Commissioned and first performed by the London Sinfonietta under Sian Edwards on 6 February 2022 at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre.

 

It’s little known that the ethnomusicologist and folksong collector Alan Lomax carried out fieldwork in the South Wales valleys. He’s arguably best known for recording the North American folk music that fed the folk revival of the 1960s, yet his interviewing of former miners in Treorchy Miners Club in 1953 offers a remarkable insight into a now extinct way of life. While Lomax has to be commended for saving the stories and songs the miners set down on tape for future generations, a dispiriting absence from the fieldwork is that of women. Of course, when we think of ‘mines’ we think immediately of ‘miners’ who we automatically imagine are men, even though some women did work in the mines.



Away from the mining itself, the work done by women on the surface was as vital as that of the workers underground. The work was predominantly unpaid domestic labour – shopping, cooking, laundry, raising the children – with some families managing to supplement household incomes with odd jobs, sewing, or taking on extra laundry. They were not completely disconnected from the subterranean work, however, generally repairing and cleaning the miners’ work clothes, often well into the nights.



The need to bring attention to this forgotten workforce was seen by the London Women’s Film Group, whose associates Mary Capps, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Edwards, Mary Kelly, Esther Ronay, Susan Shapiro and Humphry Trevelyan combined forces to make ‘Women of the Rhondda’ (1973). This twenty-minute documentary was among the first feminist films shot in the UK. Where Lomax’s recordings occurred in a noisy drinking hall, the Women of the Rhondda recordings are calmly radical in the uncomplicated way the four subjects are interviewed; in their own homes sitting on floral-patterned sofas with mantelpieces topped with family photos. They pull no punches, however, being incisively articulate with opinions sharpened by the thinking time that hours and hours of lonely repetitive work in the home allows. It’s worth noting that the loneliness was something that struck me on getting to know these recordings; with children old enough to be in school and men amidst the camaraderie of the mine, women would spend most of the working day alone with perhaps just a radio for company.



The way these oral histories relate to The Echoes Return Slow is that everything the ensemble plays is a transcription of song or speech from the two sources. And, on top of this music, we’ll hear the interviews. Whilst musical transcription is a fairly common idea, speech transcription is less common, but essentially the same principle applies where you listen to a passage of speech and write down in musical notation the pitch and rhythmic content, as well as any interesting features. As you’d imagine, speech is somewhat more complex than music, musically speaking, and so it’s helpful to use computer software to slow down recordings and isolate the particular pitches someone has used on particular syllables and the unique phrasings and inflections of a specific person. It’s worth noting, too, that you often realise someone has been speaking in a musical key, or using only a few intervals, or that one phrase in a sentence is, in its rhythms or pitches, a variation of another.



But while it seems something of a clinical, almost scientific, means to get musical ideas, the complexities of the starting material mean it’s very much an art, not a science, and a task where one makes choices about what to prioritise. Quite how detailed you make the transcription is a real question too. You can think of how most folk songs you might buy in a book of ‘traditional tunes’ are written very simply (just crotchets and quavers, in musical speak) but in reality would never be sung so austerely. My goal in this piece was to bring into the transcription as much detail as possible, yet keeping the notation within the realms of playability – to bring into the composition all the rhythmic details and harmonic inflections (read: the singer being out of tune), the ‘grain of the voice’, if you like.



For example, there’s a song (listed as ‘Unidentified Welsh Ballad’ in the Lomax archive) sung by Tom Thomas (according to Lomax’s notes, ‘76, small, bald, rosy, grey-haired’, and the miner you’ll hear first) that the ensemble ‘learns’ through the course of the work. Thomas’s poor intonation is not ignored, but brought right into the harmonic vocabulary of the piece: an F# that’s very often sung flat.



All this – the music and the speech/singing – comes together to form the work. The various stories of both archives have guided the loose narrative and the transcriptions have given the ensemble its music. There are times when the ensemble is playing music derived entirely from the speech that plays above it, other times when the situation is more complex and layered, where someone is accompanied perhaps by a song we are yet to hear that might chime with the current speech. In all, the men and women talk of good times and bad, characters notable for being ‘friends of the working man’ or in one instance someone who’d be lynched should he visit Tonypandy, of a society split down the middle by gender, of their hopes and dreams, and of arguing for better pay and conditions. In the end, though, these are universal topics. They’re as relevant to South Wales now as they were then. As relevant to South Wales as they are to anywhere in the world. The key thing is that for all their topical differences and a twenty-year age gap, the two archives share a huge amount. My work, in the end, is really what happened when I let them commune with one another, with the hope that perhaps they might together speak to something even greater. Speak to something of the present and by extension our collective futures.