Let the Light In” (2021) (57’): “a magical return to nature”
Arnold Bax tone poems:
- November Woods (1917) (approx. 17-21’) (list of recorded performances), “according to its composer, is a series of impressions of the dank and stormy rain, of nature in late autumn.” It has been conducted by Boult, Thomson, Handley, Marriner, and Lloyd-Jones.
- The Happy Forest (1922) (approx. 10’) (list of recorded performances), conducted by Handley, Thomson, and Lloyd-Jones: “Bax doesn’t give us the story line for line – he was known, as one writer said, for keeping ‘all his programs veiled behind a late-Romantic haze.’ We know his inspiration and at the same time, we are free to make up our own story to Bax’ ever-shifting soundscape. He gives us the natural landscape but peoples it with creatures of long-past history and then leaves us free to fill in the details.”
Other compositions:
- Chuck Owen & The Jazz Surge, River Runs (2011) (approx. 64’) is a “. . . great tribute to the powers of nature . . .”
- Alexander Vella Gregory, Wind (excerpts from A Valetta Symphony) (approx. 15’)
- Zhou Long, Pianobells (2012) (approx. 9’) presents musical images of bells that ring without being struck.
- David Fulmer, Sky’s Acetalyne (2017) (approx. 14’) evokes noonday Sun falling on the street in Brooklyn.
- Evan Ziporyn, Frog’s Eye (2002) (approx. 13’)
- Donald Crockett, Blue Earth (2002) (approx. 27’): “The five movements of Blue Earth (2002) portray aspects of nature – beauty, majesty and fury . . .”
- Edward MacDowell, Woodland Sketches for piano, Op. 51 (1896) (approx. 20’) (list of recorded performances): “. . . these tone-poems in little are a curious blend of what, lacking an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, and psychological suggestion; and they are remarkable for the manner in which they focus great richness of emotion into limited space.”
- Dobrinka Tabakova, Earth Suite (2020) (approx. 34’): “The overwhelming force of Nature is at the heart of the concept of my Earth Suite. The question of our existence as a species is becoming ever more complex, and yet the ultimate power remains with Nature.” [the composer]
- Meira Warshauer, Ocean Calling (2013) (approx. 41’) is a “paean to the oceans.”
- Eleanor Alberga, Symphony No. 1, “Strata” (2022) (approx. 35’) “is a portrait of our planet Earth, subtitled Strata, with each movement inspired by a different stratum of the planet’s geological make-up.”
- Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Cello Concerto, “Earth, Sea & Air” (2023) (approx. 20’): “The work ended up taking inspiration from three disparate aspects of the natural world: the imaginary flight of a swift; phytoplankton (algae) in the ocean; and volcanoes.”
- Elena Ruehr, String Quartet No. 10, “Long Pond” (2023) (approx. 18’) “captures moments throughout the days on a beautiful small lake on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Elena has spent much time and gathered precious memories: a brightly rising sun, a morning dog walk, sailing on the harbour, a “nor’easter” storm, a lovely yet mysterious full moon rising above and reflecting in the water.”
Albums:
- Jonas Cambien Trio, “Nature Hath Painted the Body” (2021) (40’): “Nature hath painted the body of the fish with whitish, blackish, brownish spots, according to Walton. Jonas Cambien Trio’s fishing-like journey is colored with fresh, brilliant intuitive and almost telepathic dynamics.”
- Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp & Whit Dickey, “Butterfly Whispers” (2016) (45’)
- Sinfonia of London (John Wilson), “Kenneth Fuchs – Orchestral Works Volume 1” (2023) (59’) consists of the works “Cloud Slant”, “Solitary the Thrush”, “Pacific Visions”, and “Quiet in the Land”.
- Francesca Romana di Nicola, “Miniature” (2023) (66’) “is the compilation of 27 small musical pieces for solo harp composed in March 2020. The title refers to the brevity but also to the peculiarity of the pieces: each one is a small world, has its own title and tells a personal story inspired by an emotion, a reflection, a childhood memory or an emblematic place for Francesca, from her past in Italy or her present in the Basque Country.” “Each piece makes its way suggesting impressions, emotions with its incessant rhythms where the sovereign nature shows itself, inspires and governs everyday life.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Franz Schubert (composer), Mutter Erde (Mother Earth), D. 788 (1823) (lyrics)
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)
