for large organ (2005-2009)

I suppose I must admit that, as an atheist (an “unapologetic complete unbeliever” I have called myself elsewhere) I have been on a mission my entire compositional life to map out a version of the numinous that eschews religion and and the supernatural and instead foregrounds Nature, from the minutiae of quantum physics to galactic filaments of super-clusters. Although nature is at the base of many of my pieces, usually I have passed over this substitution in silence, and allowed the listener to draw their own conclusions, from the cosmological architecture of the Piano Sonata to the time-space musings of in Platonia. In my organ piece compostela/finisterre of 2005-9, however, the intention is absolutely overt: my compostela is not the pilgrimage route, but the Milky Way; my finisterre not a hallowed cliff-edge, but the edge of our galaxy, the horizon beyond which is only the sparsely-populated vacuum, for unimaginable distances. The music ‘follows the route’ of a slow pilgrimage away from the galactic core towards the rim.

The issue of numinosity arose because my colleague Andrew Bernard and I began to prepare a definitive performance score of compostela/finisterre, and I realised that I had not previously addressed why I had cast the work with such a militantly anti-christian character. I felt that, in writing for organ, I had no option but to address the ecclesiastical inheritance of Western Classical Music, something I could dodge with more secular instruments. I was an organist myself, once, and I know how problematic it is to sever the organ from its history (and, of course, most common location). One of the reasons I ceased to be an organ-player was that I hated having to pay lip-service to christianity in order to gain access to an instrument; using an organ almost always entails a trade-off, in exchange one is ‘invited’ to play for services. Not for me, that compromise. But in writing a piece so embedded in deep musical history, I inevitably drew on behaviours from the past. My favourite bit of the musical past, in fact: the early 15th century. Many of the textures in compostela/finisterre derive from the kind of narrow tessitura, deeply intertwined counterpoint of such works as Dufay’s isorhythmic motets or his late tenor masses such as the Missae l’homme arme or se la face est pale. Elsewhere the work evokes plainchant, and the extended clausulae associated with organum. It would be hard to think of a more ostensibly ecclesiastical provenance. But, despite the cultural esteem and aesthetic distinction, the interior of churches – location of the vast majority of organs – is where for nearly two millennia people have been inculcated with a delusory faith that has done them incalculable damage. In writing a work for organ I found myself unable to suppress my disdain for churches. So the veneer of liturgical association that the piece displays is intensely ironic.

That was then. Today, in 2025, I was listening to Kevin Bowyer’s magisterial performance of the first half of the piece from 2008 and was struck by an unexpected redolence: the pungent, unprecedented, gnarliness of Miles Davis’ early 70s concert recordings from Dark Magus to Agharta. I have known those albums since their first release in about 1974, and their soundworld has had an indelible impact on my inner life, but I have mitigated their influence in my work to a large degree by foregrounding more immediately salient ideas. Here in compostela/ finisterre, though, the Miles noise is fully integrated – in all its pagan grunginess.

The vision of departing the galaxy fed into my idea of the work’s structure: the opening is a bustling depiction of the anthroposphere, the bit of galaxy where humans live, and is cast as very traditional organ music; as the music goes on it slowly divests itself of the characteristics of ‘culture’ and moves into sonic behaviours that are more ‘nature’-like, and perhaps less individuated. On page 38 of the score the music decisively slips from the former into the latter, and from there on the music gradually loses definition to the point where, at the end, it goes silent. One day I will perhaps write the subsequent piece that this architecture predicates, a ‘void’-work that speaks of that ineffably vast hollowness that is not shaped even by gravity, but that music will be very different from this, and step beyond the traditional organ idiom that compostela/finisterre exemplifies.