Summa: diary (February 8-14, 2025)
‘What kind of man might I have been’.
High ideation, great ambition, and masterly control. These are what we’re aiming at.
February 8 (Saturday). Curiously, the final day of last week’s Summa: diary didn’t send with yesterday’s post. The problem has now been remedied. 8.30 am: Not so much as an ambulation as a protracted consultation with the very patient and professional assistant at the pharmacy about why securing a repeat prescription on all my medicines has become like one of the Labours of Hercules.
9.45 am: Studiology (with a restorative mug of tea in my hand). The aim for the morning was to complete two further studies for the Eye-earpiece [working title] exercise and, in so doing, to convert what is ordinarily background into foreground. 1.00 pm: Completed.
2.00 pm: To the Arts Centre, where I attended a play in which a friend of mine (and former Director of Finance at Aberystwyth University), Stephen Forster, was acting. Aberystwyth Arts Centre Community Theatre (which deserves its own website) presented The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. The play is based on a sizable book by Kate Summerscale, published in 2008, which, in turn, is based on a true story about the murder of a three-year old in Wiltshire, in 1860. Staging the replay of the main characters’ multiple timelines, and preoccupying a largish company of actors on stage, would be a formidable task for any director. One of the themes that underlie the retelling of this mystery is Victorian doubt about the investigative methods used by the police at that time. Twenty years later, Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character Sherlock Holmes represented a forensic and psychological counterpoise to the largely interview-based and clumsily inconclusive evidential approach that Inspector Wincher deployed. Stephen’s performance summoned, to my mind, a snaky charm and self-absorption that I associate with the British actor George Sanders.
February 9 (Sunday). St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London (where I ‘attend’ each Sunday) has dismantled the organ in readiness for a new one as part of community’s ambitious Wren Project. The organ case is made from carved and gilded oak by Grinling Gibbons. Remarkably, it survived the damage caused by enemy bombing during the blitz on October 14, 1942. The church was designed by Christopher Wren three hundred years earlier, in 1642. The YouTube broadcasts will be transmitted by cameras placed elsewhere in the building, until the scaffolding is removed.
February 10 (Monday). 7.30 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studiology. Accidently, I mixed-down a version of the fifth study with too many active tracks. It generated a random composition that incorporated elements from all for of the previous studies and, as such, was far more engaging than the mix that I’d made on Saturday. ‘A keeper’, as they say. ‘A replacement’, I say. It didn’t escape my attention that the chaos I’d been seeking to marshal into shape in studies 1-4 had reasserted itself at the conclusion of the project as a collaborator in composition. (Pause for thought.)
Enough! The studies were uploaded to my Studium site:
Studium is an aural depository comprising samples, exercises, illustrations, drafts of, studies for, residues from, and isolated components related to past and current sound-art projects.
Since 2024, the contents of Studium were commuted to the John Harvey: Sound site. Periodically, further transfers will take place. 1.00 pm: Complete.
1.45 pm: ‘Stop!’ Reckon. Plan’, the inner-tutor advised. What, now, needs to be undertaken? And what no longer does? Solemn Sounds [working title] has, for all intents and purposes, been absorbed into the Aberfan [working title] project. The electronic voice phenomenon project can remain on the back burner for now. No more sound composition for now, in any case. I returned to study and reading.
3.30 pm: A review of Affirmation: the 8th and latest release in The Aural Bible series. How quickly I outgrow my own work these days. I can no longer feel the labour pains. The short form structure of the suite (tracks not exceeding 4 minutes and 30 seconds), was due to their shear number (16 in total). Henceforth, this duration will be regarded as an inhibiting factor. Furthermore, Aberfan [working title] must define itself against what has gone before. ‘Break the mould, John!, insisted the inner-tutor. The palette needs to change, substantially.
February 11 (Tuesday). 8.00 am: Domestics and preparations for the day ahead. 9.00 am: Studiology. I’d been a little perplexed at my cool response to some of the sound projects I’ve been engaged with since 2024. Familiarity breeds contempt, and I’m jaded following a protracted period of composition — in order to meet deadlines — that began in November of last year. Compositional practice needs to lie fallow for a while. Nevertheless, this is an appropriate time to reacquaint myself with the character of The Aural Bible series in toto, in particular. It is not a time to rush to judgement. ‘A sober estimate’ (and a far less prejudicial frame of mind) is required. ‘Listen to yourself, John!’, the inner-tutor encouraged. It has been ten years since the release of R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A — the first album in the series.
11.00 am: A coffee and searching discussion at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, with the author and performance reader Julie Brominicks. We’d met after an over thirty-year hiatus at Trevor Sewell’s funeral last week. She’s preparing a review of Peter Lord’s curated exhibition ‘Dim Celf Cymreig’/’No Welsh Art’. Like me, Julie believes that an engagement with the critical sensibilities of others sharpens our own perception, and either challenges or confirms our assumptions and ideas. I enjoyed her anecdotes about my British Landscape module, which she’s attended when an undergraduate student. It ran at the School of Art in the 1980s and 90s. Her recollection of the module was sharper than mine. Even though I must have delivered the lecture series at least 15 times. The audience’s response can be markedly different to the presenter’s experience of the same material. Me … I wouldn’t have crossed the road to hear it.
