Nature-Symphony 40
— Mother Nature's great celebration — by moonlight

Unique work, distinguished by its adherence throughout to the whole tone scale

Opus 74 (2024) — Timing: 37'

derived from field recording of ensemble of a metal wind chime with large and small bamboo chime

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

Recording location for the metal chimes — A recording at the same spot during the previous session. The arrow points to the recorder. For this recording the metal chime was on the left, and the bamboo chimes were both on the right, the small one a bit more so, and they were roughly the same distance from the recorder as the metal chime.

Instrumentation — Part of field recording of ensemble of one metal chime plus large and small bamboo chime.
Original field recording location / date: 2 March 2017, on steep ground just below the Hunter's Path (high up on north side of Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, by Hunting Gate, at the highest point of that track.
Processing and deployment:Three layers were used, with different speed / pitch reductions, and different degrees of back-of-cathedral acoustic.

For fuller details please see the Freesound page for the work.
Distinguishing features — I'm not aware of any previous extended major music work based solely on the whole-tone scale prior to this one. The atmosphere here is almost comical in the luridity of its mysteriousness — Mother Nature 'exposing herself' without due decorum! — Claude Debussy, so widely known for his widespread use of the whole-tone scale, came nowhere close to what this errant 'bogeyman' composer has come up with here!

It was the ability to put differently processed layers together in sensible alignments that enabled me to produce a work that is full of variety and drama while not requiring any contrasting scale, key or other melodic or harmonic device to give contrast, that enabled this to work really effectively. I did restrict the length of the work, though, as it was asking me to let it continue for a full hour, but I considered such a length of time in Whole-Tone Wonderland to be very likely to get on my own nerves a bit…

In practice, although this work's basis is just the whole-tone scale, things aren't quite that simple, and what makes this work sound so interesting is all the little unplanned 'extras'. For one thing, this particular chime regularly sounds the odd notes that are additional to the eight 'official' ones (accounted for by the 8 tubes), and those, especially one quite prominent one a bit above the chime's official top note, are of notes not on this particular whole-tone scale, and which add musically exquisite dissonant or high-tension effects.

Also, the downward transposition of the layers causes particular harmonics to be experienced as though they were fundamentals, and even if they are still notionally on the 'right' whole-tone scale, they can cause exquisite microtonal tuning differences (shimmering beats in their tone) as a side-effect of the chime being tuned to 'just intonation', not the currently normal 'equal temperament'. Indeed, the same would apply to the true fundamental as well.