Summa: diary (November 11-15, 2024)

I enjoy sounds that transport my heart and mind to another place and time.

November 11 (Monday). Armistice Day.

9.00 am: Writing. Over the weekend, I gathered information about television technology in the 1960s. In those days, viewers watched programs on either BBC 1 or ITV. (Just two channels. And they didn’t broadcast throughout the day either. But that was considered sufficient.) My parents had a black and white, 4:3 ratio, cathod-ray tube set, operating on the 405-line system. We couldn’t receive BBC 2 (which began broadcasting sixty years ago) until we upgraded to the 625-line system and a colour television. One of the contributors to the invention of the cathod-ray tube was the nineteenth century English physicist and chemist Williams Crookes. In the 1860s, he was also involved in an examination of spiritualist mediumship and spirit materializations.

I’ve often wondered about the extent to which painters of monochromatic abstractions in the 1960s and 70s had been influenced by the television technology they’d been exposed to. The first abstract image I encountered was the off-station static (visual white noise) on a black and white television screen. In part, this was a residual trace of cosmic background microwaves produced by the Big Bang. Thus, arguably, it was the most sublimely far reaching — in terms of time and space — image imaginable.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my initial experience of the Aberfan disaster was mediated through television. Inevitably, the technology will play a part (in ways that aren’t apparent at this stage) in the conception the project’s audio and (notional) visual development.

11.00 am: The remembrance. 12.00 pm: Studyology. I began reading Gaynor Madgwick’s Aberfan (2016). 2.00 pm: A review of the project. Whatever the many merits of the various musical tributes to the disaster, they don’t (to my mind) evoke the darkness, muck, horror, and utter chaos of the tragedy. No doubt, this was not their intent. However, these aspects justify an acoustic articulation. 7.30 pm: An evening reading.

November 12 (Tuesday). It’s far colder today. 8.30 am: Correspondence. 9.30 am: Studiology. I began work with the 78-rpm recording of ‘Jesu Lover of My Soul’ (one of two hymns sung at the mass funeral held for the disaster’s victims) — gathering material in forward and reverse mode, and at normal and severely reduced speed and pitch.

The tune to this hymn is by Joseph Parry (1841-1903), and named ‘Aberystwyth’. He was born in Merthyr Tydfil, which is situated nearly 5 miles north of Aberfan. In 1864, Parry became the first Professor of Music at Aberystwyth University (formerly the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth). From 1874 to 1880, he lived in the house directly opposite mine. I also held my wedding reception in the university hall named after him.

The photograph (below) was taken by John Thomas (1838-1905).

John Thomas, ‘Dr Joseph Parry (Pencerdd America, 1841-1903)’ (c.1875) Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

1.45 pm: An equalisation and mastering of the sample extracts from the morning’s recordings, all the time listening to what is taking place within the sound. 3.00 pm: I started to assemble online photographs of the disaster.

The death of Frank Auerbach was announced today. My first encounter with his work — ‘in the flesh’, as it were — was at an exhibition of new figurative painting held at the Saatchi owned Boundary Gallery in the late 1970s. (It closed in 2011.) This was at a time when the term Postmodernism came into vogue in the UK, and was used to describe a movement in painting that made a deceive break with Modernism and heralded a return to figuration. You could smell his paintings long before you could see them on the gallery wall. Beneath their thick, turgid, and sumptuous surfaces, the paint was still drying. If ever you need to be reminded why reproductions of artworks are woefully inadequate, then, seek out an Auerbach. His paintings are objects before they’re images — an embodiment of translating, stating, and restating, often over a considerable period of time. (Years, in some cases.) Like Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud, Auerbach had been neither a Modernist nor a Postmodernist. He stood apart from ‘isms’, and single-mindedly pursued a figurative-expressionist trajectory in the European tradition, with unwavering commitment throughout his very long career.

