268 years of reverb

The World Premiere of 268 years of reverb, a new 8-hour durational work written by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead, The Smile) performed live on the Octagon Chapel’s pipe organ.

268 years of reverb 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. Performed from daylight through sunset by James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy, this eight hour organ experience can be enjoyed for the full length of the performance, or for 1 hour and 50 minute time slots.

“The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed. In an old church, 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. In the Octagon Chapel, it’s 268 years of time: 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. 

In writing this, I was influenced by the classical Indian approach to melodies, where new notes are introduced very gradually into improvised solos – the arrival of each note is so long-awaited, that its arrival is a revelation of a new world. Knowing this introduces huge tension into the experience of listening to that music. Also, within the drone of the tanpura are the swirling overtones and harmonics that compound the complexity and beauty of the textures. It’s meditative, but not just meditative, because of this tension. 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 the first and last chords of X years of reverb incorporate notes below/above audible frequencies. In this way, 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.” –  Jonny Greenwood