A single bassoon begins it, pitched so high the instrument nearly stops sounding like itself — a reedy, vocal thing singing a folk tune from the top of its ladder. That melody is the whole investment: long, unhurried phrases with a swaying gait, so that the ear starts guessing at a pulse before anything rhythmic exists. The space around the line is live and quiet, and for a while the music stays this small — one voice, then soft sustained tones from the low winds beneath it, then cor anglais and clarinets weaving answers around the lead.

The tune stops belonging to one player. It reasserts itself once more over the faint sustain, then disperses into conversation: fragments traded between solo winds, a register drop where English horn and bassoons murmur in their low middle voices, an oboe taking up a plaintive descending figure, quick chromatic flickers passed back and forth like birds arguing. Every exchange keeps the accent of the opening — the winding, graced contours — while handing the material across the choir, piece by piece.

String pizzicatos arrive first as pinpricks under the winds, just past the minute mark, and with them the character changes. Flutes and clarinets had already begun layering; now independent lines multiply, piccolo arabesques spin off the top, trills accelerate, horns swell low beneath the swarm. Dialogue becomes weather. The build runs nearly a full minute without releasing, the layers interlocking with an almost mechanical precision — plucked low strings, busy repeated fragments, shrill upper filigree — while the texture climbs from chamber thinness toward something teeming.

The crest, near 1:48, is saturation: piercing high calls over driving lower figures, the field full to its edges. Then the swarm collapses mid-breath. A single high bassoon is left hanging in a suddenly dry, open space, playing the same kind of line that opened the piece. Nothing in the material has changed; everything in the hearing has. What sounded like an introduction now sounds like something remembered from before the storm — fragile precisely because the ear has learned what this orchestra can do and has not yet been shown mercy.

What follows, around 2:01, is not a clean switch into one dance block but a rebuild from that exposed line into interlocking precision. The ensemble gathers itself in strokes and answering figures, the full weight arriving in pieces rather than all at once. Melodic thinking has not vanished yet; it is being compressed and redistributed, with lines snapping into place until the ear starts to hear less conversation than machinery. The pulse underneath grows steadier and more relentless, but the heavy accents fall crooked, landing where the counting said they shouldn't, so the body catches the tempo and is immediately thrown off it, over and over.

By the later settled drive, around 2:45, the repeated-chord language has taken hold: a single sonority struck and struck again, the orchestra locked into a hard ostinato pocket that is almost danceable because it is so exact. The hammering eases back a step, then tightens again, the lurch turning into propulsion before it releases, drops, and gathers once more. There is no cadence in this window. The last audible fact is the chord still being pounded, another surge rising at 3:30, the sound cut mid-dance. What the excerpt leaves you carrying are its two materials: a folk tune sung at the top of a bassoon's range, and the discovery that a single sonority, repeated with shifting weight, can take that tune's place entirely.