Description

"So Much Data..." is a piece for a three-manual organ with manually operative registration. It involves three players, an organist and two assistants, who are needed for opening and closing registers. When I composed the piece, the prior focus was on creating different timbral processes of sounds. This is realized by having the assistants open or close the registers in a slow motion, while keys are held down on keyboard manuals. When the partials of tones start to find their place as the air pressure in the organ pipes is gradually released to the full extent by slowly opening a register, all kind of fascinating noise happens. The reverse thing takes place when closing a register slowly, as the partials "die away". Traditionally, the noise of this kind is considered undesirable, but in this piece it functions as a major resource. When identical sets of tones are being processed on several manuals at the same time, that opens a huge palette of possibilities for affecting the tone color. Techniques such as fading, in-fading and cross-fading multiple timbral combinations in a 43-registered organ to the number that could be described as "highly sufficient" . When these methods are applied to large chords or clusters, the huge mass of sound of a large organ almost seems to take a physical form, slowly evolving and changing in its colour and shape.

The piece was composed for the new organ of the church of Kotka (Finland), built on a baroque idiom and based on the organ in Freiberg by Gottfried Silbermann (1714). It was premiered at the opening concert of Kotka International Organ Competition, November 2002.

© Olli Virtaperko, August 2004

Instrumentation

org

Category

Works for Solo Instrument

Premiere

Ere Lievonen, Olli Virtaperko and Jonte Knif, Kotka International Organ Competition, Kotka, November 21, 2002.

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Archive number

MF16691

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