A new large-scale work by Jonathon Dove, Gaia Theory, for symphony orchestra has been commissioned by the BBC Proms for the 2014 season and premiered on 28 July (Prom 15), with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Josep Pons at the Royal Albert Hall, London. Inspired by the work of James Lovelock and continuing Dove's concern to address environmental issues in his music, Gaia Theory takes as its starting point Lovelock's idea that the earth behaves as a self-regulating organism, and his description of all the inter-related processes maintaining the earth in the optimum conditions for life as a kind of dance. From Dove's website:
I was struck by James Lovelock's observation that, since life on earth began, the sun has got perhaps 30% hotter, and yet the earth has not. For hundreds of millions of years, the impact of the sun's heat has been moderated by cloud cover, the atmosphere, the albido of the polar ice-sheets and so on, all affected by the behaviour of microscopic organisms as well as by animal and ultimately by human activity, not to mention the respiration of plants and trees and innumerable processes all, as Lovelock describes, 'locked in a sort of dance in which everything changes together'.
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