Organic collaboration: James McVinnie and Tristan Perich reimagine the organ

This summer the Southbank Centre celebrates the 70^th birthday of its Royal Festival Hall organ this spring, with a series of performances celebrating the famous instrument. Inaugurated in 1954 the organ, build by Harrison & Harrison, has 7,866 pipes, ranging in length from 32 feet to smaller than a baby's little finger. Following a 9-year refurbishment and a £2.4m investment from the Pull Out All The Stops campaign in 2014, the anniversary celebrations kick off this weekend.

Southbank Centre resident artist James McVinnie begins the festivities with two concerts on 23 March, presenting a range of works by Bach, Pachelbel and more before collaborating with producer and composer Tristan Perich for Perich's experimental Infinity Gradient for organ and 100 speakers.

CM caught up with McVinnie and Perich to find out more about their unique approach to an instrument so many perceive as traditional.

Tristan Perich (left) and James McVinnie (right) are redefining perceptions of the organ with their collaborative performance this weekend (Image courtesy of Southbank Centre)

James McVinnie, you’ll be performing a mix of music alongside Tristan’s Infinity Gradient across two concerts on 23 March – what was your thought process when it came to choosing what to perform?

James McVinnie (JM): The programme is a kind of commentary on the conception of the Royal Festival Hall organ in the early 1950s in the context of the Festival of Britain and the new Southbank Centre. I'll be playing music in my afternoon concert that was really in the ears of Ralph Downes, the designer of the organ.

It's not music that gets played very often on this instrument, but I wanted to go back to the ‘golden era’ of organ composition and confront the idea that the music that we hear in church is ‘traditional’. Actually, that music has always been incredibly radical. Before the advent of amplification, the organ would have been the most catastrophically life-changing thing to hear. It’s overwhelming even to our ears, but it would have been a mouthpiece from heaven in that very different society where religion pervaded every walk of life.

The Royal Festival Hall organ was a divisive instrument. There was a backlash in the musical establishment when it came in – Vaughan Williams was incredibly scathing – but the legacy is great. Ralph Downes built three major organs; the Brompton Oratory organ, the St Albans Cathedral organ and the Royal Festival Hall organ that were designed in a very anti-establishment way and organ building was very influenced by them. Downes was thinking against the grain with every decision, playing against the idea that the organ should be this gargantuan Victorian machine that was as loud and as impressive as possible. At the time the organ in England was the vehicle for accompanying singing, it was always a secondary part of the music, but Downes disputed that.

Tristan Perich, your work Infinity Gradient, combines the power of the organ with 100 speakers – could you talk a bit about the idea behind combining this quite traditional instrument with more modern technology?

Tristan Perich (TP): This project fits into a larger body of work focusing on combining acoustic classical instrumentation with electronics and looking at what these two worlds can say about each other. Fundamentally, they inhabit the same space; the speaker creates sound in essentially the same way as any other instrument does (through vibration which moves the air which we hear as sound) so I think of speakers as instruments like any other, except with this added layer of electronics and code. There's lots to think about there with relation to classical music, but ultimately, I'm thinking about the intersection between the physical world and the abstract world of electronics.

I grew up playing classical music, that's how I was trained as a composer, and I was very against electronic sound until I started building my own electronics. When you're programming the code, designing the circuits and connecting the speaker to the circuit board, the computation, information and algorithms become much more tangible and physical in a way that feels adjacent to playing the piano.

'I love that Jamie’s work connects centuries, because to me it’s all a continuous dialogue' ©Tristan Perich

You’re inspired by the ‘aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code’. How does your work in the classical music sphere fit into this ethos?

TP: Growing up as a pianist, I think about music a lot in terms of pattern, geometry and shape on a keyboard, the dialogue of the two hands that can work in conjunction or in opposition to each other. When you press a key on the organ the sound starts and when you release the key the sound stops. This is a very binary mechanism – the technique of how to play an organ is built into the instrument and that is directly how I think about electronic sound.

One of the first conversations I had with Jamie about this piece was thinking about the room as part of the organ – they're one and the same. In Infinity Gradient the organ, the electronic sound and the visual wiring of all of the cables from the speakers connected to the circuit board in the middle of the stage all inform the audience of what is actually happening. It's most exciting when people actually then start thinking about the nature of sound, of electronic sound and of the organ. I try to open the door for that thought process during the performance, so the music reflects that.

Every single performance of my music is exciting because there's going to be something new about it, whether it's in a new space or new musicians or whatever, everything is constantly changing. I love that Jamie’s work connects centuries, because to me it’s all a continuous dialogue and the conversations we have always feel timeless.

©Tristan Perich

Your career also encompasses visual art, often made with speakers – what led to your preoccupation with this medium?

TP: Music and sound is just part of my blood, it always was. I wanted to be a composer from a very young age, and I was also really interested in computer science and maths, in particular the foundations of math, which is similar to the world of quantum mechanics, and I'm just fascinated by that. I think the speaker is an elegant interface between that world and the physical world; it's something that's part of our lives. There's cultural meaning behind speakers, we find them everywhere, it's an interesting object to think about and expose in a more contemplative way.

When I use speakers in in visual art, they tend to be a little bit more like scientific or mathematical experiments. Mathematics has these fundamental limitations built in, and to me it's almost philosophical at that point. It becomes this quasi-existential question connecting to culture.

For me, the pendulum swings back and forth between visual art and music. Ideas for music will inspire something to try in visual art and then vice versa. That’s an exciting and dynamic way to work because your brain isn't just locked into thinking about sheet music. There's a lot more space when you're thinking about other media to work with.

'I wanted to go back to the ‘golden era’ of organ composition and confront the idea that the music that we hear in church is traditional’ (Image courtesy of Southbank Centre)

With films like Interstellar and performers like Anna Lapwood bringing a new generation of audiences to the organ, what’s something you would encourage newcomers to the instrument to discover?

JM: The first thing I would encourage people to do is go and listen to the organ. It's most easily done by going to a church service. For Londoners, I would just say, go to St Paul’s Cathedral for a Sunday organ recital. Sit under the dome for half an hour and listen to the one of the great wonders of the musical world, it's unlike anywhere else, really. When I was 15 or 16 hearing such an extraordinary sound completely changed my life. Repertoire can come after that – it's hugely rich stuff: modern music, minimalistic music, romantic music, Gothic music, early music.

TP: To go back to Phillip Glass, I think his Glass Organ Works album is beautiful.

JM: Tristan and I were chatting, a couple of years ago and I found it so extraordinary when Tristan told me he was listening to works by Glass growing up and he said, “That's what music sounds like for me, that was my equivalent to Mozart and Beethoven.” Coming from a very normal, piano lessons, grade system upbringing, Glass sounds like music from outer space.

TP: For me that was classical music. All those questions about whether you could use a synthesiser or if you could play with your ensemble on the floor of a warehouse or whatever were already answered for me so, I've always felt very comfortable using the words ‘classical music’, even though I think the way I say them is different from a lot of people.

JM: I think there's a social construct around classical music. You would never get the average person thinking that classical music would happen on the floor of a warehouse. That's the challenge for so many presenters and venues. We genuinely do have a responsibility to be accessible to people and to try to break down those social barriers that are in place. You want to try to put things on with artistic integrity so that you tap into this very interested cross section of society, you want to make sure that you're appealing to people who don't know they love you yet.

James McVinnie will perform a range of works by Bach, Pachelbel at 2pm on 23 March before collaborating with producer and composer Tristan Perich in the evening (8pm) for Perich's Infinity Gradient for organ and 100 speakers.