Philip Goddard: Nature-Symphony 77 (Threnody for a dying planet)

Описание: Nature-Symphony 77 (Threnody for a dying planet) — Not likely to flourish in the popularity stakes, this profound four-layer work seems overall to be near-static, yet always slowly seething with inner change, both actual and implied. Three of its layers paint a landscape now shrouded in a terminal sadness, through which the planet's beauties are still trying to shine, while one layer ('The Blues' chime) shines out now and again with its inherent radiance and apparent sense of trust in one's imminently 'moving on' and reincarnating in some far-beyond planetary system.

Overall, an uneasy ambivalence presides, with much 'creative dissonance' when the radiant and the despairing parties are roughly in balance — but to those truly with 'ears to hear', even those more dissonant patches have their own intense sort of beauty, which lies in the constant morphing of dissonant intervals and chords into sweet consonances, which in turn morph into dissonance again while other consonances are emerging.

Chimes used

(Layer 1)
** Davis Blanchard The Blues chime — 8-tube galvanized steel chime, tuned to a Blues scale.

(Layers 2–4)

** Woodstock Gregorian Chimes (tenor) — 6-tube, tuned to a bright and seemingly pretentiously upbeat-sounding Gregorian chant scale (which sounds quite different and sort-of 'twisted melancholic' at such low pitches as here).
** Woodstock Chimes of Pluto — 5-tube, moderately high-pitched, tuned to a radiant-sounding pentatonic mode
** Woodstock Chimes of Polaris — 5-tube, high-pitched, tuned to a radiant-sounding pentatonic mode
** Woodstock Chimes of Mercury — 5-tube, very high-pitched, tuned to a radiant-sounding pentatonic mode
** Woodstock Chimes of Mars — 5-tube, very high-pitched and penetrating, tuned to a a motif on a scale I don't recognise

I made both recordings by the Hunter's Path, on the rough steep slope just below Hunting Gate, high-up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. The Gregorian plus smaller chimes were recorded as an ensemble on 19 March 2014 at Sharp Tor, and the The Blues chime was recorded on 16 February 2017.

For fuller details, especially about deployment of the layers, please see this work's Freesound page, https://freesound.org/people/Philip_G... .

Advisory

To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones.
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My Nature-Symphonies are, at least in my experience, a new type of music composition, whose nature and origin has interesting parallels with some of the most inspiring works of Iannis Xenakis through effectively being stochastic (probability-generated) music, and his tendency to create electroacoustic works in which natural sounds and real live instruments are used as a starting-point for transformation in meaningful ways.

Note the hyphenation of 'nature-symphony', because it's important. These are NOT any old type of symphony that is 'about' nature, but are a new type of symphony-type music that is originated and played by 'Mother Nature'. My role as composer, therefore, is as a sufficiently aware and 'deeply connected' enabler, facilitator, and recogniser of what choices have truly 'clicked' and mean something, so that I'm motivated to gather together those inspirational gems and to present them in a meaningful way.

For fuller notes about this type of music work, and the transformations used, see my relevant playlist (   • Philip Goddard: Nature-Symphonies — nature...   ).
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Images used
These are AI-generated to my text prompts in Bing Image Creator (DALL-E3), and outpainted from square by Neural Love. I added the artist's canvas texture. I didn't specify any particular style for these images.
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*The composition, video and original recording are the Composer's COPYRIGHT, licensed under provisions of *Creative Commons — Attribution*.

The audio is CD quality (16-bit, 44100Hz).