Author: Götz Naleppa
Genre: Sound Art / Sound Composition
Production: Götz Naleppa 2013
Original broadcast: 14.04.2014, Deutschlandradio Kultur
Length: 40:12
Composition: Götz Naleppa
Sound and technology: Götz Naleppa

Content:
The central theme of the composition is Vergil's famous Latin text about bees from his "Georgica". The material is footage of15 bee colonies, from 7 a.m. to noon on a sunny May day in the Westerwald. The concept: text quotations (Latin and German) with unmanipulated bee sounds, chronologically in the course of the day: from early morning (few and isolated), later the lower frequencies when the drones fly, until noon (many and fierce). In between, seven musical variations of 'bee song' - that is, mainly bee sounds processed with extreme filters to make the 'music', the song of the bees, audible. Everything you hear is generated from bee sounds, including the rhythm elements.
The main theme was 'chaos and structure': I tried to find structures in the chaos of thousands of simultaneous sounds, to filter out frequencies, to discover rhythmic elements - to make patterns and 'beauty' audible. The whole piece has become one big crescendo - corresponding to the crescendo of the bee colonies from morning to noon: the beginning is calm and 'idyllic' in the Virgilian sense and then increases very slowly to the 'war dances' of the bees and an end in the present time, which alludes to the worldwide endangerment of the bees and thus also of man.
(Götz Naleppa)

Remarks:
Thanks to the beekeeper Christian Matthey, Westerwaldkreis.
Special prize for sound art at the Marulic Festival, Croatia 2014,
GOLD AWARD of the New York Festival 2014.