Once again, the theatrical element is paramount. Crumb suggests, "impractically," that the music be "heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August". The scoring, employing two of man's oldest instruments, conjures up a primitive, timeless aura; there is a brief quotation from Debussy's Syrinx, interpolated into a passage for the flute that also calls for the performer to speak a few lines by the eighth-century Chinese poet Ssu-K'ung Shu, while still playing the instrument ("The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.")

Over a pianissississimo tremolo in the bass drum, the flute intones a Pan-like song that gradually grows ever more agitated. Sensing this, the drums respond to the flute's emotional state; they burst the bonds of the tremolo to punctuate the melodic line in barely controlled outbursts and send the flute skittering along in a flight of flutter-tongued fantasy. The hysteria soon subsides, the drums recede, and at the end nothing is left but the flute, musing softly on a pair of tritones -- the devil's interval. In George Crumb's universe, the black angels are never far away.