Nature-Symphony 54
— Sinfonia Lugubre della Primavera – Il miagolio

Opus 88 (2024) — Timing: 43'

derived from field recording of solo metal wind chime, and another recording of birds and flies on Dartmoor

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

The birds / flies recording in progress — The birds / flies recording taking place, the recorder hidden between the young spruces and facing to our left, across the clearing; the arrow points to the spot. Note that in my YouTube video of this work this photo has the arrow in the wrong position. The arrow there is pointing to a visible recorder, BUT that was a different recorder, and I discarded that recording.

'The Meow', after Edvard Munch — The birds / flies recording taking place, the recorder hidden between the young spruces and facing to our left, across the clearing; the arrow points to the spot. Note that in my YouTube video of this work this photo has the arrow in the wrong position. The arrow there is pointing to a visible recorder, BUT that was a different recorder, and I discarded that recording.

Instrumentation — Field recording of a solo metal wind chime, with a field recording of late spring afternoon Dartmoor distant birds and foreground flies and bumblebees.
Original field recording locations / dates: chime on 14 November 2012 (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/705706/), at Hunter's Tor, near the Hunter's Path and Castle Drogo, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, and birds / flies on 8 June 2018, on east edge of extensive forestry clearing that extends very roughly northwards from Bellever Tor, near Postbridge, Dartmoor, Devon.
Processing and deployment: The chime recording was deployed in 4 layers, with various speed and pitch reductions and degrees of cathedral acoustic. The birds / flies recording was used as just one layer, its only processing being a modest cathedral reverb to enable it to fit in effectively with the chimes.

For fuller details please see the Freesound page for this work.
Distinguishing features — The chime used — the Woodstock Chimes of Olympos — is tuned to an Ancient Greek scale, which I recognise as similar or identical to the quite well-known scale associated with Japanese koto music. It has a particularly distinctive melancholy sound, and from this chime a pivotal rather prominent descending semitone is musically when it is combined with other chimes or, as in this case, copies of the same recording in various transpositions.

Here the overwhelming impression goes far beyond just a little sweet melancholy, to something more like unremitting grief. In the hands of a 'romantic'-style composer, that would be pretty limiting, but here with the added intervals of major sixth, minor third and tritone created by the different pitch reductions of the chime layers, we have an incredible beauty of the harmonies and their various unexpected transitions. The descending semitone keeps oozing out of the woodwork, suggesting weeping and indeed a distraught cat meowing. It was then the latter that really appealed to me.

That would have become tedious for a full-length Nature-Symphony, so I added the Dartmoor birds and flies recording to give a brighter and more grounding interest. In the event that choice exceeded expectations because of the way both birds and particularly the flies keyed-in very musically, without my having to adjust anything to make it work out like that. The flies in particular were operating as real musical instruments, tending to sound like vigorous tremolos of sections of orchestral strings. They have the last word, in a brief coda after the chimes have rather abruptly ceased their beautiful meowing.

Nature-Symphony 54— Sinfonia Lugubre della Primavera – Il miagolio

Basic details

Nature-Symphony 54
— Sinfonia Lugubre della Primavera – Il miagolio