In the summer of 2023, I founded, with my husband, bass player, Chris West, the Orchestra for the Environment. Our concerts aim to highlight through music, the beauty of nature and the importance of judicious guardianship of the natural world.
“Hasn’t enough been said about the whole climate crisis topic?” I hear you ask, perhaps stifling a yawn…
Well, and it pains me to say it, judging by the current messaging from America and even from political parties closer to home, still more needs to be done to underline the importance of environmental issues. When a UN report says that one million species around the world are on the path to extinction because of the warming planet, this surely is a problem that needs top billing.
The initial impetus for forming the Orchestra for the Environment was to perform my clarinet concerto “Tree of Life”. As a lifelong bird enthusiast, I was depressed to see so many once-common birds and habitats declining and I decided that as a musician my best offer would be to express something in music about the crisis, so I found myself pouring these feelings into the concerto.
In “Tree of Life” the clarinet, as protagonist, mimics birdsong and travels through a paradisiacal land evoked by strings and harp, before entering a combative duel with drum kit as the landscape is spoiled. The clarinet’s journey ends with the whole ensemble playing together in a spirit of hopefulness. A note of doubt is planted in the final passages, though, when we hear the song of the now extinct kauai o’o bird.
My purpose in writing Tree of Life was not merely to underline the climate change threat but also to express the feelings of anxiety that many of us have cooking away in the recesses of our minds about climate issues. As individuals we can feel powerless to effect change in the face of this giant global problem and music can at least offer reassurance and bring us together.
The members of the OftE are all top, hand picked players who agree that giving concerts is a positive contribution they would like to make to the environmental cause and doing so has also enabled us to raise money from concert profits for local environmental charities close to the heart of communities where we play. Our first concert was in a tiny village church in Lamberhurst, Kent. Since then, we have taken music to places as far flung as North Yorkshire and West Wales as well as to more conventional urban settings such as G Live in Guildford and the Wigmore Hall in London.
In assembling concert programmes for the Orchestra for the Environment, it has struck me just how important nature has been to composers through the ages. Sometimes the links are obvious: Vivaldi’s vivid depiction of the seasons, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture inspired by his trip to Fingal’s Cave, Messiaen’s preoccupation with bird song, Vaughan William’s Lark Ascending.
Often the link is more subtle. Nature can be the inspiration for sitting down and writing music even if it does not appear figuratively in the work. One of the reasons that Vienna was such a mecca for composers in the 19th century was its proximity to nature of great beauty. Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven all regularly took walks in nature to enhance their mood and creativity. For Brahms walking in nature and composing were the same thing.
In OftE’s programme for the Malvern Theatre this October 2025 and Chichester Minerva Theatre in February 2026 we feature two composers, Elgar and Finzi, to whom the English landscape was central. In fact, without its nurturing presence one wonders if they would have written any music at all.
Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto is an acknowledged masterpiece of English music and was written in 1949 for that most enduring of English music festivals, the Three Choirs Festival. Coming so soon after the Second World War, it explores Finzi’s perennial obsessions of anguish about war, and grief at the transience of life.
Perhaps because Finzi was steeped in the poetry, the folk songs and the old traditional music of our island, he manages to express anguish and to rage at the fragility of life whilst at the same time conjuring up scenes of English rural landscape and life.
Sadness at the fleetingness of life is not a sine qua non of English music, but there often is a melancholy aspect to our folk tunes and a preference for exploring darker themes rather than colour, as we see in Vaughan William’s Six Studies in English Follk song – also in our Malvern concert.
How grateful we should be to Vaughan Williams for collecting our folk songs before the oral tradition of intergenerational transmission was lost! In this particular set, the songs are mostly in minor keys with the sea as a backdrop. The words are often sad – a lover sails away to fight overseas, a convict sings of being banished to Van Dieman’s Land, a woman is nearly drowned by her perfidious lover. The aura of most of the songs tends towards the reflective and perhaps it is not too farfetched to say that such songs are the natural product of a rainy, temperate land where the mists and fogs render things opaque, where people are drawn to introspection in times of rainy, cold weather and where no grand gestures are required to describe the scenery which is on the scale of trees and woods rather than forests and mountains.
