Nature-Symphony 33
— Cornwall extravaganza: Pentargon Cove Guillemots' Coven

Opus 66 (2024) — Timing: 71'

derived from a field recording of a coven of guillemots and razorbills, with surrounding sea and other bird sounds, in and around a sea cave in rugged North Cornwall cliff

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Nature-symphonies — a transformational discovery (background notes)…

It was in 2012 that I tentatively started recording natural soundscapes, and within a few months got the idea of purchasing some high-grade precision-tuned wind chimes to record out in the wilds, hung up on tree branches. …

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… I quickly found that not only was the sound of each set of chimes individually beautiful and to some extent inspiring in quality when recorded out in the wild like that (mostly high-up in the Teign Gorge, Devon, UK), but also, almost all of the combinations of different chimes worked out beautifully musically, though naturally some combinations made a more 'challenging' listen than others.

Much more recently I tried making a half-speed version of part of each of the most appealing or otherwise 'promising' chimes ensemble recordings. They were each a revelation — immensely beautiful, with quite dramatic transformation of the original sound. That is, not just a matter of being slower and an octave lower, but the whole musical and emotional effect changed.

But then, in late August 2023 I got this little urge to do something really stupid (all the world's 'sheep' know I'm stupid anyway, so I thought I might as well do it anyway!), and try putting a particularly evocative chimes ensemble recording in a virtual cathedral, of all things, just to see how crazy it might sound.

I tried that with a particularly usable and effective reverb VST plugin called Orilriver, and was bowled over by the results. Shivers up spine, and plenty of goose-bumps for good measure! I then did listening spot tests using Orilriver in preview mode on a wide selection of my half-speed chimes recordings, and every one was incredibly, amazingly, transformed.

It was clear that I'd sort-of unwittingly stumbled into producing powerfully beautiful stochastic / probability-driven music works that have a lot in common with the ethos and methods of Iannis Xenakis, but with a big practical difference. Whereas typically he worked out probabilistic structures and processes to shape many of his works, this lunatic composer instead left that task to 'Mother Nature', then transforming those sounds in a way that Xenakis did in most of his electroacoustic works, to enhance their ability to excite the listener's own inner creativity and to generate profound and powerful experiences in the process.

It can be no surprise, then, that in these new works of mine there would be passing (albeit partial) resemblances to certain Xenakis works — Bohor comes particularly to mind, and even, in a funny way, some aspects of Terretektorh.

It was then a real no-brainer to recognise each such piece of mine as one of my numbered public music compositions. For the purpose of a liberating simplicity I chose to classify ALL of this type of work that I produce as what I'm calling nature-symphonies. That hyphen is important, because they are not just symphonies about nature, but are a very specific type of composition — nature-generated symphonies.

The term 'symphony', although closely guarded with a very restricted meaning by small-minded traditionalists, actually just means 'sounding together', which apparently was its original meaning. For me to want to use that term, there need to be at least two contrasting elements that are in some way combined or worked together in some way that is much more effective and deeply inspiring than the sum of those elements.

Although, in terms of my own nature-symphonies, that would mean ensembles rather than solo chimes sets, I've found that certain of my recordings using just one chimes set still produce effective and powerful nature-symphonies because of some element of the natural soundscape within which the chimes were sounding. A weir or waterfall, for example, or the wind itself, or a liberal amount of bird sound (much of which latter sounds remarkably musical at half-speed).

As for title for each work, they won't all necessarily have a title beyond Nature-Symphony [nn]. I'll add an imaginative title only where the finished piece suggests one to me. — Well, er, except that I do have one title earnestly looking for a work for it to be applied to, but currently I don't see how it could fit any extant or future transformed wind chimes works of mine! Not telling why!

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Basic details

*This recording taking place. The main guillemot ~~colony~~ coven is in and around the large cave on the left, which has two entrances, with a just visible thick column separating them.*

Instrumentation — Somewhat condensed version of original field recording of guillemots (mostly) and razorbills in and around a large sea cave, which latter acts as a megaphone. Also many transient bird sounds all round.

The recorder microphones were set at narrow angle (90°), and afterwards the soundstage was widened by software to about 120°, giving a reasonable degree of zooming-in, which I made more effective by imparting an EQ 'tilt' towards the treble, and of course raising the recording's amplitude a bit.
Original field recording location / date: 14 June 2023, morning, the recorder placed well down on steep grassy slope at south end of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK. It was facing across the mouth of the rugged cliff-bounded Pentargon Cove (fairly well known because of its waterfall).
Processing and deployment: condensed version of original recording deployed in three differently pitched layers. I give specifics about the recording, and the subsequent processing, on my Freesound page for the work.
Distinguishing features — To my (yes, I know, warped!) sensibility this is a great fun piece as well as being a captivating soundscape that I would listen to for hours on end if I didn't have a lot more Nature-Symphonies to get on and produce. However, my experience of people's responses to my Nature-Symphonies so far suggests that most people without strong attunement to nature wouldn't get their heads around it.

The hilarious bedlams of the guillemots and less numerous and less prominent razorbills in the cave entrance (with its megaphone effect) were a 'natural' for me to use in a Nature-Symphony. The use of differently processed layers ensures that over time we're repeatedly bombarded with the guillemot bedlams from various directions.

The speed-reduced Layers 2+3 guillemots bedlam outbursts sound amazingly unlike birds at all, but remarkably like an undisciplined strongly sozzled or otherwise intoxicated men's choir — the Layer 2 ones sounding like tenors and the Layer 3 ones clearly basses. From both those layers, the transients (high-frequency rapid peaks) have been smoothed out by the cathedral reverb, so the harsh grating abrasiveness of the unprocessed voices of those birds' 'bogeyman howls' has been lost. Also, we have the genuine sound as I heard during the recording session in Layer 1, which underlines the bizarreness of the men's choir sound in the other two layers.

However, this isn't just about the 'guillies and razzies', for the sea sound is beautiful in itself (experienced properly only with high-grade headphones), and various songbirds are flitting around and uttering contact calls or song fragments.

As to why the word 'colony' in the work's title is replaced by 'coven', that's just because those cave bedlams were strongly suggestive to me of a comic parody of a stereotypical witches' coven. Like it or lump it!

Nature-Symphony 33— Cornwall extravaganza: Pentargon Cove Guillemots' Coven

Basic details

Nature-Symphony 33
— Cornwall extravaganza: Pentargon Cove Guillemots' Coven