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

Nature-Symphony 73
— Flies as musicians (8): Hilltop celebration: the flies' freaky sarabandes

Opus 107 (2024) — Timing: 44'
derived from a field recording of flies and bees, grasshoppers and bird calls, with the odd aeroplane


Listen on YouTube

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 12 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 was the most striking yet of my flies-based Nature-Symphonies (and louder than the previous ones)*, and surely the most hilarious, taking advantage of a further noise-reduction breakthrough (see Techie stuff further below). This has 12 layers, and still rather less background sound and greater clarity than the previous one (9 layers). A really crazy-sounding fun piece, using a gutsy undulating motif built from three potent four-note chords, its included augmented triads giving it a particular sense of depth and seemingly meaningful colour.

      * Past tense now, because I enhanced the clarity and dynamic range of 71a and b, so they're just as striking!

      Again I retained some aeroplane incursions, indeed rather more than previously — of particular note is a long episode with at least two propeller aeroplanes rather overlapping, and a quieter jet getting a little into the act too. The chord formed from the motif is clearly audible in the plane sound, with an organ-like quality.

      At times grasshoppers figure in the work. Also, the odd bird calls give punctuation here and there. The distant squealy bird calls, I'm pretty sure, are a juvenile buzzard. They often sound to me like a seagull crying out in pain! However, their natural sound is difficult to notice in this rendition, because the top layer is pitched a fourth higher than the original, and again the bottom layer is pitched at an octave plus minor third below original.

      Note that the striking way the work draws to an end was NOT at all contrived by me; it's just how things came together. The really strong fly incursion then is remarkably like a close lightning strike!

      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). However, here they often sound rather like very gruff trombones.

      At least for the most part the lower-sounding ones and those providing smoother notes of longer duration aren't true (two-winged) flies at all but bees or bumblebees.