The story of Coal Lines - mathematics and music - but is it art?
- Andy Wright
- Feb 20
- 7 min read
I’m fascinated by the concept of choice in art - how does an artist decide exactly what shade of green to put where, how does a sculptor decide how big a piece of work is, or what bit goes where, how does Bob Dylan decide what chord comes next? Playing B minor after the tonic G chord in a song in G major sounds totally different to a C major chord - the mood is different - so why pick one above the other? They both sound ok, how do you “choose”?
So when you sit down to create something new from scratch, and you’re staring at a blank piece of paper, or at a block of clay, or a piano keyboard, where do your fingers go? If you have a brief of some kind, that gives you a start - write me a sad song about a cat that fell out of a tree - make me a jug in the shape of peace - paint despair. There’s loads of scope for artistic endeavour and interpretation in these starting points, but you’ve got some kind of a framework to base your work on.
There are patterns all over the history of music, from Mozart and Beethoven’s development of sonata form, to 4 chord sequences that appear in a million pop songs (e.g. C G Am F), to the 12-tone music of Schoenberg, to the rhythmic patterns in Steve Reich or Philip Glass’s minimalism. What about if you took an apparently unmusical bit of information, in my case, the 34 pits in the Wakefield district and the relative depths of their pit shafts, and used that as the basis for the compositional choices?
The original brief for what became “Coal Lines” was to create something that would accompany the sculpture “Sentinel”, which in itself was an artistic response to the idea of the use of canaries down coal mines. What grounded our artistic idea (the “our” in this case being myself and the visual artist Tony Wade https://tonywadeart.com/) was the relative depths of the 34 Wakefield district pits, in other words the starting point was a table, with the names of the pits and the depths of each shaft. I had an idea for an atmospheric soundscape: I had already made contact with a leading canary breeder and had hours of quality recordings of canaries singing, and I wanted to include both archive interviews from the NCM archive and contemporary interviews with ex-miners, specifically talking about memories or experiences with canaries. I also wanted to include recordings of mining machinery, and I wanted to link in brass band music in some way, although at this point I had no idea how….
Our original concept was to create a multi-speaker soundscape installation with the different elements being piped through different speakers, so that wherever you stood in the space you would get a different perspective and would hear a different element of the whole. This was to be accompanied by visual projections taking the visitor through a day at the pit. As the ideas evolved and we were invited to collaborate with another of the organisations who had submitted a proposal, the technology wizards at Xplor, we devised a new way of making use of the 34 pit / 34 notes idea - Xplor had the technological expertise to create light beams which when broken, would do whatever task you assigned it - in this case, play a note - so the idea of having a soundscape that visitors could “play” was developed. We agreed to replace the projections of old photographs with a giant map of the Wakefield district on the floor surrounding the Sentinel structure, with mats representing the relative position of each pit, and a light shining on each of them - what made the final result even cooler was that Xplor used old Miner's helmets for the light beams......
There are two very different and distinct sections in the music of “Coal Lines” - the bit I just described above is an interactive section, where the soundscape plays out to the room and the visitor can break the beams which play the note relative to that particular pit, thus performing, and with some walking (or possibly running!?) around the space, can create tunes, sequences of notes of their own choosing which contribute to the overall piece. This soundscape is exactly 45 minutes long - the fixed elements (the music, the canaries, the audio quotes from interviews) are the same every time, what is different is the visitor interaction, so if you visited the exhibition several times the experience would always be sonically different, dependent entirely on who was in the room and what they were doing.
After 45 minutes the miner’s lamps which generate the beams are switched off temporarily, and the Coal Lines piece is played through the speakers.
This composed part of the work is 15 minutes in duration, and takes the original concept which accompanied the discarded visual projections idea, of a day in the life of a pit village; this gave me a creative framework on which to build the piece, so I decided there would 5 sections of approximately equal length, which would broadly represent the parts of the day. As the composer, this is the most important part of the presentation.
I wanted to compose a piece that fulfilled the brief that we had set for ourselves but balanced the relatively rigidity of the maths against the desire to create something which was both of artistic merit and also something that would be pleasant to listen to. Even though the basis for the composition is the 34 randomly generated notes, I didn’t want the piece to be as simplistic as just hearing those notes without grounding them in some kind of musicality, so I started to experiment with playing the notes in different orders and different lengths - I wanted each of the five movements to be distinct and different, so I made a series of artistic choices and created the piece as follows -
1st movement - the original order of the notes that I settled on was the original alphabetical list of pits Tony sent to me - I tried different ways of playing these notes in that order, eventually settling on this sequence - I ascertained that playing the sequence over a low pedal F (which is the lowest note in the piece, the deepest pit) worked well - like this…..
This opening section kind of represents the night time, and all is relatively 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).
2nd movement - you hear each of the 34 notes again, this time in geographical order from East to West as the sun comes up over with a child’s voice speaking the names of each pit as the sun rises up in that community - a friend also suggested to me that the voice made them think of the fact that mining tended towards being a generational occupation, so typically the children in the pit village would go on to become miners themselves.
Once that quieter, sleepy section of the piece fades away, we get the 3rd movement - it's time to go to work, and the miners descend the shaft to work on the coal face - the music is suddenly louder and more rhythmic, and this time the 34 note sequence is heard in descending order as the melody goes from the highest to the lowest note (covering three octaves from the F on the top line of a treble clef, to the F underneath the bottom line of a bass clef); this part of the piece represents the lift descending down to the bottom; you hear the name of the pit spoken out as the relative note is played (for 6 beats) in the order of the depth of each of the pit as the piece descends from top to bottom.
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, as they would have been heard down the mine. For this section I interviewed ex miners and also went through the archives at the National Coal Mining museum, searching for references to canaries.
5th movement - it's the end of the working day - the finale to the piece is the only section where musically I have allowed myself a little flexibility from the earlier rules, although both the chord sequence and the melody played by the Yorkshire Imperial Band at the end only contain notes from earlier in the piece, the order of these notes and chords are of my own making - 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 the live brass for the final two stanzas, and then the whole piece ends with a single canary, reminding us of the sound that miners would hear every day.
I'm writing this the day before the installation opens - there are some interesting challenges and as a relatively new freelance artist it's been an enlightening and fascinating process to see and experience how collaborations work, the interactions between artists, venue staff, funders etc, how it all operates - I've learned a lot about my own processes, for example how long things like this actually take to create, and how compromises of all kinds need to happen with a project as relatively complex as this one. Let's see how it goes!
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