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The Enemy Within

The title of this work is taken from Thatcher’s speech to a private meeting of the 1922 Committee of the Conservative Party in 1984, in which she drew comparison between the threat of striking miners to that of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands:

In the Falklands we had to fight the enemy without; here is the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.

(Thatcher M, The Collected Speeches, London 1997)

The piece is as much autobiographical as it is political. On one level it is a lament for cultures and communities which were decimated in the name of a flawed ideology; having grown up in a mining town my sympathies lay firmly with the miners. Additionally, during the extended period of its composition I was not only diagnosed with epilepsy but also struggled through the turbulence of separation and divorce which gave the title and the theme of inner conflict an increasingly personal edge. I began composing in 2004 but the score was not finally completed until the autumn of 2010 owing to the epic scale of the work – it spans some twenty minutes - and the level of my personal involvement with the subject matter but also because the dramatic shift in my circumstances forcefully demanded a re-evaluation of my musical language; as I progressed felt that I was having to re-invent myself with every note I wrote.

The music was originally to be cast in four movements, each prefaced by a descriptive title - Landscapes, Strata, Hymns, Orgreave - but in the finished work they were combined into two large scale movements with the four ‘musics’ re-distributed to form a sort of ‘mosaic’ structure in order to avoid any suggestion of conventional narrative or suggest a romanticisation of the subject. The scoring for brass band reflects the subject matter; the band’s dark and melancholy timbre becomes a significant structural element.