On 29 March James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy gave the US premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s eight-hour organ work X Years of Reverb at Big Ears Festival. It was performed in the historic St. John’s Cathedral in Knoxville, built in 1892, whose age saw it billed as 133 Years of Reverb – the title of the work is adapted for whichever church or performance space in in which it appears. Across its span, audiences observe the changing light as day and night unfold, as the two organists play in shifts of one hour each.
The piece, 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.”
He continues:
The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed. In an old church, for example, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound…season after season spent celebrating, commiserating, praising, mourning, to the same recorded sounds. This time is measured over generations, though the rituals of the church, and is a reminder that churches are the repository for the books of parish records as well as Bibles.
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. 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 drone of the tanpura, fundamental to that musical tradition, creates harmonics and overtones that compound the complexity of beauty of its textures, which also introduces a degree of tension to its meditative character; such melodies are conceived of in circular rather than linear terms, as if climbing onto a wheel. Reflecting this, the first and last chords of Greenwood’s piece incorporate notes below and above audible frequencies - the music passes across the room as it passes across the audible spectrum, in the same way a rainbow is only the narrow range of the visible spectrum amongst all possible frequencies of light.