Tower and Town, July 2022 (view the full edition)Nature Notes"Well-being" At the Marlborough Summer School tutors and their students are encouraged to display their work at the end of each week. Members of my Birdwatch and Music Appreciation Courses have nothing to offer after roaming the Wiltshire countryside or following a Mozart Concerto with a score, but they come back enlightened about a piece of music or thrilled to have seen a pair of Stone Curlews rise up from a bare field- leaving them with a palpable sense of well-being. It is well known that time spent in the countryside is good for us. Research has verified a link between exposure to nature and stress reduction: it has restorative properties, increasing energy and improving feelings of vitality and focus. Composers have found ways of tapping into nature for inspiration. Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes for example reflect the composer's contact with the natural world. Britten walked his dog along the beach at Aldeburgh and came back with a whole passage of the opera in his head, complete with orchestration. Joseph Haydn, musical servant to the super-rich Esterhazy family, began his daily ritual with breakfast at eight, sat at the piano, prayed to God for inspiration and made sketches of compositions till mid-morning. A walk until lunchtime followed and he returned to his music later, taking sketches he had made in the morning and scoring them. The countryside around Esterhazy Palace, formerly a hunting lodge, must have inspired the great man, composer of the Bird and Lark quartets and symphonies "La Chasse" and "La Poule." Nature inspired much of his word painting: the sun, the moon, and all God's creatures in his oratorio "The Creation", composed in his mid-sixties.
Robin Nelson |
My summer schoolers might hear a Quail bleating or encounter a family of Yellow Wagtails, and in recent years Red Kites, Little Egrets and Ravens have been regularly spotted. But July is a quiet time for birds, with song much reduced, parents moulting and bedraggled after the exertions of the breeding season and the duck species "in eclipse plumage". But then, with the sun out, and the downland flowers a riot of colour we suddenly focus on the butterflies: Skippers, Ringlets, Meadow Browns and the dainty black and white Marbled White fluttering by. For those coming from more urban environments they provide a true "sense of well-being."