The Unknown

From fog horns to tuba finding how to 'answer' the unanswerable question…

This work was commissioned by Carson Cooman, who is, among other things, a composer, concert pianist and organist with quite a track record of promoting unknown but significant contemporary composers. For the current commission I was left free to choose the form, duration and even the exact instrumentation of the work, though the suggestion was for the piece to be for a solo instrument in addition to the organ. The choice of tuba was my own idea.

The original idea behind this work was one which many would associate with Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question, though the similarity is only in the initial concept and not in the music, and this is a much weightier and more searching piece. In my mind was this haunting musical question loaded with a burden of an intense longing for something beyond all understanding (i.e., what people, in their ignorance of what spirituality really is, would widely call a 'spiritual' longing) — a three-note motif — which it seemed would be most effectively rendered on the tuba, its questions echoing in the mysterious space evoked by exotic registrations on the organ.

Most works for solo instrument and organ give the latter a subdued role for the most part, in order to accompany the soloist, but this work is different. Much of what is played on the organ here is also of striking solo quality, and is mostly light years away from the 'plenum' sound so characteristic of church organs. Many different voices emerge from that mysterious space of 'the unknown', with questions and encrypted comments. Final resolution and 'knowing' isn't in getting a pat answer to the tuba's question, but in acceptance of the unknown and what appears to be unknowable.

Once I started composing the work I realized to my delight that this was also my opportunity to incorporate the essence of a powerful and moving musical experience that I had on 9th June 1979 during a brief visit to the beautiful granite island of Lundy, off the north coast of Devon in South-West England. It was basically a fine, warm and rather humid day, but as usual for such weather in that area there was sea fog. I arrived on Lundy as the fog was beginning to thin and break, so weak sunshine was already coming through. I went off and had a solo walk round the whole island, mostly along its dramatic clifftops. During the first hour or so of that walk I was haunted by the most incredible musical experience from — guess what! — the fog horns!

These were of the old kind, with a powerful deep and heavy tone. Unfortunately, the fog horns there now are the standard modern 'whistle', with a relatively high pitch, a bit like a flute, but with a blandness of tone that would disgrace any such instrument!

There was one sounding from the lighthouse on the south end of the island and another sounding from the lighthouse at the north end. The two horns were sounding at rather different time intervals, so sometimes they coincided or at least overlapped, while at other times they seemed to be answering each other. At that time I had no means of recording the notes I heard, so it's only the general impression of this that I can attempt to recreate — not the actual notes. In any case, what I heard was much more than just the single low fundamental pitches of the two horns, including also harmonics that produced chords in my mind.

The answering and occasional clashes of the two different chords sounding through the mist in this wild and open place had a surreal and intensely haunting quality that to this day affects me deeply when I remember the experience.

So, in the opening section of this work a repeated low pedal note on the organ is my south fog horn, while the tuba is the north one — except that it isn't really, because it actually plays different notes and at irregular time intervals, as though there were various ships out there in the fog, each sounding its fog horn once in a while. In the midst of that the tuba is surreptitiously bringing in the notes of the motif that is soon to be the burning question that it poses into and about the unknown.

As well as that question in a whole range of variants, a commonly repeated motif is the descending one of three semitones and a minor third that haunts the final movement of my 4th Symphony, and indeed the current work also has a similar modal colouring to much of that movement, centring on the same chords, which to me signify a deep and intense longing for that seemingly elusive 'something' beyond all understanding, and the suffering that arises from that longing's denial.

Temporarily during the middle of the work, and again for the ending, a slow repeating variant of the question motif on deep pedal notes insinuates itself into the music, whose questions and wonderings suddenly find themselves falling into time and harmony with it. The listener's impression is of the discovery of great slow waves — a sort of deep breathing — that had really always been there, and everything falls into that breathing. Just letting be and accepting the unknown has enabled us to find at least the beginnings of harmony with all of 'Existence'…

My recording of the work demonstrates the sort of thing that, with a bit of work, can be achieved with John McCoy's Jeux soundfont, which can produce a full range of reasonably high quality church and cathedral organ sounds in MIDI realizations.