Friday 8th November 2024
Blackburn Cathedral, Blackburn, England
Though the relationship has been a troubled one, there is an affinity between the world of the church and spiritual matters, and the world of science and futurism. Historically less acknowledged by the church (think Galileo and the Inquisition), it has increasingly been embraced as Christianity has mellowed – or been tamed – in the West. Nowadays, the affinity is less acknowledged by the scientists, for any admission of metaphysical depths can be seen to stray from science’s core tenet of rationality.
The relationship is not only historical – astronomy’s early nurturing under ecclesiastical patronage, for example – but conceptual. The yearnings of people throughout the millennia to look to the heavens, to understand the firmament, possesses many of the same inclinations as the scientific quest to reach for space. Indeed, it could even be that the first religious ideas in early man were seeded by the sight of those stars in the sky.
It is a conceptual synergy that has been embraced by Blackburn Cathedral, which hosts tonight’s suite of music from the 2014 science-fiction film Interstellar. The church organ will be played by Roger Sayer, who played the organ on the original score after being approached by composer Hans Zimmer. In his Q&A session tonight, Roger remarks to the audience that the organ itself looks something like a spaceship. Its vast pipes clamber up the walls of the cathedral and the effect of regal otherworldliness, of celestial visitation, is enhanced by the vast crown of thorns, designed by John Hayward, which hovers suspended over the organ.
So compelling is the scene – and soon, the music – that one can almost forget about the vast Moon suspended above. In the nave, above the seats of the congregation, a gigantic replica sphere of the Moon draws the eye, and I am able to find a seat almost directly beneath it. I could almost reach up and touch it.
This, of course, is precisely the same thought one has for the real Moon when it stands bright in the sky and looks almost close enough to touch, a tantalising feeling which has surely provoked much of mankind’s wanderlust for the stars. I sit in my pew and look up at the swaying marias, for the installation rocks gently, almost imperceptibly, on its strings. I recall Galileo’s famous remark about a different sphere: “And yet, it moves.”
So too does the music. When Roger Sayer is announced, to applause, and takes his seat at the organ, his back is to the audience. It matters not – the visual treat of the church architecture provides tonight’s theatre. As the organ summons, almost cinematically, its first huge intake of air, those of us in the audience have all this vast majesty to contemplate, rather than the seated figure of the organist.
The first music of the night isn’t Hans Zimmer’s score from Interstellar. The dean of the chapel had earlier announced that this would not take place until after the Q&A and intermission. Instead, Roger begins with a suite of music from Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. As those distinctive, majestic notes begin for ‘Sunrise’, better known as the iconic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are reminded that this conceptual affinity between science and religion, between space and the firmament, is not an idle one. It is one that has been recognised (if not always acknowledged) by many artists. I consider myself one of them, though of course a minor one; my science-fiction novel Void Station One was initially conceived of as a purely rational, indeed atheistic, story, but ended with a completely unexpected – even to me, as the writer – welcoming of the concept of a god.
For his part, Roger Sayer reinforces this graceful affinity with a second suite of music from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Again, to uncultured philistines like myself this music is best known for inspiring some of John Williams’ motifs for Star Wars, particularly in the first part of the suite, ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’.
Unfortunately, my ear cannot catch any of these, nor any of the nuances Roger Sayer has delivered in his two suites of organ music so far. A young couple who sat themselves directly in front of me moments before the music started have been gossiping amongst themselves throughout, ducking their heads and whispering and giggling. Considering this is music to focus on and contemplate, their behaviour is immensely distracting.
I tell myself that soon they must settle, but instead they begin to fidget in the pews, the wood squeaking relentlessly and disrupting the music for those of us unfortunate to be sat near them. I spend the majority of ‘Venus, the Bringer of Peace’ contemplating war, and ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’ despairing that the entire night of music is passing me by.
I sigh and mentally add it to my unfortunately ever-growing record of poor concert behaviour, but my attempt to resume concentration on the music is interrupted by a loud “Pssch-thock!” sound. The male of the couple has opened a can of beer that he has smuggled into the church. The loud, disruptive sound prompts more giggles from the pair. As the grand, celestial organ music brings to mind the concept of musica universalis, these two have reminded me that while Heaven may be in the spheres, Hell is other people.
Roger Sayer’s suite of Holst’s music ends, to applause, and the couple decide to leave their seats during the brief intermission. I assumed this would be a bathroom break, or perhaps they intend to nip to the local off-licence, but whatever the motive, thankfully a miracle occurs in the cathedral. The pair do not return, and the rest of the night is uninterrupted.
The next part of the night is a Q&A with Roger Sayer, who has approached from his organ to address the audience. It is a fascinating session, as Roger details his role in the development of the music for Interstellar a decade ago. Roger had no hand in its creation by Hans Zimmer, but the composer came to him to use the organ at Temple Church in London. Zimmer had made samples of music using the organ at Salisbury Cathedral, not realising that each church organ produces its own unique sound, and his samples could not be adequately recreated at Temple Church.
