Summa: diary (March 22-27, 2025)

I am a catalogue of errors, flaws, and failings.
‘You cannot keep picking up the question, only to put it down again. Decide!‘

March 22 (Saturday). 8.45 am-1.00 pm:

March 23 (Sunday). 9.30-10.30 am:

March 24 (Monday).

‘The night has passed, and the day lies before us’.

7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studiology. Over the weekend, decisions were made and light was received. I also came across a commercial calendar for 1911 — the year after Merthyr Vale Colliery began tipping coal above Pantglas Junior School, Aberfan. Typically, the calendar is overprinted with the name of the business proprietor. It would have been given gratis to regular customers around Christmastime. (In my experience, only Chinese takeaways maintain this tradition.) The image is entitled ‘The Heavenly Choir’. In the light of what was to descend upon Aberfan over fifty years later (not to mention the losses to the community that resulted from two world wars), the image’s sentiment is a prescient consolation.

9.30 am: A review of the material sampled on Friday, and an extraction of what might prove serviceable. Amid the pounding of industry, I heard angel ‘voices’. A sea-fog crawled over the town. 10.45 am: An extraction of the ‘voices’ from amid the reverberant thuds and rumbles on the sample — which cast my mind towards the scene of children and teachers entombed beneath the coal slurry. 11.15 am: Some preparations for my weekend in London. 11.45 am: Sunlight burned away the fog. (A metaphor.) Every weekday, from my studio window, I can hear the sound of children in the playground of a primary school nearby. I strongly suspect they’ll enter one of the compositions.

Who is The Dreamer? — A Tribute to David Lynch has been released. My contribution to this compilation album is the track ‘Where We’re from, the Birds Sing a Pretty Song. And There’s Always Music in the Air (for David Lynch)‘.

2.00 pm: On with composition dealing with angel ‘voices’. There are times, and this is one, when the 3-minute time limit seems too short. But this is my sonnet form; everything has to fit within 14 lines. 4.00 pm: An ambulation through the town and across the Promenade. Some young people braved the 10°C [50°F] temperature in bathing costumes.

March 25 (Tuesday). 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Writing. 9.00 am: On with the angel ‘voices’: compressing the timeline; finding the composition’s shape. The governing idea is that of a consoling presence in the midst of acute suffering. It’s a theme that underlies Entombed – Jesus in the Midst (1974), by the Welsh artist and former coal miner Nicholas Evans. Both the painting and Evans featured in my book Image of the Invisible: the visualization of religion in the Welsh Nonconformist tradition (1999). The scene shows four miners trapped beneath the surface by the fall of a roof. Christ is present in the guise of a miner-rescuer, to bring comfort in extremis.

11.00 am: I completed the ‘voice’ elements as the sea-fog returned, and began extracting explosive sounds from last week’s explorations on the smaller rig. I’m listening for sonorities that evoke the sound of activity on the surface of the slurry, as it might have been heard by those still conscious beneath. By 1.00 pm, a draft of the composition was concluded.

1.45 pm: A Lenten lunchtime reading: Psalm 103.105. 2.00 pm: A review of the morning’s work and the ‘watery one’ — which is a companion to the piece I’m working on presently. 2.45 pm: An initial consideration of an adjunct project. I was ‘Summoned by Bells’, to quote the title of the English poet John Betjeman’s autobiography. 3.50 pm: We may have a ‘goer’: a solemn sound. 4.00 pm: An ambulation down Llanbadarn Road, up the Avenue, and into town. I was reminded of Carel Fabritius’s A View of Delft (1652).

March 26 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Correspondence, studio maintenance, and weekend preparations. 8.45 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s work. I sense, in respect to several dimensions of life, that I’m returning to origins — those of my research interests and practices, childhood experience, and the historical events surrounding it. A circle of activities and associations is being completed. Thereafter, new beginnings will beckon.

9.30 am: Townward for a haircut, visit to a bookshop, shoppery for dinner, and travel advice at the railway station. 10.45 am: Studiology. Campanology: adjusting the decay of six different church bells (which will be superimposed, one on another) t0 6-seconds duration each; and further research on bell-peal patterns.

2.00 pm: For an hour, I edited, assembled, disassembled, and superimposed the recording of my interview with an eyewitness at Aberfan. The outcomes may never be used, but they’re there in the archive. 3.00 pm: I charted the permutations of a 6-bell peal. It progresses by a simple procedure of substitution. In the diagram below, the first row shows the six bells in numerical order. In the second row, the positions of the first and last bells are swapped. In the second row, the second and penultimate bells change positions. And so forth, for the next four rows, until the order of the first row is re-established in the seventh. Six distinct permutations in all. The process was previously explored in a composition entitled ‘The Conversion of St Paul’, on The Bible in Translation (2016) album.

March 27 (Thursday).

I can imagine it, but not in this world.

7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Travel preparations. 9.00 am: Studiology. I returned to the adjunct project, to sculpt the six superimposed bells (which now sound as one) by bathing the samples in reverberation. This serves both to mellow the source and position the sound (illusionistically) at a distance from the ear. After all, our customary experience of hearing either a single or a peal of bells is at some remove (unless you’re a bell ringer, that is). Moreover, the peal (due to the mechanics of the pulley system, along with variations in the attentiveness and aptitude of the ringers) is uneven. This, too, has to be replicated in the composition. Approximation, rather than exactitude, is called for.

Strangely, the lower the tone of the bell the longer it appears to chime, relative to the those that have gone before. In the tradition of bell ringing, the digital samples are arranged from the highest to the lowest note. The notes descend by an interval of one semi-tone. The relationship between the tone and perceived loudness of the notes is also instructive, with the lower tones appearing to sound marginally less loud than the higher, at the same volume.

1.45 pm: I endeavoured to remove digital artefacts that result from a combination of overlaying the notes (and their harmonics) of six separate bells, and varying the pitch and length of the samples. 4.00 pm: Packing and tidying.

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