AUGUST: I would like to extend my greatful thanks to Dr.Peter Boizot, chairman of the Peterborough United football club (Posh) for allowing me to conduct my residency at the stadium and for sponsoring the event. I further thank the management for their cooperation in making the project possible. Thank you to Messrs. Hands, Gledhill, Plummer, Borrows and to Scott.

The early weeks of August were quite beautiful for me as I grappled with the structure and musical materials to get the project started. Eventually, I decided that, since there are four sides to the stadium, there should be four tracks - one for day-time, one for night-time, another for windy weather and one for rainy weather. At no time should more than one track be heard except at the moment of fading in a change of track. Simple rules for playing each track will need to be worked out in due course. All tracks will start at the same time and run concurrently.

Each of the four tracks consists of four palindromic sequences of sounds composed carefully using techniques I have developed in previous work and which I call forcefields (further information on my pages on the sister site for the Electro Acoustic Ensemble on www.eae.org - follow inks with my name).

There are eleven members in a football team and I spent a lot of August composing eleven short elements for three of the forcefields. The numbers 5 and 7 assumed some importance and one of the forcefields explores five elements only.

The first track to be composed was 'day-time'. Each of the other tracks is composed according to the durations of each element in the day-time track. Signal-like passages are common to all tracks.

The unstable nature of most of the sounds is intended to heighten the tensions expressed by space marked out and identified by a building.

The idea for the rain and wind tracks came while considering that both weather events create a noise on the listeners' ears. Since most of the music is to be soft and intended for a reverberating sound system it occurred to me that repetition of the elements could play a leading compositional role. Hence wind consists of most elements (all except the signals) being presented twice in succession while rain has repetition, together with a certain licence for development of elements.

For night I considered that night-time matches are well lit - I saw light as an interruption to night. The track consists of many brief silent interruptions to the flow of the sequences. Apart from signal-like sounds, there are other converges between the tracks but these are usually not intended to be obvious and are unlikely to be noticed by the listener. Their use is to lend further structure. The tracks are scored in detail under each other on over ninety pages of A3 size score.

SEPTEMBER: Originally I had hoped to input the musical information using software but practical considerations (the time required would run into months) led me to play the information in live on a keyboard. The daytime track was recorded in Hull on the week-end of 23rd-24th September.

OCTOBER: Instructions for Performance

Start either with Day or Night - as is appropriate.

After about four or five minutes, fade into Wind or Rain depending on the weather conditions. Should it be windy and raining at the same time,Rain should supersede Wind. ( The Rain track is a little 'heavier'in density of sound and should be heard more easily above the noise which rain may make. )

In a complete performance it would be ideal to return to Day ( or Night ) towards the end, regardless of the weather. This return should be approximately two to three minutes, or longer.

The work is subliminal and hence volumes should be very low but may need adjusting during performances depending on the amount of noise from the crowd. It is only at points where a fade takes place that more than one track may be heard for about three or four seconds. It is not intended that more than one track should be heard for long.

21st OCTOBER: The morning was very fraught - three colleagues were coming down for the performance by car in very difficult rain conditions; half way through the morning they managed to contact me from the roadside after they had been involved in a near collision and their car was stuck in a field. Mercifully, no one was injured but there was the ever present possibility of shock and of being stranded. It should explain that one of the group, John, was bringing a vital cable link to make it possible to connect the sound mixer to the main amplifier in the stadium. Shortly before meeting two members of my production team, Dhillan and Paul, I was much relieved to hear that the car had been pulled out of the field by some passers by and that there was actually little damaged. The party continued the thirty miles journey to Peterborough.

The performance could proceed and the Day track was begun shortly after 2.30pm, closely followed by a fade into Rain. The piece finished some ten minutes before the kick-off. During half time the piece was played again although not in its entirety. Again, some seven minutes were played as the crowds left.

As a composer one never knows what sort of reaction to expect but I would have been very concerned had no reaction been recorded. I picked up some choice comments from odd members of the crowd - strongly but honestly expressed! The management received phone calls too. It will be interesting to see how reaction changes later in the project.

On a future occasion I shall endeavor to insert more information into the programme in an effort to bring more understanding.

The piece was intended to float unobtrusively just above the noise of the crowd but it is possible it came over a little too clear at times -it is very difficult to judge the noise level of a crowd assembled throughout the terraces but efforts were made throughout.

December Phase 2 ! It seems unfair to approach the busy Tesco centre during the pre-Christmas rush - something I had been warned about by the centre management. If I were to be ready with a piece of work in time it becomes clear that I would have to create the piece with minimal contact. I hope that I can still arrange a presentation to the staff and the thirty or so businesses in the mall during or after the performance. So what did I mean by 'recycling' ? When I finally got down to the composition it became obvious that the word could mean almost any rewrite - even unrecognisably changing notes and structures. Eventually I felt it was better to keep many of the sounds recognisable. Again the piece became structured into four sequences ( forcefields ) but the last of these is heard only once as it is really a coda. The first three sequences use ten elements each - it seemed that this was a way to marry up the approximate number of businesses in the mall to a feature within the music. A further compositional recycling came out of a need for an obvious link between the two pieces as they would be running at the same time - one in Tesco's and one in the mall. One track eventually came to contain mostly high,'bleep'like sounds while the other, more unusually for me, uses lower and often more sustained sounds. The latter direction came out of a comment made at the public presentation in November by young architect Jason Zaccariah who suggested sustained sounds as a way to develop the slim and long dimensions of the mall. I felt at the time that this would not work but, here you are, Jason, I hope this gives justice to your remark. As in Phase 1 there are many signal-like convergences.

January, 2001 The Night-time track is finally recorded in Hull on Thursday January 4th. The score to Phase 2 is finally completed in mid-January and recorded on Saturday, 27th. Tuesday evening, 30th, sees a second performance of Phase 1, this time starting and ending with Night as the game was an evening fixture. The only other track played was Rain. The announcer, Bob, very kindly introduced the piece and invited the public to sit and relax and enjoy the piece almost like entertainment. I sat among the spectators as the seats were filling but heard no remark,adverse or otherwise. Has my music become accepted ? Or,perhaps,it is just not as strong as I had hoped ? A part of the piece was played again while the spectators made their exit. The next evening match performance is planned for Feb.20th.