Ascending, Nature's Way!

Going right beyond 'New Age' music to create joyfully humorous nature fantasies…

I'd never felt any enthusiasm for 'New Age'-type music, which seemed to me tiresomely bland and lacking in any real point, but in the early 2000s circumstances seemed to be pointing me rather in that direction, to produce some music which could be used as a background for contemplation, meditation or 'healing' sessions. Much music produced for that purpose is of the 'New-Age' type that I have no time for — just pleasant bland doodlings — yet I'd heard some such music that did have more quality, with much more sense of light and shadow, tension and release, and a sense of real vision instead of the ersatz, synthetic sort of 'vision' dished up in so much New Age music.

The music I produced supposedly for that purpose actually has quite a gripping quality, and really it's much better regarded as something of a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of New Age-type music in the course of my transcending it to go my own way and yet again produce some very engaging classical music reflecting various aspects of nature. Indeed, nowadays I don't see it as being any more (or less) 'healing' music than much good and deeply sourced classical music.

The original title of this work was simply Ascending, thanks to the New-Agey original basis of its conception — and it wasn't till 2021 that I finally got my act together and changed that to the current Ascending, Nature's Way!, hopefully to minimize people's associating this work or any of its contents with the very harmful New-Age concept of ascension. However, from the best part of a year's retrospect since I made that change and made related changes to titles of the individual movements, I can securely say that the changes aren't at all an uneasy doctrinaire or 'political correctness' move, for I'm immediately struck by the joie de vivre that now shines out from those titles, much more faithfully reflecting my experience of composing the work, and indeed the overall playful buoyancy of my whole life outlook.

In this suite of pieces, the first, Looking Into the Sky, although not ungrounding in the way that 'New Age'-type healing music is, does have a rarefied, 'spacey' quality about it and many people would therefore habitually tend to listen to it in an ungrounded way, so I recommend therefore that it not be listened to on its own, but always followed by at least the next item, which, like the remaining two, is quite strongly grounding as well as awareness-expanding.

So, this Ascending, Nature's Way! suite is a set of four rather dream-like tableaux or frescoes, each of which is based upon the potentialities of one or a particular combination of MIDI instruments in my custom soundfont file. In this sort of music I follow the potentialities of the starting sounds, so that each piece has a strong element of 'getting inside the nature of the sound'. My intention was that each piece contain some basic or core element that is steadily ascending, whether or not this is readily noticed by the listener. However, in the event, that aspect didn't really appear in any obvious way in the final movement. Perhaps we could see that as something of an unsubtle message about 'ascension' actually being quite a distraction from where we really need to be pointing ourselves!

I'm particularly indebted to Lorin Nelson, more widely known as Lorin Swelk, for his three excellent Soundfont collections of, respectively, bells, birds, and, particularly notably, whales. The whale songs / calls are in some cases tuned and looped so that they can be used as a musical instrument.

To get the full effect in listening to these pieces you need to use high-grade loudspeakers (or headphones) that can reproduce audibly down to 25 Hz or even lower. In #2 and in the final climax of #4 I include a powerful organ subbass (16 / 32 ft) in the instrumentation, and this will be largely missed by ordinary domestic hi-fi speakers and especially computer speakers.

1. Looking Into the Sky — 11'

(Originally titled 'Ascending')

The sound used for the core of this piece is a reversed version of an instrument sample described as 'swept chimes', which in the original descends through about an octave before the loop causes it to repeat. Thus the reversed version ascends, and because it's reversed, its sound is more other-worldly and strange than the original version of the sound. Additionally, other wind chimes sounds are used, along with processed antique cymbals and orchestral triangle and more or less unprocessed temple gongs, also with a strings pad that goes into harmonics. The atmosphere is rarefied and remote, beyond all earthly emotions.

In 2021, as part of my seeking to make the title and descriptions of this work and its movements as consistent as possible in no longer giving any sort of credence to the New-Age notions upon which it was originally founded, I renamed this movement, and suggest here a more healthy way of experiencing its music.

