The first draft of what became for a ¹ took longer than 35 minutes to read; but its starting point was an invitation to perform ² for no more than 10 minutes!

I was doubtful that I could produce a satisfactory text by cutting to that extent. I decided, therefore, to take a longer view, making one or more studies. Such studies would either constitute the work or lead to a new making of the entire first draft. Sketches 1 & 2 use some only of the material.

The bulk of the material of that first draft was taken from what survived of my email correspondence with Alaric Sumner. A little other material has been added. All of the material has been rewritten. In making the tape for my own realisation, I added verbal comments. These are not recorded here.

Originally, my title was A Hum for Alaric Sumner and that remains as a subtitle, and built into the text. Humming is an image from a poem sequence from the 1970s of which Alaric published the first section as Mutation. Through that action, which he did with a small volume of considerable physical beauty, he encouraged me to continue with the sequence and to publish a second volume, Morning Humming, where the image of humming first appears. And that image remains in my usage, more than 20 years later, an activity between speaking and singing. For me, in this usage, it is an action of vitality whilst retaining its casual and background qualities.

Naming the speaker was a problem:

Voices has everything going for it except lack of pretension.

Person would work, but I don't want to emphasise the a unified individual.

Man might have done for when I performed it because the text is particular enough; but I would rather not stress that particularity and "Man" might connote Everyman and I do not wish to do that, not even Everyperson.

One has problems. There is the supposed oddity of using "one" instead of "I", caught up in class images; but One suggests the isolation which follows the death of another. The "I" of the text is sourced from 2 separate sources and is spoken by tape and live voice. Because the text is specific, coming up with a common name is not on and I cannot choose between Alaric and Lawrence.

One is probably the best solution. It was the name I had in mind during the realisation of Study # 1 although my hand-written score said "A Voice".

What I wrote as a score for Study # 1 is not what I did. What I did, close to but divergent from Study # 1 is, therefore, Study # 2. What is published here, is somewhere between the two.

Lawrence Upton

(1) This title emerged as I began this sentence, on the way to Dartington

(2) at as held at Dartington College of Arts on 1^st June 2000