Coal Lines, a collaboration

Coal Lines is part of the opening exhibition at the new WX Wakefield multifunctional space, with a spectacular light sculpture, "Sentinel" at it's centre. Coal Lines is a complimentary piece of work, an artistic collaborative response to the sculpture, which explores the history of coal mining in the Wakefield district, with an emphasis on the use of canaries in the mines, as canaries are the inspiration for the sculpture.

My role in the design of the Coal Lines collaboration was as the “sound artist / composer”, to create and piece together everything that you can hear at the exhibition. Tony Wade, the artist on the project, gave me the list of the 34 pits, and the depth of each of the mine shafts for those pits - I plotted these out on a graph.......

the original graph for Coal Lines (complete with a miscalculation - note 33)

...and overlaid a treble and bass stave with the highest note just below ground level as a top F (which is the note on the top line of a treble stave) and the lowest note (which was 742 metres down), in the gap immediately below the bottom of the bass stave, which happens to also be an F three octaves below. So each of the 34 mines was subsequently assigned a note, relative to the depth of the shaft.

The piece of music I created is entirely grounded in that sequence of 34 notes, used in different configurations. After considering other mathematical possibilities such as the length of the notes, we decided that this would restrict the compositional process, as there needed to be sufficient flexibility to allow a level of musicality and make the piece a pleasant listening experience rather than purely a maths exercise - having played around with the notes in different orders for some time I decided that there were a number of sequences which I could make work musically, so I used three different configurations of the notes (and then a configuration with slightly more artistic licence in the fifth, final section of the piece).

My aim was to craft a narrative arc for the piece, so I chose to portray a day in the life of a mining village and its inhabitants. I divided the day into five sections, or movements, which seamlessly connect to create a continuous 15-minute composition.

1st movement - its night time, and all is still and quiet - as a brass band fades into the

distance, you hear reflections of miners talking about their working lives down the pit (as if in their dreams) - the 34 note sequence drifts around in the background on a solo piano, heard in its original (alphabetical) order……

2nd movement - as the sun comes up you hear each of the 34 notes again, this time in

geographical order from East to West (the sun rises in the East), with a child’s voice

speaking the names of each pit as the sun rises up in that community……

original concept drawing for the notes in "geographical" order

3rd movement - it's time to go to work, and the miners descend the shaft to work on the coal face - it's loud, and noisy, and the 34 note sequence is again heard in a strict rhythmic

fashion, this time in descending order as the tune goes from the highest to the lowest note,

and the lift goes down to the bottom; the mines are spoken out in the order of the depth of each of the pit as the piece descends (this section includes live brass from Sweden, and also Yorkshire).

4th movement - we reach the bottom of the mine shaft, where we hear more reflections from miners, this time talking about their experiences and knowledge of canaries - the 34 note sequence drifts in and out of the conversation (in the original order), along with the sounds of the birds.

5th movement - it's the end of the working day - the finale to the piece as the lift returns the miners back to the surface and back to their communities - we hear some final reflections as the piece builds to a crescendo, including some live brass for the final two stanzas, and then ends with a single canary, reminding us of the sound that miners would hear every day.

The sound-piece consists of the following elements -

• Composed music (all based on the 34 notes derived from the depths of the pit shafts) recorded at my own studio in Mirfield

• Excerpts from contemporary interviews conducted with ex-Miners in preparation for the creation of the work

• Excerpts from archive audio recordings sourced from the library in the National Coal Mining Museum of England, which is sited at Caphouse colliery.

• Authentic canary sounds used with the permission of Marios Theodosis, a canary breeder from Greece 

• Live brass performed by the Yorkshire Imperial Band and cornet player Matt Tipple 

• The names of the collieries in sections 2 and 3 are read by Tommy MacLaughlin (aged 8) and Ken Capstick.

The second part of the experience is interactive; once the 15-minute piece ends, what

follows is a 45-minute soundscape, an ambient piece using some of the original elements from the composed piece. Visitors can interact with the soundscape by playing 23

of the notes. The floor around Sentinel shows the location of each of the 34 pits. You can

“play” 23 of the notes in the sequence in any order, to effectively play along with the

soundtrack, by breaking the beams of the lights shining on each of the pit location floor.