Singing Hollow

How to experience this music

This piece is part of an experimental music tradition that treats music and the world around us as intertwined. If you're not used to this, you might find it strange or even rude to leave during a performance or to come in after it has started: but this music is designed to be experienced in that way.

If you only want to stay for thirty seconds, that's perfectly fine: it's possible to get a lot from something even if you only live it for an instant. Equally, you are welcome to stay for as long as you like.

The way to get the most out of this piece is probably to move around gradually and listen in various different positions inside and around the church. I would recommend walking around aimlessly until you find yourself in a position where you think something interesting is happening, and then staying there until you're no longer interested: then repeat this process until you think you've heard everything you want to hear from the piece.

The reason that listening in this way makes sense is that the piece is made up of many overlapping layers and structures: the idea is that no two people will have the same experience, because everybody will hear things from different times and different places. While there is structure here, which is all inspired by the way the bell ringers think about their music, it's all cyclical: there's no beginning, no middle and no end, and you shoudn't wait for something to happen in order to make sense of what you're hearing. If you do want to try and make sense of it, you could think of the music as a way of stimulating the church and its grounds, and placing them in the surroundings - a bit like the Singing Hollow sculpture in the church grounds.

Introduction

The Singing Hollow sculpture in St Audoen's Park invites visitors to put their heads into a hole inside a rock. It creates an acoustic transformation reminiscent of the feeling of sanctuary from the outside world that comes when you walk into a church. This inspired this live sound installation: organ plays inside the church, musicians play in the grounds, and church bells bridge both worlds, all playing parts that are both independent and interdependent.

In the original performance, the piece is designed for four outdoor instruments, six church bells (each one rung by an individual) and an organ. It was specifically written for St Audoen’s Church of Ireland, which is an incredibly old church.

[named for] St Ouen (or Audoen) of Rouen (Normandy), a saint who lived in the seventh century and was dedicated to him by the Anglo-Normans, who arrived in Dublin after 1172. It was erected in 1190, possibly on the site of an older church dedicated to St. Columcille.¹.

Three of the bells in this church are over 600 years old.

Singing Hollow: the sculpture

Wolfram Graubner is a German artist who seems to be mostly known for creating sculptures which are playful and interactive. The garden of St Audoen's has several musical sculptures, the most beautiful of which is probably Graubner's Singing Hollow, which is a large rock with two hollows. Text beside the sculpture asks passersby to put their head inside the rock and hum, trying to find "their pitch". The effect of putting your head inside is more spectacular than you might expect: before you make a sound, the sound of the environment is filtered dramatically, and you could make a really interesting personal piece of music simply by varying the position of your head in the hollow over time. Once you start humming, you'll find different notes resonate in wonderful ways that are tailored to your own head: and the craziest thing about this is that the enormous sound you are making inside the hollow can barely be heard just a foot or two away.

As I was thinking about this piece, I thought a lot about how church bells can be heard both inside and outside the building they live in, and about how churches themselves often preserve a very different atmosphere to their environment. Singing Hollow (the sculpture) bridges two worlds in the same way that church bells do, and the sculpture already achieves a lot of the things I wanted to explore while writing music for this situation - hence the name!

How the piece works

This piece is composed of three musical elements: the bells, which are inside the church but heard both inside and outside; the organ, which is locked inside the church; and the other musicians: who are supposed to be mostly outside the church, moving around, but can of course physically move in a way the other elements can't.

The church itself, and its grounds, are a fourth element, and probably the most important one. Everything else in the piece serves to try to activate the air and molecules of the church and the area around it through sound.

The music you hear is very carefully controlled in a few specific ways, and is left really open in many others. It consists of multiple layers which are loosely co-ordinated, aiming for an effect of something which is always changing and progressing, but never has a start, a middle or an end. The mechanisms of control are different for each element.

The Bells

There are six bells in St Audoen's Church. The bells are tuned (perhaps roughly, since some of them are over 600 years old) to the standard musical notes D C Bb A G and F. Six people will be in the bell tower throughout the piece, ringing one bell each. The mechanics of how this actually works are pretty crazy and it's well worth watching some YouTube videos or trying to attend a rehearsal.

Bell-ringers normally ring what are called "methods", which are a type of music where the pattern is constantly changing and can never repeat within a piece: it's very precise and mathematical, and it takes a lot of work to learn how to do it.

These methods are notated in various ways, including like this excerpt from a method for five bells:

In this piece, the bell ringers will spend two half-hour sessions ringing changes and methods like they normally do; and between this, they will play some music I have written which is just a very simple method gradually slowing down (or speeding up) until each note is spaced apart by about thirty seconds. In total, they will play for about two hours.

The Organ

The organ is playing using a computer-generated score: every so often, the computer will ask the organist to stop, and it will then listen (through a microphone) to the sound the bells are making, analyse what it hears, and produce a "pitch cell" for the organist. A pitch cell is basically a list of notes that the organist is allowed to play. There are six types of material the organist can play, and they rotate throughout the whole performance. The material always appears in the same order over and over again, but the durations of each section are constantly and gradually shifting. The organist must always use the notes in the pitch cell to improvise on whichever type of material is currently active.

The Outdoor Musicians

The outdoor musicians are mostly free to play anything they want. There's a page of instructions which are intended to guide them: they are supposed to be listening to the bells and trying to pick out things from the sound to use as guides for making drones and musical fragments that activate the space: but the musicians who are playing are all really gifted improvisers, so they may take these instructions to unexpected places.

However, they are being very strictly guided in terms of their physical location: each musician carries a walkie talkie, and they will be directed to move around the church and its grounds to various places throughout the performance. The church has been divided into different areas, and each of these areas has been subdivided into six sectors: the walkie talkie will be delivering co-ordinates to the musicians asking them to move around these sectors.

The instructions issued through the walkie talkies are actually rows from the bell-ringing methods: so, instead of affecting the position of the bells in time (since the bells are fixed in position) the same musical instructions are being mapped onto physical space to affect how the music sounds and how the musicians interact with one another, with the sounds of the bells, and with the space.