Music Compositions of Philip Goddard — www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk

Nature-Symphony 34
— Exploration of a joyful planet yet to be devised

Opus 67 (2024) — Timing: 62'
derived from a field recording of a solo metal wind chime plus a separately recorded solo bamboo chime


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Basic details


Original recording for Layer 1–3
The bamboo chime used in this work being recorded earlier in the same session. The original for this work was made a little higher up and facing uphill to minimize background sound from the river Teign far below.
Another recording from same session as this work's metal chime recording.
This is another recording from the same session as this work's metal chime recording. The scene looked just the same, but without the bamboo chimes.

  • Instrumentation — Part of field recording of solo small Indonesian bamboo wind chime (longest tube 30cm), used as 3 layers, and the second, quieter, half of a larger 8-tube metal chime tuned to a gentle-sounding Blues scale, used as 2 layers.

  • Original field recording location / date:

    • Bamboo chime recording: 13 December 2023, on Piddledown, just in the top of the open woodland high up on north side of Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, just a little above the Hunter's Path. 

    • Metal chime recording: 16 February 2017, a little way further east, on steep ground just below the Hunter's Path, by Hunting Gate, at the highest point of that track.

    • Processing and deployment:

      Layers 1-4:
      (solo metal chime): Davis Blanchard The Blues (8 tubes, tuned to a gentle Blues scale)

      Layers 5+6:
      (solo bamboo chime): Indonesian ornamented chime, small (longest tube c. 30cm) (its 6 tubes giving intervals and chords of second-inversion minor, diminished seventh, tritone, fourth, minor sixth, with a lot of emphasis on the minor third, and the differently pitched layers of it bringing in an emphasized minor seventh)

      Fuller details on the Freesound page for the work.

    • Distinguishing features —This is closely related to Nature-Symphony 22 (Solar rays — The Sun's 'Poem of Ecstasy'), for it uses the same metal chime and contains fundamentally the same soundworld, but here deployed differently, with more variety (four layers using the same recording differently processed), together with a small bamboo chime deployed in a further two layers. As with N-S 22, this is a massively profound and inspiring piece for those who can open to it. It seems slower than the other one, because Layers 3+4 of the metal chime have been slowed (and thus reduced in pitch) to their workable limit.

      Layers 1+2 are closer to what we get in N-S 22, but it's the slow ultra-bass pair that really holds the stage and drives the show. At that level the sonorities are greatly changed, more mysterious and at times dissonant (but in an inspiringly meaningful way), and I set the volume of the upper two layers to be something of an ornamentation of the lower pair, rather than as equal protagonists.

      The bamboo chime I chose as the necessary contrasting element is a small one with an unusually potent musicality for a cheap bamboo chime. I deployed it in two layers, like Layers 1+2 to be present as a sort of ornamentation — though in practice these two layers together have a beautiful and rather haunting potency, which I enhanced by letting them start the work, so it begins with the lower bamboo layer, which is soon joined by the upper one, with just enough time for the harmonically rather fiery sound to become established before tracks 2+3 of the metal chimes enter stage, then followed by 1+4.

      When listening to this work, for me it's like being suspended in mid-space, with telescopic vision observing a planet and its features as it slowly revolves and circulates around its sun — but what a planet!