1.45 pm: I listened to Noisome Spirits (2021) album. I’d advised Julie that this might be an appropriate starting point to engage my sound work, given her commitment to the landscapes of Wales and its border with England. She kindly gave me a copy of her book The Edge of Cymru: A Journey — a historical travelogue and much else beside, I imagine. This will be my travelling companion when I return to South Wales shortly.
2.45 pm: I continued listening to and making notes on The Aural Bible series until 4.45 pm, when I ventured into town to celebrate a birthday in the family. I don’t usually name the establishments that I eat and drink at, but this one is an exception. Arabic Flavours, Aberystwyth, was established by Ghofran Hamza. She was one of a number of Syrian refugees we’d welcomed to the town some years ago. At the time, so I recall, her stated aim was to bring good food to the people of the Aberystwyth. And didn’t she just. Undoubtedly, the best meal I’ve had in the town.
February 12 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I took up what I’d put down yesterday: returning to Penallta Colliery: Sound Pictures (2022). The Aural Bible series is based upon objects, texts, and found sounds with historical, religious, biblical, industrial, and supernatural themes that are often centred on Wales — its landscape, culture, society, and beliefs. Some years ago, the ‘Welshness’ of my work was considered too provincial by those who assessed the quality of research in UK Higher Education. Had I been based in England (and, better, London), writing and making things with an anglo-centric focus, the criticism would not have arose. There was little appreciation that Wales is a separate country with its own traditions, research contexts, agenda, publishing and exhibiting structures, and concept of relevance. I stuck to my guns, and did only what I wanted to do.
Re-listening to the series albums, I’m struck by how ‘pictorial’ and evocative of landscape so many of the compositions are. In my mind’s-eye, I see 19th century engravings of biblical scenes and black and white photographs of the area where I grew up, taken before I was born by family members and friends of my parents.
12.00 pm: I’ve had quite enough of John Harvey’s sound work. Studyology. I pushed on, for the remainder of the day, with reading and filing online articles relevant to the book.
February 13 (Thursday). 7.30 am: A communion: a reckoning. 8.30 am: Studyology. Reading and writing: theology and orality. My mind’s too thick with thinking. ‘Push on nevertheless, John! There’ll be respite shortly’. The cold chills and distracts. Silly, mindless, and ill-informed articles distract. I don’t think theologically, or politically for that matter, when making things. Theologies are theories about God, and humanity and the Church too. They’re disputed, many, and varied. They’ve has never helped, creatively speaking. Artworks are, to my mind, self-governing. They develop in response to both the directives of the artist and their own internal logic and necessity. When I’m making, I’m not thinking about God too (unless distracted). Which is not to say that some of mine are devoid of theological and political content.
4.00 pm: I ended up at the railway station, hoping to catch what would become the 4.27 pm back to Birmingham International. It failed to arrive at 4.20 pm. My enthusiasm for the comings and goings of trains is a residue of my childhood. There’s a poetry to railways. They’re sites of brief encounters, lovers’ separations and reunions, first and final meetings of families and friends, and of places that you’ve never either explored beyond the station platform or expected to stop at.
Yes, I remember Adlestrop
Edward Thomas, ‘Adelstrop’ (1914)
The name because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontendly. It was late June.
February 14 (Friday). My mother’s day. 6.30 am: I awoke with my mind in a dizzy spin. (Was that part of the dream?) In that dream, I was in my basement searching for small, old, unfinished, and rather mediocre paintings of mine. Someone suggested that I devote a year to painting, exclusively. (Should I be listening to this?)
On this day, I invariably listen to my memorial portrait of Mam, And also a Beloved Daughter (2014).
9.00 am: Studyology. Today, I began to gear-down in anticipation of a short break next week. As I was reading through the few scholarly papers dealing directly with the soundscapes of the Bible, from a biblical studies perspective, I alighted upon a BBC News report on the relatively recent landslip in Cwmtillery — a ward of my home town of Abertillery: ‘Terrifying landslide reminded me of Aberfan’. I read the article and the papers in parallel. I was struck by the acoustic analogy, drawn by one witness, between the sound of the coal-waste’s fierce and dispiriting slide into the village and that of a jet aircraft — a sound which linked two kindred events (incomparable in their devastation), which had occurred in different places across 58 years.
[I] was reading the testimonials from Aberfan last night and one of the survivors said exactly the same thing. When they were in school, they heard it coming and it sounded like a low flying jet … I never thought in a million years that my daughter would hear the same sound that those children must have heard on that terrible day.
It has never before occurred to me that this dreadful sound was the last those who died in the avalanche heard.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice