Iain Matheson

Programme Note

The title comes from Nicholas Brady's poem extolling the organ, written as a text for Purcell's 1692 Ode for St Cecilia's Day.
The organ's wondrous capacity for sounds of infinite length, great volume, and colourful registration, is well-documented.
This piece prefers the organ as anti-hero, exploring the opposite characteristics in a wondrous machinery of short, quiet notes moving in monochrome restraint. Structurally the music could be thought of as a long and intricate grace-note in search of a downbeat which never arrives.

REVIEW
`Wondrous Machine exploits the organ's extreme register in a delicate mix of sound and silence sounding like tree frogs.' (Patric Standford, Yorkshire Post 25 Nov., 1999).