Gerald Finzi was ahead of his time in his concern for the natural world and the environment. Together with his wife, Joy, he created a rural idyll at his home at Ashmansworth, Newbury. Guests of the couple would mention home grown fruits and vegetables, freshly laid eggs and homemade bread. Importantly, Gerald cultivated an orchard in which there were over 300 types of apple, many of which otherwise would have been lost. He always venerated the countryside and chose to spend as little time in towns as possible.
The third movement Rondo theme of his Clarinet Concerto places us firmly in the rolling English countryside. Whereas a chunk of a Sibelius symphony somehow always brings to mind snow covered Finnish landscapes and the grand sweeping phrases of Bruckner take one straight to the Alps, Finzi’s music is immediately redolent of England. Finzi does this by utilizing a deceptively simple clarinet theme that develops as it ambles along, tracing hilly contours and ending up on a high trill. Its harmonies and phrases are rooted in folk culture and its rhythms and pulse are no doubt influenced by English speech patterns as well as perhaps the rhythms of traditional Morris dances.
Recently I felt at first hand how nature can inspire you to write music when I visited Iceland’s Waterfall of the Gods. I was seized by the desire to capture the thundering, swirling water and the glint of sun on spray by writing a piece for full symphony orchestra. It was almost as if the dramatic scene was compelling me to find expression for it. The resulting work, Godafoss, will be included in OftE programmes in 2027.
Sir Edward Elgar adored the countryside. He and his wife even found the small town of Malvern too bustling for their taste, so they moved to a house outside the town where Elgar had a view over the Malvern Hills from his study. This view inspired compositions to take shape in his mind such as The Dream of Gerontius and Sea Pictures.
Elgar loved to cycle around the Worcester and Malvern countryside so that he could encounter nature up close and even as an old man, he would arrange to be driven in a car to admire the sights which were so important in fueling his inspiration.
Although Gustav Holst worked at St Pauls Girls School in busy Hammersmith, London, he too was inspired by nature, writing his Brook Green Suite whilst recuperating in hospital and picturing in his mind the little park opposite the school. Town planners please take note that even a little pocket of nature in an urban setting has immense power to reassure us and even a small park can be an oasis to a tired soul. This beneficial effect is now scientifically proven, and the Japanese have even developed a therapy, shinrin yoku, in which patients embrace trees to boost immunity and mood.
It’s undeniable that nature is of huge importance to composers, as it is to all of us. In modern times it is easy to become divorced from the natural world and see it as a nice to have accessory, but we ignore it at our peril.
Recently, it has to be admitted, rays of sunshine have tentatively pierced through the clouds of worry. There have undoubtedly been reasons to be optimistic when you hear about the UK now generating more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels, or that birds such as red kites are breeding successfully again in the UK and have been pulled back from extinction.
You may be interested to know that the musicians in OftE try as far as possible to be green, travelling by train and electric vehicle or giving each other lifts. We travel around the country taking music to the people rather than expecting audiences to travel long distances. I don’t think we could ever justify flying though.
These measures are not solutions but are at least small contributions to combating climate change. And that is all most of us can hope to do, but it is important that we do take these small steps because if we trash the natural world, we lose massively not only in terms of health and wellbeing but also in terms of musical creativity and inspiration.
Emma Johnson 2025
Concert details:
Orchestra for the Environment and Emma Johnson
October 2nd 2025 Malvern Forum Theatre
Programme: Elgar Serenade for String Orchestra, Finzi Clarinet Concerto, Holst Brook Green Suite, Vaughan Williams Six Studies in English Folk Song, Britten Simple Symphony
February 28th Chichester Minerva Theatre
Programme: Holst Brook Green Suite, Puccini Crisantemi, Finzi Clarinet Concerto, Emma Johnson Folk Song Set, Britten Simple Symphony