Hinugot sa Hangin is a Filipino phrase that means 'pulled from the air'. This piece is a journey through the sonorities afforded by the unique overtones of the carillon, with fluid strings of rhythmic modes and melodies that serve as vessels. The writing began with the thought of the carillon bell's sound, as well as the physical gestures of the carillonneur. Thinking of these two together brought me to certain idioms of my country's gong traditions – to the rhythmic flourishes from the Kulintang ensembles of Mindanao, and to the resultant melodies in the overtones of interlocking gongs in the Cordilleras. It is my first piece for carillon, written in October of 2020 as an entry to the 2021 Franco Competition contest held by The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America.

It consists of musical episodes based on the imagery of lines flowing from a rhythmic mode, twisting into new ones, unravelling, and dissipating. The piece begins with a soft rhythmic motif in the high registers of the instrument that expands downwards as an E octatonic into an embellished melody. The melody then develops into a new rhythmic figuration that descends through whole-tone and octatonic chords upon the impulse of the lower bells, accentuating the destabilizing effect of the lower bells in relation to each preceding passage due to the prominence of their odd overtones. This contrast was inspired by the consonance of the tritone on the bells of the carillon, and subsequently by the prominence of the tritone in both the whole-tone and the octatonic scales. The rhythmic figuration sheds its flourishes and stabilizes into a 'dance' of juxtaposed pentatonic motifs with differing cadential tendencies, soon serving as the bed of a play of melodies in the tonal regions of G and D major. This unravels rhythmically with triplet flourishes, until a new episode featuring a prominent descending melody is heralded by an expanding figure reminiscent of the introductory segment in Kulintang music. The melody is similarly embellished to that in the beginning, with flourishes idiomatic to Kulintang tradition, but twists and bends towards the overtones of the bassline with a growing tendency towards G major. The reintroduction of the bass-impulse figuration introduces another unstable chain of chords that leads to its coming undone into a slow, almost hymnal section, that paves the way for a final dance of rhythms in G major. This 'sours' upon the press of middle C as it gives way to the overtones in the lower bells, slips back into the first rhythm figure onto E minor, and slows down to a close. The performer may accentuate coincidental melodies that appeal to him/her from these juxtapositions of irregular rhythmic figures.

—Jose Antonio Buencamino