Nature-Symphony 71a and 71b
— Flies as musicians (6a + 6b): A romp in the shadow of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1 + 2

Basic details

• Instrumentation — A field recording of flies and bees, with the odd aeroplane.

• Original field recording location / dates: I made the original recording on 17 July 2024 on the summit area of Cranbrook Down in the south-west corner within the rounded square of the ancient hill fort Cranbrook Castle, high above the Teign Gorge (Drewsteignton, Devon, UK).

• Processing and deployment: This pair of 'twin' works both have nine layers, as detailed in the Freesound pages for this work (71a — 71b), where the processing is also described. They are identical apart from their layers being tuned to different musical motifs, and their relative offsets being adjusted to produce different rhythmic configuration.

• Distinguishing features — Each of these two works is based on a different colourful and potentially dramatic motif derived from the soundworld of Ralph Vaughan Williams* as in, say, his Sinfonia Antartica. That of the second is quite easy to describe. It consists of three three-note groups:

  * For notes about the significance for me of Vaughan Williams' music, see relevant section in Musical influences on Philip Goddard's music & literary works.

  • First is the top three notes of a descending major scale based on the tonic;
  • Second is a descending augmented triad, starting a major third below bottom of first group;
  • Third is first three notes of an ascending major scale, starting a minor sixth below last note of second group.

  So, the 'official' augmented triad (the second group) is actually drawn out by the intervals above and below to give effectively an overlapping between two augmented triads and an augmented wholetone chord, which makes for a really potent sense of colour and harmonic dramatics, especially as the major scale top and bottom are in different and strongly conflicting keys, so creating tension that way!

  The menacing-sounding 'organ' that opens both works is in fact an aeroplane, and this is my second use of aeroplane sound in any of my works — my having woken up grievously belatedly to their potential as an occasional musical element in the odd works of mine.

  The ending of both these Nature-Symphonies is a reprise of the opening, but with the order of layer offsets reversed, which reverses the motif, and that whole section is raised by a semitone, so giving a brighter feel to end the work.

  The flies' timbres are an important aspect of each Nature-Symphony using them. Generally, in these processed arrangements, each individual fly sounds remarkably like a fast tremolando orchestral strings section, albeit more precisely located but on the move. So, we get sonorities ranging from delicate sul ponticello violins right down to double-basses (sometimes sounding like a cross between that and a contrabassoon). At least for the most part the lower ones and those providing smoother notes of longer duration aren't true (two-winged) flies at all but bees or bumblebees.

  In this particular case, in both 71a and b, the greater dynamic range and closer perspective causes the flies and bees often to sound more like very gruff trombones. Where we hear what sounds like a dense flurry of flies, generally it isn't that at all, but a bee or bumblebee fussing around fairly close. For ones with a rapid wavering of their tone, often when they're visiting flowers, in a multi-layered Nature-Symphony each produces a new note from each distinct change of its pitch, and so gives the impression of, yes, a dense flurry of flies!