September 1, 2017

8.00 am: A communion. 9.00 am: My work diary is beginning to fill again, now that September has come around. The countdown to the beginning of the new academic year begins. Shortly, I’ll be moving into academic preparation mode. But first … . Having completed the digital to analogue transfer of the sermons, I continued, in the background, to perform an analogue to digital transfer of the Scourby vinyls. I’ve now reached Proverbs. In the foreground, I trawled through the first of the four sermon recordings, again with a view extracting samples of the preacher’s vocal ‘musicality’ (hywl) and salient phrases related to Psalm 23:


‘The Lord is my shepherd’ (Ps. 23.1)

I’ve wondered whether I should record the ambient space along with the sounds external to the chapel when I work there in November on the composition. The sermon recordings captured ‘events’ associated with the context – noises that would probably have not registered with the congregation during their audition of the sermon and, if noticed, then, would certainly not have been remembered. They are like scenes rendered incidentally at the periphery of the ostensible subjects of photographs – hardly noticed, perhaps, by the camera operator at the time the photograph was taken, but just as present for all that:


‘Porthcawl Bay 1947’

The closer we approach, the less we see; the details of reality dissolve into pure forms. Who were these people? What was there relationship to one another? Where had they come from? Who among them is still in this world?

12.00 pm: An appointment with the dental hygienist and a return to our on-going disagreement about the virtues of electric toothbrushes. I’m convinced that the device’s vibrations impair the integrity of older fillings. To me, the logic is compelling; and my experience bears it out:

After lunch, I moved onto the second (and longer) sermon. I concentrated on extracting the many and contrasting speech acts proclaiming ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. By 4.30 pm, I was at sermon 3, with a good deal of material already gleaned from its predecessors. While I listened, I responded to the report by the audit team following the recent departmental quinquennial review. (We had a commendation of ‘excellence’.)

Ruminations from the seat of self-defeat and reasoned restitution:

7.30 pm: On with the remainder of sermon three. (It’s been a long day in church!). I’ve reached ‘I shall not want’. There’s significant wow and flutter and speed deviations at some points on the tape. Recording was touch and go in those days.

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