Summa: diary (April 1-4, 2025)
‘Where is the love?’
April 1 (Tuesday). On my return — a postcard from a friend:
Postcards are, in the absence of the sender’s address, messages to which you can’t reply — even to say ‘thank you’. In any case, my friend is presently a moving target on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, which will conclude at St James the Apostle’s shrine in Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. ‘Godspeed!’
7.30 am: Proof of presence:
9.00 am: Studiology. With the energies, memories, and potentialities of the weekend still alive in my heart and head, I regained my poise and reviewed the previous week’s sound work … with clearer ears. I was heartened by what I heard. (Sound is a place of solace.) My habit is to listen to compositions-in-progress at low volume, and to those elements especially that dip below the threshold of audibility. When painting, I would interrogate the image in reduced levels of light to, likewise, observe which passages were of a sufficiently low-tone to disappear into obscurity. Quietness and darkness are synonymous to me.
10.45 am: Having scrutinised the half note-by-half note descent of my six bells, I decided to redo them (twice, as it turned out) — if only to prove to myself that they could be rendered better. And they could. 12.30 pm: The next stage of development was to generate six permutations of the bell changes.
1.45 pm: A protracted conversation with Adobe accounts about a hideous and inexplicable price-hike in their monthly charge for my Creative Cloud account. I haggled. Got a good deal. But life is too short … . 3.00 pm: Bells, again. 4.00 pm: An ambulation in the sunshine.
April 2 (Wednesday). 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: A little email catch-up with friends who’d gone silent. 9.00 am: Studiology: I took up where I’d left off. The permutations give rise to a curious auditory illusion due, in part, to the presence of harmonics above and below each bell’s tonal centre. For example: bell 6 is one semi-tone lower than bell 5. However, when inverted (6, 5), bell 5 sounds lower than bell 6. In visual art, the closest analogy to this acoustic phenomenon (which, admittedly, is not very close) is simultaneous contrast. In essence, the perception of a colour changes in relation to its adjacent colour. For instance, the two central squares below are of the same hue and tone but appear darker and lighter than none another due to the action of the different contextual colours.
10.00 am: I commenced assembling the six permutation sequences, in order: 1-6. The inescapable logic of the composition is that the order of the sequences of permuted bells should also permute (Rows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, then 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, then 6, 5, 3, 4, 2, 1, and so forth.) The completed permutation of all the sequences determines the length of the composition — just over 18 minutes. One of the most appealing aspects of bell permutations is their potential for considerable temporal scale. A six-bell peal has a possible 720 changes; a seven-bell peal, 5, 040 changes; and a twelve-bell peal, and 479,001,600 changes.
11.00 am: I power-walked up Penglais Hill for a monthly (usually) refreshment-meet at the Arts Centre with my friend and former postgraduate student — the artist and educator Saoirse Morgan. We talked shop: landscape, exhibiting, teaching, and (today) Polaroid photography.
12.15 pm: Back at the studio, I listened to Sequence 1 (which compromises six permutations of the six bells). 12.30 pm: I continued into the afternoon generating the remaining five sequences. The combined set was more affecting than I’d anticipated. The slow peal of six bells (called a ‘minor’, appropriately — given the subject of the project) in various permutations and sequences over 18 minutes reduced my physical heart rate, calmed my soulful heart, and induced a profoundly melancholic spirit.
3.15 pm: I set the project aside, and returned to Aberfan [working title].
April 3 (Thursday). 7.30 am: A news round-up of the fallout following the imposition of US tariffs on the rest of the globe. I fear this will not end well for any country. Percentages represent a cold abstraction of the misery that tariffs will inflict on the working class and, in many parts of this world, on those who live far below that threshold. A full cognisance of the sum of suffering in this world at any one moment would wholly overwhelm any one of us. It’s a grief too great to bear.
9.00 am: Sudiology. I extracted elements from the disarticulated and slowed-down piano rendering of the hymn, ‘Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep’. I was walking in the dark, today. But slowly, pavingstone-by-pavingstone, a path is being laid.
1.45 pm: An ambulation and shoppery. 2.30 am: The aim was to complete the melodic line by the close of the afternoon. The resultant piece sounded like a piano being played in the lower octaves, accompanied by a viola da gamba. 4.00 pm: I rested my ears and read for the final hour of the session. I’m endeavouring to finish Peter Paget’s The Welsh Triangle (1979), which chronicles numerous purported UFO sittings (and sounds) at Broad Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 1977. When I was about five years old, I stood on the garden path, where my Dad was weeding, and looked northward towards the bottom of the garden and upward at the still, blue sky, around midday. In front of me, what looked like a solid, regular sphere made of scrunched, glistening aluminium foil, with a diameter of 12 to 15 feet, very slowly and silently rolled in a horizontal line from west to east, several hundred feet above the ground.
April 4 (Friday). 8.30 am: A dental appointment. My dentist is excellent: clear in their explanation, and tender in their practice. The first line from Matthew Bridges’s hymn ‘Crown him with many crowns’ (1851) came to mind, as the upper-left side of my mouth sunk into dull inertia. 9.15 am: Operation ‘coronation’ was a resounding (if expensive) success.
9.30 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s work on the Aberfan [working title] composition. I continued where I’d left off. Today, my aim was to combine elements in such a way as to throw-up problems, rather than provide solutions. The outcome was disquieting. It placed me on the outside of my own work — in the discomfort zone. I would have to mature to appreciate it. But the sounds had opened a door through which I’d not walked before. Whether anyone else would follow me seemed, in that moment, entirely beside the point.
David Bowie once said something to the effect that: if he’d been totally uncompromising in his work, he would’ve had no audience. To my mind, the one composer and performer with an established following who fully committed to the consequences of that rigour was Scott Walker. In the final phase of his creative evolution Walker, who cared little for either the public or critical reception of his work, composed the sonic equivalent of brutalist architecture (of which I’m a fan). He’d begun his career as a pop idol in the 1960s, and subsequently reinvented himself as an avant-garde composer in the 1990s. It was a transformation — one music critic described — as radical as (to stretch the imagination to breaking point) the popular American crooner Andy Williams morphing into Karlheinz Stockhausen.
This week, on several occasions, I’ve listened to Charlie Chaplin’s closing monologue from his film The Great Dictator (1940). While the patterns of history never repeat themselves exactly, the manifestations of evil recur with dull and predictable consistency.
*Feature image by Saoirse Morgan (2025 04 02).
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