large organ (2005-2009)

I’m an atheist. An unapologetic complete unbeliever. So, for me to write an organ piece I had to come up with a way of both incorporating the instrument’s historical, ecclesiastical referentiality ...and abandoning it. What does exercise my awe-muscle is cosmology; I find the unimaginable scale and age of the universe staggering. So, what I sought, when conceiving the organ piece Kevin Bowyer had suggested I write, was a religious metaphor that could be turned to the aggressively secular.

Most people, especially Catholics, will be well-informed about Santiago de Compostela, the final western destination of the mediæval pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago, across north Spain. Named after the Apostle James (Saint James = Santiago), it acquired the suffix ‘de Compostela’ because of a local legend: Saint James was killed by Herod Agrippa in the year 44; because burial in Palestine was forbidden, his disciples reputedly transported his body by boat to the Spanish coast—to the Roman port Iria Flavia—and buried his body on a nearby hill. In 813 the hermit Pelagius “heard music, and saw a bright light” in the sky above that same hillside, and it came to be known as Campus Stellae, ‘field of the star’, in Spanish Compostela. The place-name has a double etymology; it also comes from the Latin componere, to inter, and is identified as the compositum tella, or burial site, of Sant’ Iago. All this puts it in the mythical domain of biblical figures coming to Europe, like the Grail stories after Joseph of Arimathea.

Less well-known is that the Roman name for the most north-western point of Spain was ‘Finis Terrae’, ‘end of the world’, beyond which was only emptiness. The name endures as Cape Finisterre, the bleak cliff that ends the pilgrimage route on the coast—among the farthest western points of mainland Europe.

While this might all seem eminently appropriate for an instrument as ecclesiastical as the organ, as I say, I had a rather less pious vision as I wrote the piece. The famous Camino provided me with the Janus-faced metaphor that I sought. Compostela has always reminded me of the night sky, of our terrestrial view of the galaxy; ‘the Milky Way’ was the nickname for the Roman trade route that became the Camino, famously referred to in Buñuel’s sacrilegious film, la Voie lactée (made by Janus Films!). And beyond the galactic rim, the finisterre, is the intergalactic void, trillions of cubic light-years of emptiness, the dark night of souls far vaster than our own.