Imagine. You're lying down at ease at the base of a big tree that's dropped most or all of its leaves, and are gazing up its magnificent trunk to the proliferation of smaller and smaller branches and then twigs — and beyond all those, a buzzard is soaring higher and higher in a thermal, while still higher are some cotton-wool tufts of fair weather cumulus, which themselves are starting to bulge upwards — and, very much higher still, you find yourself admiring the gracefully curved and twisted streaks and swerves of cirrus cloud, where the clouds are all made of ice crystals. And then again, beyond those…

2. Love Is In the Oceans — 15'

The backbone of much of this piece is a complex sampled sound described as 'Atlantis' (which, however, I chose because of its sound and not its name, as, to my understanding, Atlantis is a very harmful myth!). This is a veritable wall of electronic-organ-like synthesizer sound, continuously descending in wave upon wave in an agreeable and even radiant mode. I use this as a background, starting at a very low pitch, where its elements are all slowed right down and you can hear within it all manner of implied melodic motifs that were probably never actually played to produce the sound — just as when you listen to an extended peal of church bells (at least in the UK, where bell-ringing is a special art) it becomes possible to hear all sorts of beautiful things in the sound that are aural artefacts and haven't actually been played.

From some of these implied motifs I take the actual melodic material, which is then given to softly playing French horns (allowed to play a much wider pitch range than 'live' ones), a special, remote-sounding French Horns pad with a metallic resonance, and, most importantly, whales. I use fragments of both untuned and tuned whale songs. There is an incredible power and energy about the whales' singing voices, their imprecisions of pitch enhancing the effect.

Very often it seems quite confusing as to whether a particular melodic motif being heard is actually a played item in the foreground or just one of the artefacts in the background. This is quite deliberate; I chose timbres and volume to achieve this effect, so that motifs, like fish, come into and out of focus within the vastness of the ocean.

This piece is a song of joy, a celebration of life. A darker section has about it a gentle sense of humour as the various orcas weave their songs and calls among the organ-like minor chords, and the feeling of joy is never lost despite the brief view into the darkness of the abyss. In a later, mysterious and haunting section an almost breathing-like ostinato on the metallic horns pad gets taken up by a very deep whale voice while dancing motifs for horns eventually get taken up by whales, who briefly show that they can dance too, at least in spirit…

3. Sunrise Over a Submerged Cathedral — 14'

This movement's title contains a lovingly humorous nod towards that of Claude Debussy's wonderful piano prelude La cathédrale engloutie. However, nowhere in this music is there even a hint of Debussy or indeed that specific work of his.

The body of this movement uses a slowly ascending sequence that I've already used in Clarity of a Mountain Sunrise and in a passage in the second movement of The Seen and the Unseen. It is two very slow ever-ascending chromatic scales a minor third apart and out of sync — effectively in close canon. Both of these are harmonized a minor third below, in lower octaves.

A dark and spacious introduction leads into the even darker bottom end of the ascending sequence, into which is interwoven the sound of whale songs, which are themselves subjected to the ascending sequence, which seems to carry within it an emotional intensity as though derived from some sort of striving to fulfil a deep longing or aspiration. Each semitone step up gives us a resolution of tension, which just leads us into the next tension and subsequent resolution, and the striving leads us inexorably upwards, the whales becoming higher and higher-pitched as though they were becoming birds welcoming the blazing light of the rising sun.

On account of the relative lack of musical 'action' for much of the movement apart from the gradual ascending, it won't necessarily be to the liking of everyone who enjoys the other movements. Near the end of the movement we leave the ever-ascending vision behind with a return to the opening spacious music with which to finish off.

I had originally called this movement Sunrise over Atlantis, but more recently changed that, because I no longer wanted to associate this or indeed any of my music with the actually very harmful Atlantis myth, which is so beloved of people who are involved at all in the confusion of a New Age 'movement' that blights the world.

