Again in common with the use of individual sounds, space can function structurally to delineate the form of the work. The opening of Boomtown is a good example, where the sound of a mill hooter is heard in one speaker after another, gradually filling the room with activity.

Clearly all these approaches to space interact so that the structural and the representational in the above example coexist, the emergence of a representational space at the beginning, for example, performing a structural role in relation to the rest of the piece.

Furthermore the existence of a representational space, a sense of realism, creates a situation in which a lack of realism takes on a strong structural significance. A good example of this is the moment after the May Day Parade when the story of the Peterloo Massacre is related on all the wall speakers against an increasingly abstract background on the four corner speakers. This occurs at a point in the structure toward the end of the piece and its quite traditional climactic role (a sudden unison after the complexity and counterpoint of earlier sections) is emphasised by the very lack of realism in its spatialisation. Surrounding the listener with duplicates of a single voice may create a feeling of internal dialogue of more global significance than merely one woman’s memory.

This passage is worth discussing a little further, as the story being told is in fact two stories intertwined. One is the story of the Peterloo Massacre and the two frightened children being rescued by a stranger. The other is the story of the three year old having to work in the mill, cleaning out the equipment while it was still running. These stories both have significance in terms of the oppression of working people in 19th Century England and illustrate the need for political reform at the time. However both stories also have an influence on the possible interpretation of the following sounds, a re – emergence from abstraction of the sounds of mill machinery. At a seminar I played the work to a small group of people. In the following discussion the group was divided between those who interpreted the ambiguous sounds in relation to “the soldiers on horseback cutting people down” and those who related them to the young girl cleaning the machinery in the Mill. I myself for the first time had enough distance from the piece to fall into the former camp although this relationship had not been explicit at the time of composition. Thus a metaphorical meaning emerged from representational material due to its structural proximity to the two interlaced stories.