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

Nature-Symphony 72
— Flies as musicians (7): Landscape of pseudo-fugues of the jolly tritone

Opus 106 (2024) — Timing: 54'
derived from a field recording of flies and bees, grasshoppers and bird calls, with the odd aeroplane


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Basic details

This recording taking place
This recording taking place. Recorder's black furry windshield is black object low down among the stunted bracken on left.

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

  • Original field recording location / dates: I made the original recording on 16 August 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 work has nine layers, as detailed in the Freesound page for this work, 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. The impressive range of timbres, dynamics and 'attack' characteristics makes up for the lack of normal musical development.

    • Distinguishing features — This is decidedly a joyful fun piece, using a nine-note atonal motif, which contains tritones, the latter giving it a joyful sense of pungency and depth.

      From about halfway through the work the summed background sound from all nine layers very gradually gets augmented by a continuous hum of flies activity over the close-by dense stands of tall bracken, becoming really noticeable during about the last 15 minutes. However, because that is heard from all layers, a chord close to being a tone-cluster is constantly sounding, so it's difficult to recognise any of that as a general hum of flies when you listen to the work on speakers. When listening through high-grade headphones, however, it is possible to recognise all that hum of febrile fly activity, which of course gives a lot more sense of energy of the whole soundscape.

      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.