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.

Premiere

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