Summa: diary (March 15-21, 2025)

I’m constantly astonished by how much can be achieved with only a modicum of ability.

March 15 (Saturday). 7.15 am: Upward. 8.00 am: Woods-ward.

Now that Spring is nearly upon us (officially), my Saturday ambulatory beat will alternate between the Promenade and Parc Natur Penglais. En route, I stopped and listened again to the sound of streams and rivulets in the dingle, in advance of the next composition. At the summit of the Parc, the town lay before me resplendent, like an elaborate relief map. I traced my walks up Great Darkgate Street; left, down Terrace Road; left again, down Eastgate Street towards Pier Street; and right, onto Great Darkgate Street once more.

10.30 am: A side project: an exploration of micro-field recording using a stereo Dictaphone, an external condenser microphone, a pop filter and a wind shield, a camera-stabilising handle, and a modified smart-phone grip. Yet, still cannot exclude the thunderous bumps of even the smallest hand movements. This may yet prove to be a fool’s errand.

March 16 (Sunday). 9.30 am: An ambulation to the Municipal Cemetery, where the crows gathered in the surrounding trees to establish nests.

3.00 pm: Borth. In a certain light, the beach and the Irish Sea have an intrinsic painterliness: close-tones of different hues set against high-tone contrast; a spectrum of neutral colours, from red-grey, through yellow ochre-grey, through monochrome grey, to blue-grey; and a thin, wet film and impasto-like ripples, left by the outgoing tide.

March 17 (Monday). St Patrick’s Day. At least one scholar has advocated that Pat (the patron saint of Ireland) may have been born in Banwen [blessed, or white, summit] in the Upper Dulais Valley, Glamorgan, Wales. The Welsh painter and coal miner Cyril Ifold, who lived closeby, at Glynneath [Glyn-nedd], painted the coal tips at Banwen in the 1950s. Of a certainty, 9% of my DNA is Irish.

Cyril Ifold, *Banwen Tips* (c.1950s) oil on board.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Writing and admin, including the dread university account password change. On this occasion, the system required me to upload a photograph of myself as proof of identity, because my username — which Information Services used to inform me that a change needed to be made in the first place — wasn’t recognised. (Sigh!) At least the contrivance of the new password was relatively straightforward today. No more repeated rejections because, for example, either it reads like: ‘the Serbo-Croatian word for theodolite’, or ‘Y6er+$S?ghs7′ is too similar to an actual word’. (Which word? WHICH? Tell me!) I suspect that my ‘honorary staff’ status may have been the spanner in the works.

9.45 am: Studiology. New composition: subterranean springs and heavy rain. Fast flowing water sounds too much like white noise only — undifferentiated from either heavy rain or a fierce incoming tide. However, the sound of slow gurgling water summons the identity of a spring or small stream, unambiguously.

1.45 pm: I added my recording of electronic ‘gurgling’ (which sounds more natural than nature, to my ear) to the acoustic samples. Tomorrow, I’ll return to the composition with fresh ears. 2.25 pm: A review of Friday’s endeavours, followed by ‘free-play’ with prepared brass-band samples of a dismal sound quality. (I always a welcome that challenge.) 4.00 pm: An ambulation. 7.30 pm: Correspondence with a friend in need, followed by reading.

March 18 (Tuesday).

I need new passions.

6.30 am: Awake. 7.30 am: A communion, following both Common Worship and The Book of Common Prayer. (I like to make my own sandwiches, thank you.) 8.15 am: Studiology. I returned to the brass-band samples and extracted potentially useable material. This project has turned out to be such a melancholy enterprise. Instinct persuades me that the concluding composition is already decided. I must now develop a corresponding opening for the suite. Keith Jarrett’s Hymns/Spheres (1976) is my model in this respect. He bookends the album with two compositions of exactly same length. They serve as a brace that holds together the intervening improvisations.

2.30 pm: The brass band section was complete (as far as my ears could tell, presently). I listened again to the choral fragment, which substitutes for one of the hymns at the mass funeral in another composition. (The sound is made of material — transformed beyond recognition — from a 78-rpm recording of ‘Jesus Lover of My Soul’ (sung to Joseph Parry’s hymn tune ‘Aberystwyth’.) It struck me that I was listening to heavenly, rather than earthly, voices. 4.00 pm: An ambulation through town and along the Promenade in the Spring afternoon sunlight. A tonic.

This year will be the 65th anniversary of the coal-mining disaster that took place at Six Bells Colliery, Abertillery, in 1960. 45 miners lost their lives. Six Bells is on my home turf. The village is situated at the southern-most perimeter of Abertillery. I was one year old when the underground explosion (caused by the ignition of firedamp) occurred.

Six Bells Colliery, Abertillery, Monmouthshire, Wales (c.1900-10) (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

When I was conducting research for the Miner-Artists: The Art of Welsh Coal Workers (2000) project, I visited John ‘Chopper’ Davies at his council house in Blaina, Monmouthshire, Wales. John was a prolific self-taught artist and a former miner at Six Bells Colliery. Had he not swapped shifts with a fellow worker the day before the explosion, John and I would never have met. His life, too, would have been snuffed out. Forty years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the disaster (June 28, 1985), he was making a drawing from memory of men shoring-up an underground tunnel at the colliery. At exactly the time when the explosion took place — 10.45 am — John recounted:

My arm went numb. I couldn’t control the crayon. It was like someone else had my hand.