4. Seven Days — Seven Joys of Nature — 23'

I originally entitled this movement Seven Chakras, Seven Archangels, because for some years I had taken on the notion of higher (non-physical) beings such as ascended masters, angels and archangels, in which most 'healers' (at least in Western cultures) believe. However, I came since to recognise that such higher beings are bogus — inventions of the garbage, which pose as higher presences whenever anyone attempts to channel from non-physical sources, in order to cause major problems for humans. Thus naturally I no longer wanted to associate myself or any of my work with archangels or any other inventions of the garbage, and so I renamed this movement.

Although seven is supposedly one of the sacred numbers, the prime significance of the number here is that this movement is based on the notes that are claimed by some people to correspond to the purported seven main chakras* or energy centres of the human aura or subtle energy system.

As given by Barbara Brennan in Light Emerging, one of her classic books on spiritual healing, the notes are, working upwards, G (below the treble clef), D, F, G, A, D, G. Actually, the tuning of these notes isn't stated, so in the absence of other information I had to assume that the actual pitches of these notes were based on a tuning of A=440 — which I expect is incorrect, but I had to draw a line somewhere and simply plead a certain degree of artistic licence.

According to Barbara Brennan these pitches are reckoned to resonate harmoniously with the respective chakras, so that one of these pitches can be used, e.g., by humming it, to energize and give healing to the related chakra. Although there might conceivably be some grain of truth in that (er, well, if chakras really did objectively exist) if the pitches are correctly tuned, I also think that the correct tuning wouldn't be just a matter of the overall tuning but actually of having the notes on a just temperament scale, which is difficult for most people in modern Western cultures to achieve, as they are so conditioned to equal temperament scales or modes. I myself have no ready facility for producing musical realizations in just temperament.

Having drawn the line at getting the exactly correct pitches and having decided instead to stay with equal temperament, I was moved to try an experiment, to see if I could create a piece of music that mostly used only these notes. In fact the development of the music directed me not to keep to those particular pitches at all, but, rather, to preserve their sequence of intervals, in melodic or chordal form, while the music makes its excursions.

The music does, however, return to the basic seven pitches frequently, so that overall it does feel to be centred there. In fact for the most part the notes are used as a seven-note mode that spans two octaves, giving the respective intervals from bottom to top: fifth, minor third, major second, major second, fourth, fourth.

To sum up so far, then, all this stuff about the number 7 being sacred, or chakras or indeed anything metaphysical, is just historical information about how I came to put together some beautiful sounds in (at least, to me) beautiful ways, having actually let go of all the 'spirituality' baggage (probably better described as 'garbage', like the source of that garbage!).

Many passages in this piece have an arched shape and timbres that give an impression of various vast palaces and illuminated cathedral-like caverns. The birds add both humour and poetry, often singing completely naturally, but at other times manipulated to participate in the music. In certain passages I associate the middle note of the odd scale with a sudden and brief singing of the chiffchaff. No doubt many a bird lover, at least here in the UK, will recognise the species that has the last word in this piece. And that word is — cheeeeeeese. Got it?

The main instrument sounds that I used in this movement are:

• a modified sinewave that has a certain harmonic richness — in fact sounding rather like an organ Rohrflöte stop, except that I have shaped the sound to be non-sustaining and fairly percussive, as though it were a piano of sorts, and I have given it a strong cathedral-like reverb.

• a humming-choir sampled sound described as 'Bradbury', single notes of which actually seem to be in harmony or at least to contain strong harmonics. Every note of this humming choir usually starts with a simultaneous slow fade-in and strong upward glissando, and overall the choir imparts a static and timeless quality to the music.

• an 'electric piano' made with combined sinewaves, which has a very muffled quality in its lower reaches

• a synth pad that sounds intermediate between choir and string ensemble, with treble filter sweep that gives a lot of 'breathing' sounds and some 'wah' in places. I occasionally use other synth pad sounds too.

• selected bird songs, especially song thrush, blackbird and starling. The latter, at lower-than-natural pitch (and therefore speed) produces the harmonious clusters of downward glissandi that are heard from time to time. As already noted, the chiffchaff sings every time the music transiently focuses on the middle note of the scale — a particularly joyful effect.