I listened to several recordings of religious radio broadcasts that I’d made in Colorado Springs in 1999 for the Aural Diary. These have, in part, inspired the sound projects that I’m presently engaged with, some fifteen years later. Nothing is ever either wasted or meaningless. But sometimes ideas are seeded long before their fruition. Before putting ‘Image and Inscription’ ‘in the can’, as it were, and pushing on with the analysis, I returned, for one last time, to the opening section of the composition. My insecurity wasn’t founded upon any objectifiable dissatisfaction with the piece. It felt vulnerable, because this was the first section that I’d evolved (one which has been, nevertheless, redressed several times already in the light of the subsequent sections). I just needed to check, for peace of mind. Now, I’m satisfied. Finally, I tweaked the bass response of the low drones at the beginning of section two, before closing. (This will make my auditor’s ears rumble.) The adjustment restored an idea that had been lost. (In the creative endeavour, good stuff sometimes gets pushed out by other good stuff, as Homer Simpson might say.)

On, then, with the analysis and description. At this point, I’m facing the same challenges as our PhD Fine Art students: to distance myself sufficiently from the creative process and artefact to interrelate, describe, explain, critique, and evaluate both. In parallel, I remastered the completed mixes of the composition for MP3 compression (which removes an alarming 90% of the original sonic material).

In what ways can the sound composition be considered a hermeneutical inquiry? In what sense does it provide either an understanding or an interpretation of the source text? What contribution can the methods of musicology make to this discussion? And, are these appropriate questions in the first place?:

A will read a cross-section of music criticism on biblical oratorios. Although, I suspect that I already know what I’m likely to discover.

In the evening, I pressed on with the Aural Diary migration and cataloguing, closing at 2001. There’s a little more to do, but the recordings made beyond that year were produced digitally, and are already entered into the system:

Much happy remembrance of family holidays, the children when they were learning to talk and developing personalities, and the ambient sounds associated with settings for contemplation.

After work, I watched a documentary on the composer Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016). He came from a working-class background in Salford, Lancashire, and went on to produce some of the most demanding music of the twentieth century. The cultural limitations and social deprivations of our upbringing should never excuse us from aspiring. Indeed, they may be the blesséd goad to such. Your background is not your foreground.