St Mary’s, Thornbury
Right now in Halberstadt, Germany, a specially built organ is playing the John Cage piece As Slow As Possible. The piece started in 2001, though the organ only started playing in 2003 after a year and a half of silence. It is due to finish in 2640. In February 2024, crowds gathered to hear it changing chord for the first time in 2 years, an event so momentus that it made the BBC news. Imagine the anticipation of those in attendance, arriving 24 years into a 640 year long piece of music to hear one of its biggest moments: a single chord change.
In some ways though, it is not the chord change, but the chord which is interesting. I learned to enjoy listening to long, slow evolving pieces one day after a chance encounter with a Bristol-based found sound artist in Valparaíso in 2012. I was walking past a community centre on Cerro Alegre and could hear some strange noises coming from inside. About 20 people were sitting listening to a groaning sound, so I stopped and sat down and started listening with them. I had wondered into an active listening workshop being run by Simon Whetham, part of the yearly Chilean sound art festival Tsonami, and when the piece had finished he explained through an interpreter that we had been listening to the sound of a gang plank on a wooden ship, creaking as it moved on the waves. He told us that he had been playing in a punk band in Bristol in the early 2000s, until a friend had invited him to Greenland on holiday, where he heard the sound of a glacier inching forwards through headphones connected to contact microphones. A truly epic and powerful sound! Back in England he stopped playing rock and started recording the world around him through sensitive microphones instead.
After this introduction, he blindfolded us all and led us round the barrio for an hour, each time moving us for a while and then leaving us in one place for about 20 minutes at a time. He asked us to noticed how the sound of the city changed with each change of position, and then we returned to the community centre and listened to the gang plank piece again. It was a completely different experience for me: each changing sound a musical symphony, having listened so closely to a city for one whole hour.
You can still buy tickets for the last day of As Slow As Possible here. I have just applied for one, and am hoping to still be around to hear the end, but in the meantime I would like to go and hear one of the organ's long unstinting chords in action too.
Organ under repair
Just like the instrument at St John on the Wall, this organ has been bagged up while the church undergoes repair.
In the same month that I heard about the Halberstadt organ, I was also sent news of a recital at St Mary's church in Thornbury, and so I went along to listen and heard Nigel Davies play a selection of songs from Bach to Boyce and Ball, and a couple of Percys: Whitlock and Fletcher, in a very varied programme. The music was great, and the orange winter sun through the stained glass of St Mary's was butter soft.
I talked to the church's director of music afterwards and he was happy to arrange a recording session at a future date. When the day came, I was particularly excited to sit down at the console and try a new idea: in a conversation with Huw Morgan a couple of weeks before, he mentioned that he often sits and holds F, G and A together, a chord which he finds can draw out a great deal of harmonic variation from the pipes, as long as you are willing to sit for a while and start living in the sound. I was absolutely dying to try this out once he'd told me!
In the end I found I was only able to hold the chord for a couple of moments before cutting it off. I was unable to occupy the sound on this occasion, and felt self-concious about the noise it made. I hope I will be able to try this idea again another time!
You can listen to other sounds that I made here on Soundcloud.
