# Composers who were especially inspired by nature.



## drmdjones (Dec 25, 2018)

Beethoven's looooong walks in nature were an inspiration to him. Brahms was similarly inspired by idyllic vacation spots. Milton Babbitt was inspired by large, gray metal boxes full of vacuum tubes, so count him out. Others you know of? Would love to hear their stories.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

John Luther Adams has talked a lot about his work being inspired by the Alaskan wilderness: http://johnlutheradams.net/sonic-geography-of-the-arctic-interview/


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## pianoville (Jul 19, 2018)

Mahler got a lot of influence from nature, particularly in the 3rd symphony.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Vivaldi, Delius, Sibelius, Debussy, Vaughan Williams, Mussorgsky


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Sibelius, Delius and Percy Grainger were deeply inspired by nature. I'd say also Grieg, Debussy.

This is what Percy Grainger said about his Hill song n.1:

"I consider Hill-Song no. 1 by far the best of all my compositions. But the difficulties of conducting its highly irregular rhythms are almost prohibitive. At the time of composing Hill-Song no. 1 (1901-2, aged 19-20) wildness and fierceness were the qualities in life and nature that I prized the most and wished to express in music. These elements were paramount in my favorite literature--the Icelandic sagas. I was in love with the double reeds (oboe, English horn, etc.) as the wildest and fiercest of musical tone-types. In 1900 I had heard a very harsh-toned rustic oboe (piffero) in Italy, some extremely nasal Egyptian double-reeds at the Paris Exhibition and bagpipes in the Scottish Highlands. I wished to weave these snarling, nasal sounds (which I had heard only in single-line melody) into a polyphonic texture as complex as Bach's, as democratic as Australia (by 'democratic', in a musical sense, I mean a practice of music in which each voice that makes up the harmonic weft en joys equal importance and independence--as contrasted with 'undemocratic' music consisting of a dominating melody supported by subservient harmony). In this way I wished to give musical vent to feelings aroused by the soul-shaking hill-scapes I had rec ently seen on a three days tramp, in Western Argyleshire. I was not in favour of programme-music. I had no wish to portray tonally any actual scenes or even to record musically any impressions of nature. *What I wanted to convey in my Hill-song was the nature of the hills themselves--as if the hills themselves were telling of themselves through my music*, rather than that I, an onlooker, were recording my 'impressions' of the hills. (In this respect, my purpose in Hill-Song no. 1 differed radically from Delius's in his Song of the High Hills. I asked him whether he, in that noblest of nature music, had aimed at letting the hills speak for themselves, as it were, or whether, instead, hi s aim had been to record in music the impressions received by a man in viewing the face of nature. He said that the latter had been his intention. When Delius and I first met, in 1907, we felt a very close compositional affinity. Our chordal writing seeme d to both of us almost identical in type. And this was not unnatural; for although up to then we had seen nothing of each other's work, our melodic and harmonic inheritances came from much the same sources: Bach, Wagner, Grieg and folk-music. It was Deliu s who arranged for the first public performances of my larger compositions. His favorites among my works were my first and second Hill-Songs, which I played to him in 1907. He had always been devoted to the mountains of Norway. So it was no surprise to me to see that pinnacle of his muse, The Song of the High Hills, emerge around 1911.)"


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

*Alan Hovhannes:*
_And God Created Great Whales
Mysterious Mountain
Mount St. Helens
Hymn to Glacier Peak
To the Appalachian Mountains
Storm on Mt. Wildcat
Island Sunrise
Mountain Idylls
The World Beneath the Sea
Child in the Garden
Dawn on Mt. Tahoma
Ode to the Cascade Mountains
_
...and a whole bunch more "mountain" themed works. Of course, little of it is played, and only die-hard fans have heard more than a small fraction of his enormous library.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Toru Takemitsu 14, 15

Get rid of this stupid 15 character rule.


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## Tchaikov6 (Mar 30, 2016)

Wagner, particularly in the Ring


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## Guest (Jan 26, 2019)

d'Indy ..........


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## Alfacharger (Dec 6, 2013)

John Williams has a great interest in trees! Here are three concert compositions based on the subject.


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## Red Terror (Dec 10, 2018)

isorhythm said:


> John Luther Adams has talked a lot about his work being inspired by the Alaskan wilderness: http://johnlutheradams.net/sonic-geography-of-the-arctic-interview/


The Alaskan wilderness is infinitely more interesting than his third grade Feldman pastiche.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

No one more profoundly than Sibelius. His last great work, _Tapiola,_ is almost frightening in its cold and haunting inhumanity. With it Sibelius disappeared into the snow and never came back.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Tristan Murail.


In literature, French literature, nature and landscape are really central to the most modernist avant garde, in the work of Pierre Bergounioux for example. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was important for French avant garde composers too. Of course Messiaen and Luc Ferrari from the previous generations.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

Messiaen and Vivaldi were both obsessed by birds
Heitor Villa-Lobos was inspired by Brazilian nature (among other influences)


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Mahler conducted the New York Philharmonic during the season then went to a cabin in the Austrian woods to compose during the summers.


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## CnC Bartok (Jun 5, 2017)

Bartók in his "Night Music" mode ought to be mentioned as well. These pieces are very obviously nature-inspired, typical examples might include middle movements from the 4th and 5th Quartets, the Adagio in Music for Strings, the Elegy in Concerto for Orchestra, and "The Night's Music" (there's a clue in the title there!) from Out of Doors

Can we also count the fruitful obsession with birdsong that pervades so much of Messiaen's music as well? Jacck has mentioned this, I'd say it's a fundamentally important example....


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## vesteel (Feb 3, 2018)

On the more obscure side, Joachim Raff has some works that were inspired by nature. Among his nature-inspired works are his 3rd symphony was inspired by the forest, his 7th was about the Swiss Alps, and his last 4 symphonies were based on the four seasons. There is also a single movement work for Piano & Orchestra called "Ode to Spring"


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> No one more profoundly than Sibelius. His last great work, _Tapiola,_ is almost frightening in its cold and haunting inhumanity. With it Sibelius disappeared into the snow and never came back.


Beautifully put!


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

drmdjones said:


> Composers who were especially inspired by nature.


we should realise that the subject of 'nature' came to existance only with the advent of romanticism because, until it came, people had not even noticed that nature exists; they had seen it merely as a commodities and food supply; they even feared to travel at night, mainly for superstition reasons... it is only now that we see nature as a friendly thing, but for then people it was kind of a dark matter; same about the composers who took on this theme.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Zhdanov said:


> we should realise that the subject of 'nature' came to existance only with the advent of romanticism because, until it came, people had not even noticed that nature exists; they had seen it merely as a commodities and food supply; they even feared to travel at night, mainly for superstitios reasons... it is only now that we see nature as a friendly thing, but for then people it was kind of a dark matter; same about the composers who took on this theme.


Yes, even the word "natural" tended not to designate a desirable quality. The "natural man" was an unwashed heathen headed straight for the lower regions, and his moral obligation and path to salvation was to overcome "nature" in himself.

The Romantics flipped it all upside down - or was it right side up? Or both?


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Any composers especially inspired by ducks?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

regenmusic said:


> Any composers especially inspired by ducks?


Saint-Saens, Carnival of the Animal Quackers.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

regenmusic said:


> Any composers especially inspired by ducks?


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Ask a serious question and you'll always get a serious reply.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

regenmusic said:


> Any composers especially inspired by ducks?


In this lovely folk setting by Janáček, a duck is wounded by a hunter and worries that she may never get to raise her ducklings.


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