X Years of Reverb was written to agitate and reanimate all the music, voices and sounds that have ever filled the air/soaked into the walls of the space where the music is played. To coax them out of the fabric of the building, so they can be distilled and concentrated into just eight hours.

 

Often, in an old church, air is passing through the same organ pipes (and into the same room) that have remained unchanged for centuries.  Hearing church organs, then, is a kind of time travel - the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient music. In the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, it’s 268 years of time: seasons spent celebrating, commiserating, praising and mourning - all to to the same room-coloured sounds. This time is measured over generations. The rituals of the church are a reminder that - as well as Bibles - churches are the repositories for the parish records that bear witness to all this lived (and lost) life. 

 

In approaching this piece, I was influenced by the classical Indian Carnatic approach to improvised melodies, where new notes are introduced very gradually into a players’ solo: the appearance of each note is so long-awaited, that its arrival is a revelation of a new world opening up. Knowing this introduces huge tension into the experience of listening to Indian music. It’s often meditative music, but at the same time, full of momentum and life because of the tension. Also, within the drone of the Tanpura - the instrument that typically accompanies Carnatic music - there are swirling overtones and harmonics that compound the complexity and beauty of the music. This is a texture I’m looking to reproduce, particularly in the central sections of the piece. 

 

Melodies in Indian music are often thought of as circular, rather than linear – you’re climbing on to a moving wheel, not starting and ending in silence - this is why there’s a sense that  X Years of Reverb begins and ends outside the audible spectrum. Like this, the music passes across the Church in the same way that that the tones of the music pass across the audible spectrum. It’s analogous to how a rainbow is only the narrow range of the visible spectrum amongst all possible frequencies of light.

 

Further influence for the music came from the modern practice of tone sweeps, as used when PA systems are tested in different music venues. In these tests, every frequency is sent into the room from the speakers, and analysed to see how the room responds. Having witnessed this process many times, in a variety of venues, it seems to me that the space is different after the tones are sent: the room has been re-energised, with every corner being visited by a full frequency of sound, and the room’s history of music and celebration has been set loose once more.