BBC Proms world premiere of Jonathan Dove’s new orchestral work Gaia Theory – which explores the idea of life on our planet evolving alongside the environment

Gaia Theory by Jonathan Dove
BBC Proms, 28 July 2014
Royal Albert Hall, London, UK

Composer Jonathan Dove joined Cape Farewell’s Disko Bay expedition to West-Greenland in 2008. His new orchestral work Gaia Theory explores the idea of life on our planet evolving alongside the environment. The work has been commissioned, and will have its world premiere during the BBC Proms 2014.

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.

Gaia Theory at the BBC Proms
About Jonathan Dove
2008 Disko Bay Expedition

“Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.“

James Lovelock in an interview in 2000