Nature-Symphony 74
— Flies as musicians (9): Dance of solace, after Mt Everest rockfall

Basic details

• Instrumentation — (a) A field recording of flies, bees, grasshoppers and bird calls, with the odd aeroplane, and (b) separate recordings of solo large (50cm longest tube) and small c. 30cm longest tube) bamboo chimes.

• Original field recording locations / dates: I made the flies (etc.) 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).
  The large and small bamboo chimes were recorded on 13 and 11 December 2023 respectively on Piddledown, high up on north side of Teign Gorge.

• Processing and deployment: The flies aspect of 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.

  The large and small bamboo chimes occupy just one layer each, both reduced to half-speed and thus an octave below original, and their level kept fairly low, and their acoustic set to near back-of-cathedral, so they are experienced as rather a background element, so that most of the time we can properly hear the intricacies of the flies' / bees' performances.

• Distinguishing features — A further new departure and great fun piece, with musical depth: flies (12 layers) with bamboo wind chimes (large and small, one layer each). Along with the flies and bees / bumblebees, birds (mostly juvenile buzzard, but also some linnet contact calls), grasshoppers and the odd propeller aeroplane all play their part. The motif configured for those 12 layers is adapted from movement 2 of my Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha).
  
  That motif is an uneasy one, particularly because of its third (last) 4-note phrase, which finishes by descending by a major third, which, in conventional major-minor tonality, tells the listener that it's leading onto another phrase that would give a proper sense of completion — but that completion isn't there, as though it were a human life having been cut short. It therefore feels troubled, at least when you hear that third phrase clearly.
  Also, its last note, whose pitch 'should' be consonant with the opening pitch, is actually an octave plus major seventh lower — decidedly dissonant, though the intervening whole octave mitigates the sense of overt discord, just giving an uneasy feeling of the thread having been cut off before it could find any comfort or sense of release.

  Again I retained some aeroplane incursions. 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 fifth higher than the original, and again the bottom layer is pitched an octave plus a major third below the 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 mostly rather delicately played 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.
  
  Note how the sound of the chimes, particularly the small one, are much of the time either completely in tune with what the flies are doing, or at least have a meaningful musical relationship with it. That would suggest that I spent a fair amount of time adjusting pitches to bring about the sheer musicality of that combination.

  The sordid truth is that, yes, I was expecting to need to do that, but to my surprise there was nothing I needed to adjust in the layer tunings to make chimes and flies play beautifully together (of course with the odd perfectly okay deliciously wayward moments). Much of that comes down to how I came up with the motif to start with.

  When I started experimenting towards a possible new Nature-Symphony, the first thing I did was to set up the bamboo chimes as two layers in a new project in Audacity, and listened to some short sections of those two after reducing them both to half-speed and thus an octave lower than original, to see if their sound suggested any possible compatible motif to give the flies and aeroplanes. When I applied some cathedral reverb too, I was really struck by the beautiful play of tones and harmonics, and they quickly brought to mind the primary motif in the dance-like movement 2 of my Symphony 1. I was then confident that an adaptation of that motif would play really sweetly with the chimes, at least given a bit of wholesale up or down adjustment of the flies or the chimes. The real surprise was my finding that such adjustment was unnecessary.