The Hallé Presents: 606 Years of Reverb at Manchester Cathedral

Manchester Cathedral was founded in 1421, and Jonny Greenwood’s 606 Years of Reverb takes its title from that fact. It’s an eight-hour, drone-based organ piece whose name changes depending on the age of the building in which it’s performed. The idea behind it is simple: a building’s walls hold onto everything they’ve ever heard. Greenwood has described the experience of hearing a church organ, specifically, as “a kind of time travel” – air moving through pipes and bouncing off ancient walls, still carrying whatever the room has heard before.

The piece grew out of Greenwood’s fascination with medieval Italian church organs, discovered while involved in charity work to rebuild earthquake-damaged churches near his home in Le Marche. It was a kid-in-a-sweet-shop moment for a musician long known for his curiosity with lesser-spotted instruments (think his ondes Martenot in Radiohead, or, more recently, the Indian tanpura in his own piece Water). Some of the organs he found had double black keys; some produced percussive sounds; one even had a water tank that let the organist mimic birdsong.

That fascination sits alongside another, more recent one: Indian Carnatic music, where melodies unfold gradually and circularly, each new note a little revelation. Greenwood has built 606 Years of Reverb in a similar way. But a stranger influence also shapes the piece: the tone sweeps used to test a venue’s PA system, sending every frequency through the room to see how it responds. Greenwood has said the room afterwards feels re-energised, its history shaken loose. 606 Years of Reverb aims for the same effect, only over eight hours rather than a few seconds.

Performed by organists James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy in shifts, the piece will be played without pause as daylight moves through the cathedral’s stained glass and fades into evening. There’s no interval or fixed seats. You can stay for the full time if you like, or timed slots of an hour and 50 minutes are available across the day, starting at 11am, 1pm, 3pm or 5pm. You may, in fact, do well to leave something in the tank, because later the same evening, Greenwood’s music fills The Bridgewater Hall, in a very different register: his score for There Will Be Blood, played live to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film.

While ambitious organ programming isn’t new for the Hallé (see Anna Lapwood’s stint as Featured Artist last year), there’s been no programming quite like this.