Once the limb had returned to normal, John could see a figure close to the centre of the composition that he had no recollection drawing. The ‘ghost’ in the picture, the artist believed, represented the spirits of the departed coal miners. (In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, characters experience a paralysed arm at pivotal moments of spiritual intensity.)

John ‘Chopper’ Davies, *[untitled]* (1985), crayon on paper & detail.

L S Lowry painted Six Bells, Abertillery, South Wales in 1962, just two years after the disaster.

March 19 (Wednesday).

‘Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth’

8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Writing. 9.15 am: Studiology. The Six Bells Colliery disaster is haunting me, too, now. ‘Is this a distraction or an opportunity, John?’, challenged the inner-tutor. I revisited the ‘watery one’ (as I refer to it internally), which I’d begun on Monday. For the first time since the beginning of the Aberfan [working title] project, I addressed the other of the two hymns sung at the mass funeral: ‘Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep’ (to the tune of Buckland). The source on which it’s played sounds like the type of upright piano used in school halls during the 1960s, where pupils gathered for morning assembly: boxy, reverberant, and not a little out-of-tune. The initial trials of the transformed sample sound promising: plaintive and evocative.

1.45 pm: A walk to the pharmacy on the hill on behalf of a family member. On the way home, I stopped off at the local hospital visitors’ cafe. (My ‘local’, as cafes go.) It does the best and cheapest hot chocolate in town. 2.15 pm: On with the ‘watery one’. Each composition must have, at the very least, a shadow of foreboding.

My friend, the artist, Wayne Summers introduced me to the Welsh painter Geoff Olsen, recently. He was from Merthyr Tydfil and was, like me, educated at Newport College of Art (and elsewhere). Olsen was 16 years older than me, and died from leukaemia in 2007 at 64 years of age. Some of his most accomplished works were made in his final year. That’s as eloquent a testimony to his commitment and passion as one could wish for. (I shall return to his work at a later juncture.)

The jazz composer, band leader, and trumpeter Miles Davis was 65 years of age when he died. Pablo Picasso was Davis’ equal in the realms of visual art and, likewise, one of the most significant innovators in his field. However, by the time both were in their 60s, neither was pushing beyond the boundaries and reinventing themselves any longer. Davis, nevertheless, kept busy, doing — what were for him — new things, as well as collaborating with younger musicians. Picasso, for his part, became a paler and paler echo of himself.

Peter Buitelaar, *Miles Davis*, North Sea Jazz Festival (c.1980s) & [Anon], *Pablo Picasso* (1969) (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

It wasn’t their age that stymied continued innovation. Rather, it was their longevity as artists. Both had set out on the road to their careers when young, and were active for many decades during which they applied themselves with rigour and changed the landscape of their respective arts. You can only do that for so long and so many times. Some of the coal miners I researched became artists only after they’d retired. Thus, they’re most productive and ground-breaking years began during a period in life when many other artists were on the wane.

March 20 (Thursday). The Spring Equinox.

8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Studiology. A review and revision of yesterday’s composition. The ‘watery one’ is 80% complete. What is wanting will be known, in due season. 11.00 am: Bring on the thunder! I’d returned to Noisome Spirits (2021) territory: a landscape and narrative represented by sound alone.

1.30 pm: An ambulation. I came from the darkness underground, beneath the base of a coal tip, where spring water flowed, into the Spring warmth and sunshine. (The warmest day of the year so far.) It felt like a burden lifted.

2.15 pm: I lay aside the ‘watery one’, and listened to several fragments in search of a composition. While adjusting a brass-band piece (with the working title ‘Hymn 1’), a conceptual breakthrough was made. This will, if acted upon, have ramifications for the suite’s structure and rational. Oddly, I’d unconsciously rediscovered an approach to historical narrative already deployed in Penallta Colliery: Sound Pictures (2022).

March 21 (Friday). Aberfan [working title], and the composition that will grow alongside it, are memorial works. But its very doubtful whether either will contribute to any public commemorations. They don’t posses, what one might call, a ‘popular form’. Statues, murals, plaques, poems, and music do. Often, works made in these mediums are conceived to have a broad appeal. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s done exceptionally well. Good public monuments must first and foremost be good works of art, and only then embody the event they commemorate, and articulate the sentiments of the community. Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is a case in point. The work is a response to a very different type of disaster: the German Nazi and Italian fascist bombing of a town in Basque Country of northern Spain on April 26, 1937. It’s an exceptional work of Modernism; indeed, of art of any style and period. While the atrocity Picasso memorialises (rails against) is geographically and historically specific, his painting transcends these contexts: Guernica represents horrors of Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, and of wars to come, too.

Pablo Picasso, *Guernica* (1937) oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Domestic chores. 9.30 am: Correspondence and advice to a friend and co-worker in sound:

When I was a newbie lecturer, a senior academic advised me about developing a research profile: ‘Don’t do the same thing for too long. Vary your output’. But that he meant, don’t publish just books, or just chapters and articles, or just present conference papers, or just make exhibitions. There’s a danger that in focussing on one type of output for an extended period of time, we forget how to excel in the others. My advice to you is to mix major and minor activities, and maintain a balanced diet. By the same token, don’t have too many plates spinning at the same time.

9.45 am: Studiology. I reviewed the brass-band fragments and made final adjustments in order to regularise pace. 10.30 am: I returned to sound manufacture: clicks, sputters, hiss, whines, and bumps.

2.00 pm: For now, the machinery of the coal-mining industry is my turntable. The winding wheel and the record ‘go round and round’ (as the song goes). An ethereal sound arose that quite took me by surprise.