Below Ground

for Baritone & Piano

Total Duration: 20'

I - Prelude

II - Ah, You That Breath the Upper Air

III - Interlude [Piano only]

IV - Workers Song

N.B. This can be performed as individual movements, or as a complete cylce.

Commissioned by the Welsh Music Guild as part of the Paul Mealor Prize for Student Composers in 2022.

Below Ground is a reflection on my Welsh heritage, as well as family mining background from

the Cwm Valley. The song cycle explores the theme of news and reportage through various

points of history and perspectives; taking extracts from King George the Sixth to poetry

published in newspapers, written by miners in Wales and Cornwall in the 19th Century. As

someone who grew up on brass bands and mining stories from my Grandad, these songs

offered me the opportunity to learn more about the rich history of mining communities, giving

me insights to their day-to-day life. As such, I wanted this to inform the overall structure of my

song cycle, where each movement offers a different perspective on miners. When researching

texts and discovering a wide variety of source material, this cycle suddenly became a personal

project. After reading the miners poetry, I recalled memories of my Grandad (whom this work is

dedicated too), and the initial working life he went through before pursuing a career as an

operatic tenor.

To me, it was important to capture the danger associated with this profession. Miners would

often risk their lives in poor conditions and wages in order to provide the necessary fuel to keep

the country functioning. This led to me using the more chromatic and darker aspects of my

musical language to convey the poetic unrest and disquiet amongst the workers.This is reflected

in the initial two movements, where the speech of King George VI recounts a mining disaster in

the Welsh Village of Senghennydd in the early 20th Century. In contrast, the initial miners poem

in movement two, entitled ‘Ah, You That Breath The Upper Air’ , reflects on the danger of the

work and the ignorance of the upper classes at the time. However, I did not want this piece to

be one-dimensional and focus purely on the political anxiety of the times. Therefore, the final

movement entitled ‘Workers Song’, takes form as a folk-song. Invoking the traditional songs that

miners might have sung during their journeys to and from the mining pits.