"In my recent book, 'The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places', I introduced readers to the idea that it was the animals who taught humans to dance and sing, a concept long suspected, but rarely addressed to that extent.

All through the late 1980s and 90s, I experimented in different ways trying to incorporate natural soundscapes into varying forms of music. Being trained within the limits of a traditional Western (Occidental) musician, none were completely successful, by and large, I think, because our musical paradigms are so far removed from their ancient origins. Then, recently, after the publication of 'The Great Animal Orchestra' in the UK, I got a call from Richard Blackford, former Balliol College Oxford composer-in-residence, with the news that he had read the book and would be very interested in collaborating on an orchestral piece illustrating the very connections I described in the text. In the fall of 2012, after a week long meeting at Wild Sanctuary, our place in northern California, Richard and I decided to collaborate on a symphony, with Richard writing the score inspired by selected natural soundscapes drawn from my sound archive, and me supplying the audio components which would then be incorporated into the composition.

With Richard’s wonderful sense of the sonic world and his brilliant mix of textures, rhythms and themes this, then, would become the first full symphony to incorporate entire natural soundscapes into the fabric of orchestration during a live performance and subsequent recording." - Bernie Krause

The CD also contains a new orchestration of Saint-Saen's Carnival of the Animals.