Summa: diary (August 22-28, 2026)

If an audience doesn’t appreciate your efforts, then, the last thing you should do is blame the work.

August 22 (Saturday). 7.00 am: I encountered a glitch when uploading the daily track for the 144 Variations album. This morning’s had ‘0 bites’. (No content.) The track had to be recomposed from scratch. 9.00 am: Completed. This was the 85th release. So, I’m well over halfway to completion, on October 20.

Since returning from North Wales, I’ve focussed on the next sound project (based on Shrewsbury station) and associated grant applications, while waiting for a publisher to make their response to my book proposal. At this time in the year, company and institutional staff are on holiday. So, there’ll be no prompt response to my queries. Thus, progress proceeds at a glacial pace; patience is required. The new project has extended its historical boundaries from 1888 to 1907 (and beyond). In the latter year, on October 15, a night-train crashed at Shrewsbury station. 18 people died, but only 17 were ever identified by name. 2027 will be the 120th anniversary of the crash. Thus, I have an unknown person (from the crash), a non-existent person (Thomas Thomas, MP and ghost), and a known person (Arwel Hughes, a composer) at the heart of my endeavour. Death and tragedy remain the inescapable themes of my work … for now.

9.30 am: A later than usual ambulation along the Promenade. Beside me a middle-aged man walked and drew in a small sketchbook. Admirable. Phone cameras cannot compete with the experience of looking intently and in-time that drawing affords. What he saw, however poorly rendered, will remain in his memory and imagination for a long time. Whereas, my fleeting photographs will be forgotten almost as soon as they’re taken.

The bright clouds were reflected in the near-still sea.

10.30 am: I was behind on correspondence with friends a far off. 11.30 am: I wrote up the notes on the new project that I’d made during this last week. 2.00 pm: Further project admin, followed by reading the tribunal’s 48-page report on the Shrewsbury train crash.

August 24-27 (Monday-Thursday).

‘There’s a storm coming-in’, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991).

I’m going through a period of poor sleep, waking every half-an-hour from deep sleep, before returning to ‘what dreams may come’. 7.00 am: A review of last week’s work in order to establish the agenda for this week’s priorities. I returned to the uncalled-for presentation on the two Aberfan albums, for the day.

A funding deadline looms. I suspect that I’ll not meet it, due to both the complexity and far from resolved status of the proposal, and the unavailability of potential collaborators, who are on holiday. I’m disgruntled by much contemporary arts funding. Often, a component of public participation is called for by the funders. I appreciate the principle that public funding requires publicly-accessible outputs. (Something for something, as it were. It’s all political.) However, there’s a danger that the incorporation of a ‘soft-collaboration’ interface between the artist and the audience will skew a project’s intent.

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching documentaries about the playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter (who owed a great deal to Beckett, in my opinion). They began their ‘projects’ (a description of creative activity that would’ve stuck in their throats) without any discernible objectives. Words begat words begat sentences begat paragraphs begat ideas beget themes. They each took a long walk without a map or any sense of where they were heading until they arrived. Funding applications, on the other hand, require the artist to know their destination even before they’ve set out. This skews the process. The want of money can compromise intent.

I discussed these dilemmas with my friend and former colleague Dr Dafydd Roberts over coffee at the Arts Centre on Wednesday. He’s one of the university’s Research Officers, and also a sound musician/performer. Which makes him ideally suited to pointing me in the right direction for sound-research funding. Dafydd practices electronic improvisation — a mode of spontaneous composition that follows its own nose. (Who knows where it goes.) We’ve worked together only once. The upshot of our meeting was several suggestions about funding organisers that were hands-off, and didn’t require a project to include an audience sing-a-long.

Wednesday afternoon, I interrogated one of my daughters-in-law — who works in secondary education — about the protocol for contacting schools with view to potential collaboration. If I must engage the public as part of my new project’s funding bid, then, it’ll be on my own terms, and within my own sphere of competence as a teacher. And schools may be grateful for the input, at no cost to themselves.

The provision of music in schools today is appallingly underfunded and limited. In not only my but also my sons’ day, music departments received the staff and resources they needed, and were augmented by peripatetic tutors who covered a wide range of instruments. I failed my way through the e-flat horn, the trombone and, finally, percussion (for which I had a very modest ability). And I sang in the school choir too, until my voice broke. My secondary-school music department staged annual performances for family and friends. It was a healthy experience — working alongside my peers — confidence building, and fun (even if I wasn’t particularly good at it).

At the close of Thursday, there was thunder. And such a thunder. It was neither close nor far away, but everywhere overhead. And here’s the thing … The rumble didn’t decay, but continued unabated, like a low-frequency drone, for nearly three-quarters of an hour. I’ve never heard the like of it before. ‘The voice of many thunders’, emanating from many different places simultaneously.

August 28 (Friday). 6.30 am: I know their names; those who’d died.

5 were from Wales. 4, from Shrewsbury. Besides the dead, 33 people were injured in the accident. The train was travelling from Manchester to the West of England. 8.00 am: I began fashioning my first attempt to create a coherent narrative linking the unconnected events from the period 1887 to 2027. 140 years of history. This would be the day’s determination. Writing finds the golden thread that runs through even the most apparently discontinuous sequence of ideas.

1.30 pm: An ambulation and shoppery, while the sun still shone. The bank holiday visitors were a little thin on the ground, still. For families, this weekend would be their last blast before school begins in early September.

7.30 pm: I was, for the first time this Summer, aware that the evening light was declining sooner and more swiftly now.

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; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice