9.00 am. Email correspondence dispatched, I continued the weekend’s review of the British Landscape exam scripts and recording marks, in general, in readiness for second and external examiners. Close to noon, my vicar sent me sad news about the, not unexpected, death of Bill Williams. He was 95:

© Jenny Lovell / Royal Society of Chemistry

Bill was a lecturer at the Edward Davies Building when it was a Chemistry department. Indeed, he was the last man out of the building when the department closed, only to reopen again as the School of Art. He was member of the congregation at Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth. I’d often sit next to or near him, and serve as his human walking stick as we shuffled to and from the communion rail. He’d sometimes be seen playing the piano in the double gallery as part of his informal quartet. (Bill was an accomplished pianist.) He took every opportunity to return to his blesséd ‘EDB’. And, in one sense, it had belonged to him. His efforts, during his time as a lecturer in organic chemistry, to ensure that the building was fit for purpose were legendary. He was a gentleman of the old school: private, unassuming, courteous, gracious, and a with a memory and intellect that had remained intact to the very end.

12.30 pm. I needed a distance (a pause) from assessing, and returned to my CD booklet’s text. It’s not intended to be a long document. But it requires me to step back from the project a great distance in order to see the whole, summatively and succinctly. This was a hard slog.

Over lunch, I made a few modifications to Pedalboard III, replacing a fuzz and a tuner pedal with something at one and the same time different and the same in each case:

After lunch. ‘The Wilderness’ section of ‘Image and Inscription’ had been bothering me for a long while. Something … one thing … was amiss. Sometimes it takes an age for the mind to articulate a problem that either the ear has been hearing or the eye, seeing. As with many aspects of life, discerning the answer is relatively straightforward; determining the question — now, that’s the challenge.

By mid afternoon, I’d returned to the CD text. It had begun to move again. Now, I’d more of an instinct for what needed to be left out. The excised material will form part of the extended discussion and conference paper, further down the production line.

Evening. I returned to ‘The Wilderness’ to finalise my modifications to the internal track balance. Would the casual audient be able to recognise the improvement? Probably not. That’s irrelevant. What mattered was that I could hear the deficit as clear as though it was a cracked-brass bell:

So the first composition to be made was the last to be finished. Which is so often the way with things.

My alumnus audient had, some weeks ago, conveyed their initial responses (‘feedback’) to the completed suite of compositions. I’d been tardy in my reply, and determined to remedy my discourtesy in an email:

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. A period of busyness has prevailed. Your remarks were neither known to me nor obsolete. Indeed, they were very fresh, pointed, and much appreciated. I knew you could be trusted to read the programme notes. The match between the narrative and the sound is only partial. Not all the incidents in each passage of text were sonified. The tracks would have been too unwieldy and literal had I not focussed on the key features only. I desperately tried to avoid illustration. My approach was to create metaphors. Evocations. (You’ll recall that this was the advice I gave you in relation to your own work, last year.) 

You can listen to the compositions on either headphones or loudspeakers. The tracks are balanced for both. Your practice of listening to them with your eyes closed is worthy. That’s the best way of ‘seeing’ the landscapes, internally. I guess the ‘futuristic’ quality of some passages is, in part, due to the technology of transformation. Nevertheless, you’re right. It’s also the result of appropriating the past and casting it into the forms of the present. But that’s always been the case with biblical art. Look how Gustav Dore re-imagines the biblical texts describing the Mount Sinai episodes; he presents his vision in the vesture of 19th century engraving techniques. 

I’m astonished that you can still attain an alpha state while listening to this stuff. What goes on inside that head of yours? I liked your observation that the compositions blur ‘the lines between image and sound’. I found that to be genuinely illuminating and encouraging.