To The Red Sky

Sir Thomas Armstrong, a former principal of the Royal Academy of Music and a veteran of the First World War, once stated that there is a falsity about the reporting of all battle scenes. In the face of the most shatteringly etched images of war in works such as Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et decorum est what hope might we then have of truly identifying with the experience of those subjected to battle?

The stories you will hear in To the Red Sky are extracted from oral history recordings held by the Imperial War Museums. With Sir Thomas’s sentiment in mind, the idea behind the work is not so much to use sound (especially electroacoustic sound) to paint a graphic picture of the First World War, but to create an experience bringing us closer to empathy with the sentiments of these very articulate and reflective veterans of war—seeking a kind of mosaic of collective memory. I have drawn together reflections around a broad range of themes, expressed in ways that do not attempt to justify the war’s means or glorify the outcome, but to gather stories conveying images, events and feelings that have remained with these men and women … some perhaps told many times, some perhaps drawn out of deep memory in the moment.

That these were recorded late in the lives of the subjects is important. Distillation in time gives a quality of concentration and gravitas to their reflections. In some cases they are poetic and in some cynical, with a burning and ardently outspoken frankness— but all very real. This quality of directness must be taken particularly seriously in the elderly: when these oral histories were taken, time was running out for them and the vividness of their memory gives us an urgent message—still—to listen. Their evocation of the past remains with us as very something immediate, very human … disturbing and uplifting in equal measure.

To the Red Sky is an adaptation of Red Sky (2014-15) for alto flute, clarinets, piano and electroacoustic sounds, created with the support of Arts Council England and Leicester City Council for the Leicester New Walk Museum’s Leicester Remembers the Great War exhibition, April 2015, performed by Carla Rees, Heather Roche and Xenia Pestova.

The oral history recordings are reproduced with the permission of the Imperial War Museums.