Renewal Manifestation

Undead Embrace

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

For at least a century, the organ has had a connection in the popular imagination with the ghostly and the undead. The associations derive in part from the organ’s place within religion and solemn ritual, and it is also easy to hear it as a sonic pathway for prophetic visions. But it is also an instrument with a unique sense of presence and permanence. Built into churches and concert halls, the organ is often architecture as much as instrument, fixed in place like an unquiet spirit. Furthermore, the sound of an organ does not decay, as those of other instruments do. Sustained mechanically, its music need never end – unless it is staked through the bellows, perhaps.

Just such a staking takes place at the end of György Ligeti’s Volumina for solo organ. Having unfolded in waves of continuous sound, at the end of the work the bellows pump is switched off, precipitating the organ’s slow demise: a tragic, wheezing collapse into silence. In Renewal Manifestation , Calum Builder embarks on a kind of instrumental necromancy, approaching the organ like an undead spirit – a ‘monster being taught how to breath and sigh’, as he puts it. A revenant. Like the draugr of Norse mythology or the Icelandic aptrganga (‘again-walker’), or the Celtic barrow-wight, Builder’s organ is reanimated, brought back from the dead – even if not fully back to life. The organ in question is that of the KoncertKirken in Copenhagen, where Renewal Manifestation was first performed as part of the 2022 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, although Builder’s inspiration was the instrument housed in the Mariendal Church in the Frederiksberg district of the city, and the instructions in his score are designed around that instrument’s capabilities. Both are relatively modest, two-manual instruments, and Builder does not place great emphasis on a wide range of stops and registers. Instead, he finds ways to defamiliarise the organ’s sound, pulling stops only half out (to create eerie multiphonics), or employing Ligeti’s method of emptying and refilling the bellows. Alongside these ghostly gasps, the violin, viola and cello of the CRUSH String Collective, as well as Builder’s alto saxophone, add their own textures of scratches, whistles, crackles and rustles, following a complex choreography of breaths and bow actions.

Calum Builder in front the organ at Mariendal Kirke © Shayna Builder

In the first movement, ‘Breaths and Waves, Wheels within Wheels’, the monster appears at first as if lurching towards us, panting and with heavy tread. With the dissonant chords and exaggerated solemnity of its opening solo, it is easy to imagine a phantom at the keyboard. When the other instruments of the ensemble enter, they sound like something trying to speak, as though piecing together the movements of tongue and lips and larynx, without having full control over their intentions. Although organ and ensemble gradually approach one another, they never quite come together; and at the movement’s end the organ bellows are switched off once more and any fragile sense of unity falls completely apart.

But then something happens. As the bellows are switched back on at the start of the second movement, ‘Birth/Rebirth/Birth/Rebirth/Birth/Rebirth/Birth’, they bring the ‘monster’ hoving once more into view. Yet it no longer seems desperate or threatening. Instead, it has acquired a kind of stature and solidity, which it sustains even despite further reboots. Moreover, the other instruments have started to transcend the halting proto-speech of the first movement, and to locate something close to song. The horror has dropped away, and we are drawn into a kind of séance, attempting to make out the words of lost and distant spirits.

In the third movement, one of those – a ‘Still Small Voice’ – comes into focus. Delicate string techniques – flageolet harmonics, and molto sul tasto and molto flautando bowing – are used to create a soundscape ‘like that of moving air’. The organ plays with its stops only partially pulled out so that little more than air escapes. Apart from three short cues, which provide a loose structure, the music is completely improvised. It moves rapidly, but ephemerally, like a flickering candle flame.

Calum Builder at Marmorkirken © Adriana Zak

And so it is that with the fourth movement, ‘Where You Go, I Go’, the monster has been completely rehabilitated. No longer a creature of the undead, consigned to movie cliché or religious conservatism, it corresponds with its string partners to create a bed of luminous harmonies that slide in and out of time, like warped tape. Over this Builder’s saxophone is at last able to sing its voice. The composer describes Renewal Manifestation as concerning ‘stories of mystic visions and experiences that are poured out upon those who have sought communication with divine spirits’, and in this last movement we can feel ourselves embraced at the threshold of that world, and being seduced into it.