Jonny’s Greenwood’s eight-hour durational work for organ X Years of Reverb made its German debut on 24 August from James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy at the Ruhr Triennale. The piece, whose title changes according to the age of the building in which it is performed, was mounted in Evangelische Kirche am Markt Katernberg in Essen as 124 Years of Reverb.
The work, Greenwood says, “was written to summon all the music, voices and sounds that have ever filled the air and soaked into the walls of a room: to shake or coax them out of the fabric of the building, so they can be heard again - distilled and concentrated into eight hours.”
Interviewed in the Guardian, Greenwood described his fascination with the organs in several medieval churches in Italy, which inspired the piece. “The internal parts – what they call the ‘brain’ – are these incredibly complex pieces of technology”, he notes. “These huge machines…were tackling the same challenges of synthesis and sampling and sound reproduction that we struggle with today.” X Years of Reverb is also influenced by the treatment of melody in Indian classical music, where new notes are introduced very gradually into improvised solos: “the arrival of each note is so long-awaited”, Greenwood says, “that its arrival is a revelation of a new world”.
The work received its world premiere from McVinnie and McCarthy at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, at the 2024 Norfolk & Norwich Festival, under the title 268 Years of Reverb; McVinnie and McCarthy also gave the US premiere of the work at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville in March 2025 and gave the Irish premiere in St Canice’s Cathedral, Killenny on 9 August.
McVinnie next takes up X Years of Reverb on 28 February with Anna Lapwood in Manchester Cathedral as part of a focus on the composer’s work from The Hallé, where it will be billed as 605 Years of Reverb.
The focus includes the world premiere of the revised version of Greenwood’s violin concerto Horror vacui, premiered in 2019 by Daniel Pioro at the BBC Proms and winner of the 2020 Ivors Composer Award for Large-Scale Composition at Bridgewater Hall on 26 February with Pioro and André de Ridder; the pair will also give the Netherlands premiere of the work at the Concertgebouw on 16 May, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
Greenwood’s largest-scale concert work to date, the 25-minute concerto is scored for 56 strings, and is a further homage to Penderecki, following Greenwood’s 48 Responses to Polymorphia (2011), reflecting the composer’s fascination with early synthesiser technology and electronic music-making. The concert also features Water, with the composer playing the tanpura in the 18-minute work for strings, flutes, amplified upright piano and chamber organ. Greenwood has appeared in several of the 50 or so performances of the piece to date. Like X Years of Reverb, Water reflects Greenwood’s interest in Indian classical traditions in its use of drones and fluctuating ostinato patterns.