November 13 (Wednesday). 7.00 am: Colder still. ‘Stir yourself, John!’, the inner-voice barked. 8.00 am: Writing. 9.15 am: Studiology. I began processing the photographs and maps that I’d secured yesterday.

‘Map of the Welsh village of Aberfan, showing the extent of the spoil spill in the Aberfan disaster of 1966’, Ordnance Survey (1967) (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

I’d not appreciated how extensive the spoil spill had been. The slurry had taken out not only Plantglas Junior School but also part of the adjacent senior school and 16 terrace houses on Pantglas Road and Moy Road. The black and white photographs were taken by local and national newspaper photographers, as well as two Magnum photographers: Ian Berry and David Hurn. (Hurn’s renowned Documentary Photography department was situated on the opposite side of the corridor, and directly outside my 1st year studio at Newport College of Art in the late 1970s.)

My visual memories of the disaster were not formed by photojournalism. Rather, I recall only the blurry, low-contrast, low-resolution, burnt-out, blue-grey, 405-line fragments of the BBC’s live television coverage. Some of the film footage is accessible on YouTube, along with an intriguing example of sections comprising a British Movietone news release covering the mass funeral, labelled ‘The Final Tribute — No Sound’. But there is one; it’s the sound of the film track on which no audio content had been recorded. The final footage would have been edited and overlaid with commentary and music. I based my album Penallta Colliery: Sound Pictures (2022) on one of British Movietone’s film essays.

2.30 pm: Following a short ambulation, I spent the afternoon eking out fragments of historic sounds recorded at the site of the rescue, and the proximate area.

November 14 (Thursday). 6.30 am: ‘One misty moisty morning when cloudy was the weather’, to quote the old nursery rhyme.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Corresponding, writing, updating. A quandary many are in, presently: Should I withdraw from X [formerly Twitter] or muscle it out the vain hope that either membership numbers will decline and force Musk to put the platform up for sale, or he’ll fall out with Trump and put his propaganda machine into reverse. In the meantime, I’ve established an account on Bluesky (@johnharveyaber.bsky.social), if I need a place to land after I’ve jumped. While in the ‘Valley of Decision’, I shall be posting to both platforms in parallel.

10.30 am: After much wrangling with downloads, usernames, and passwords: studiology. Having spent several days looking at photographs and film footage of the disaster, I reviewed photographs I’d taken of my own school, which I attended at the time of the disaster. In 1987, I found a way into the, by then,derelict infant and junior schools, and recorded the interiors of the rooms and spaces that were still accessible. Both buildings were earmarked for demolition shortly afterwards.

Assembly Hall, British Infants School, Abertillery, Wales (1987).

1.45 pm: Ambulation and egg hunt in town. 2.15 pm: I began translating some of the photographic and film-still image files into sound files. On this occasion, I explored the potential that details taken from the photographs have to generate sounds that are sonically distinct from those of the whole.

November 15 (Friday). The day’s first sip of hot tea is for me a petite ecstase. 8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. Image-to-sound conversion continued. The longer I engage with this process, the more I understand the relationship between the bit size and codec used to convert the photographs, and the sounds’ texture, pitch, and length. In some cases, there’s a curious (and possibly fortuitous) resemblance between the visual appearance of the sound graphic and the source image.

11.00 am: More hot tea, while listening to songs by Petula Clarke, who was born on this day in 1932. She grew up in a village near Merthyr Tydil. Her grandfather was a Welsh coal miner — likely at the Merthyr Vale Colliery. It was this pit’s management that oversaw that dumping of coal spoil above the school in Aberfan. Her music never fails to take me back to my childhood in the mid 1960s, my home town, and visits to London with my parents.

I’ve used the conversion technique in its raw state occasionally in the past (including the recent Delta Width Variable (For Daphne Oram) track.) For this project, the raw sound will be processed on the studio rigs. 12.00 pm: Before beginning this stage of development, I converted the sound files that I’d derived from image files back into image files (which now bare no evident relationship to the source), and these image files, in turn, into sound files again.