Roger Sayer is in his element here; he speaks eloquently about the organ as an instrument, about the pipes and the bellows and the keys and pedals and the configuration of stops which produce each unique organ note. At the end of the night, after the music ends and the crowd disperses, those of us who remain find we can approach the altar for a closer look. With its keys and pedals and stops, with sheet music propped up as a map through the aural terrain ahead, the organ looks like the pilot’s console of a spaceship, as Roger had suggested earlier.
As it breathes, Roger says, the organ in effect provides a never-ending note; his stops and keys manipulating the sound as the vast intake of air is expelled through the pipes and a reservoir of breath is pulled in by the bellows. This was one of the reasons why it was so apposite for Zimmer’s Interstellar score: not only the sensation of breath in the airless void of outer space but, in travelling seamlessly from the highest note to the lowest, the instrument can convey the vast sense of distance depicted in the spacefaring film.
When Roger does return to his seat, after a twenty-minute interval, and begins the final movement of the night, the score for Interstellar, it is that highest note he begins on – and which, a remarkable passage of music later, he will end the night on. This is also the note which the film began and ended on as the credits played, and I find that Roger’s Q&A session has served as a valuable primer on some of the nuances of the music I am now to experience.
Interstellar is one of my favourite movies. Epic, inspiring, rational and beautiful, it was one of the primary inspirations for my own novel, Void Station One. A month ago I managed to expunge one of the small errors of my life when I got the opportunity to watch the majesty of the film for the first time in the cinema, on its tenth anniversary. I had been unable to do so when it was first released as I did not have any money at the time, and I always regretted it.
On that anniversary rewatch, still fresh in my mind, I felt goosebumps as it opened onto that dusty bookcase in Murph’s room and the first distinctive motif from ‘Dreaming of the Crash’ by Hans Zimmer began to play. I feel the same again tonight in the cathedral as Roger Sayer begins to play the same motif, which throughout the movie keeps this daunting, cerebral paean to astrophysics grounded in the tender, longing father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murph.
As Roger moves expertly through the wealth of music of Interstellar, I am able to lose myself in it, mapping the notes onto the scenes I know so well. The lonesome, tragic void of ‘Stay’ as Cooper leaves his daughter and travels the silent void of space. The questing brio as our astronauts enter ‘The Wormhole’. The forbidding natural terror as they realise what those ‘Mountains’ really are. The thrilling triumph of willpower and skill that is communicated in ‘No Time for Caution’.
The context of the cathedral puts the music back into a classical setting, allowing us to see it as the masterpiece it is. Just as Strauss’ famous music was written to soundtrack a ‘Sunrise’, so too does Zimmer’s work stir the soul even when removed from the film it accompanied. In my writing, whether that is in my fiction or in my reviews, I am often prone to lamenting the loss of talent in our modern culture, the ways in which we fail to match up to the mores and standards of our civilisation’s brighter days. Tonight, Roger Sayer has reminded me that remarkable things are still happening in our art and music. Those inquisitive, ethereal notes of ‘Day One’ deserves to reverberate throughout the centuries, and be played by hands that have not yet been born, in times – perhaps spacefaring ones – that have not yet come to pass.
At the end of the night – having ended, as promised, on the highest note – Roger turns to the audience to receive the deserved applause. He bows and then turns, raising his hands to the majesty of the organ. In his Q&A, he had mentioned that the original score was actually six organs playing at once. Such amplification of power I experienced in the cinema, but tonight Roger’s solitary organ has sufficed to deliver the most profound and most majestic and also the quietest, most sombre aspects of the score.
In that same Q&A, Roger had said he would not perform the full score of the film – which would be hours long, too much perhaps even for a dedicated Interstellar fan like myself – but instead a condensed version of it that he first transcribed a decade ago for a rendition at the Royal Albert Hall. In all that time playing Interstellar’s music, he says, “I never tire of it.”
After the music ends and the audience has filtered out into Blackburn town, I head out into the autumn night and look up at the dark sky. So compelling has been the cathedral and the music that I had almost forgotten about the vast Moon suspended above, and yet it had always been there, that satellite reminder that there are worlds yet to explore. Like Roger, I would not tire of Interstellar’s music and its enterprising spirit. One must also hope that humanity never tires of the yearning and fascination with the outer worlds that inspired Interstellar’s creation. Perhaps then we will one day find mankind among the stars.
As I head down the stone path of the church grounds I stop and look back. The cathedral is welcoming, eternally welcoming, with the warm light pouring out of its doors. While it is not as singular a building as York Minster, which I visited prior to a previous concert just a few months ago, Blackburn Cathedral rests in that remarkable spot many of our stone churches reside: havens of tradition, an anchor against the rapid developmental change that churns through the rest of our towns; architecture from when that word was synonymous with art rather than economy.
As the organ notes of Interstellar continue to thread themselves through my mind, I find myself thinking looking at the stone building and thinking that if art is how we decorate the space we hold, music must surely be how we decorate our time.* And the same harmony between space and time that scientists identify in an equation is something that we can understand intuitively on nights like tonight.
Setlist:
- Suite No. 1 – Also Sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss)
- Suite No. 2 – The Planets (Gustav Holst)
- Mars, the Bringer of War
- Venus, the Bringer of Peace
- Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
- Q&A and Intermission
- Suite No. 3 – Interstellar (Hans Zimmer)
* This quote is often attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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