John Ewings was one of the few people who claimed to have witnessed the vision of an angel on the battlefield at Mons in August 1914. His account of the experience as a 35-year-old soldier in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers at the battle of Mons is the core element of this work. Ewings was born in 1879 in the village of Sixmilecross, (County Tyrone, Ireland, now Northern Ireland), and his oral history was recorded by the BBC Northern Ireland’s Up Country programme in 1980 when he was aged 101. In order to deepen the overall narrative projected in the work, Ewings’s memory of the angelic vision is anticipated by a prophesy he recalled being given at about the age of ten from a ‘wee man’ — a fairy — while in the countryside herding cattle for local farmers. In structuring this work, I have retained the natural pace, phrasing and cadence of Ewings’s elegant and exquisitely timed storytelling, while at the same time framing elements of his oral history in ways that I hope create a heightened sense of anticipation for the listener. I wanted to encourage a sense that we ‘gather round’ to hear this tale, while the electroacoustic sounds are conjured around it as a kind of web of the reimagined past and the inner processes of memory. Did an angel appear before soldiers on the battlefield at Mons? The idea is generally thought to have developed as a result of wartime propaganda, although the basis from which the specific imagery of the legend emerged is less than clear. Yet, if we pause to reflect on the way John Ewings related the scene, it becomes powerfully allegorical — the angel, he says, ‘was a man.’ It is this symbolic vision of a superhuman, pacifying presence amidst the trauma of battle that I have aimed to emphasise in the closing moments of his account.

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An Angel at Mons was realized in 2014 in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Laboratory at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and premiered in its original 15.1-channel format on April 25, 2014, at the Salle Claude-Champagne of the Université de Montréal (Québec). Thanks to BBC Northern Ireland — the sections of John Ewings’s oral history reproduced in this work are used, reproducted and published with their kind permission.

Composition

• 2014, MTI Research Centre — De Montfort University, Leicester (England, UK)

Premiere

• April 25, 2014, eBuzz: Carte blanche à John Young, Salle Claude-Champagne — Université de Montréal, Montréal (Québec)

Once He Was a Gunner is a radiogenic electroacoustic-documentary work based on the Second World War memories of my father, Alexander Young. Born in Seaton Delaval (Northumberland, England) in 1920, as a child he emigrated with his parents to New Zealand. In 1941 he was conscripted as a gunner in the 5th Field Regiment of the New Zealand Division of the 8th Army and served continuously until 1945. He was at key moments of the New Zealanders’ North African and Italian campaigns such as El Alamein, Minqar Qaim, Monte Cassino, Orsogna, and the Senio River. In Italy the severe, wet and freezing winters of 1943 and 1944 meant that many units of both allied and German forces stayed in civilian homes. It was at one such location in Central Italy that my father met his future wife — my mother — and the work is based on an interview that I carried out with him after revisiting that place in 2005. In the work the interview is presented as a series of vividly described recollections of people, events and places, from Bari to Trieste, connected and framed by an architecture of sound design aiming to evoke the unspoken emotions that lie behind strong memories. The events represented are not in strict chronological sequence, I wanted to offer them in the manner of memories revealed, perhaps through association or as a response to some unknown conversational seed. This is precisely how I grew up, with a patchwork of knowledge about my father’s wartime experiences — sometimes shocking, sometimes humorous. As was the case for many returning soldiers, he talked more about the war as time went on but, hearing these stories fifteen years after recording them, I was reminded of the extent to which the war — or, more precisely, memory of the war — was a current that ran like a river through our family life. For my father and mother, for my sisters and me, it was always there to remind us of why we were together. Once He Was a Gunner is a journey through one man’s experience of the war in Italy — living with civilians, moments of lucky escape, the fear, the camaraderie, the panacea of alcohol, and the sense of loss on returning home.

Once He Was a Gunner is in 26 linked sections.

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Once He Was a Gunner was realized in 2020 in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Laboratory at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). It was first broadcast on October 3, 2020 during the Sound Lounge programme on Radio New Zealand Concert, and presented on March 17, 2022, in a 5.0 audiovisual version — with images provided by the National Library of New Zealand — at PACE Studio 1 of De Montfort University (Leicester, UK).

Composition

• 2020, MTI Research Centre — De Montfort University, Leicester (England, UK)

Premiere

• October 3, 2020, Sound Lounge, Radio New Zealand Concert, New Zealand