Gráinne Mulvey now has the rare honour among Irish composers of having two anthology albums. The Tyndall Effect follows on from 2014’s Akanos, which drew on her work from 2006 to 2012; the works on The Tyndall Effect range from 2013 to 2020, and are unified by being inspired by the nineteenth-century Irish scientist John Tyndall, of whom the album is a commemoration.

The Tyndall Effect opens with Diffractions (2014), and rightly so: it is a tour de force of detailed and varied orchestral colour-writing which starts loud and doesn’t drop the tension once in its almost ten-minute duration. Its opening gesture, which for all its volume is made of subtle textures, transitions organically to an entirely different and much quieter section that is yet also a natural response to the opening. There are eight sections in the end, and Mulvey’s colouristic creativity in each one, as well as her creativity in handling transitions and pacing, is not just intellectually satisfying, but had a somatic effect on my sense of time – a mark of a masterpiece. The performers, the NSO under Gavin Maloney, must also take credit here for matching this work’s constantly shifting character and its balance of forcefulness and sensitivity.

The album ends with its other orchestral work: the 2015 cello concerto Excursions and Ascents. Mulvey’s orchestral writing here is of a piece with Diffractions, but I found my attention constantly slipping in this twenty-minute work. In the cello line (performed here by Martin Johnson), in particular, the writing often seemed to fall back on stock gestures and signifiers of virtuosity (such as left-hand pizzicato), and the frequent recourse to glissandi of all sorts sounded like substitution of vague gestures for more precisely heard pitched ideas.

The final ensemble work on the album is LUCA (2017), performed by Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble under Sinead Hayes. Mulvey uses difficult harmonies and timbres in this piece – dissonances, wide intervals, exposed notes – that seem to deliberately court the risk that the music will sound unpleasant or even painful, and very often she leans into this difficulty. But her fine ear sees her true and the reward is a piece with a palette of unique beauty.

The other three works on this album are for solo piano. The earliest of these, Calorescence (2013), performed intelligently by Thérèse Fahy, pursues a rigorous exploration of a single musical idea – the emergence, from a pounding, insistent ascending quaver pattern, of a lighter and more mellifluous, but still, sotto voce, pounding and insistent, melodic section.

Interference Patterns (2014), written for the 2015 Dublin International Piano Competition, is a concert étude, and the recording here is of Nathalia Milstein’s competition performance. It’s a fine piece, one with a lot more authenticity than many showpieces, and Milstein brings out its lability well. It’s a shame it sounds as if it was recorded on a phone.

The most recent work on the album is 2020’s Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light for piano and tape, performed here by Isabelle O’Connell, for whom it was written. Another highly focused work, O’Connell here is playing with an array of her former selves in which all manner of piano sounds were sampled and processed, returning to the performance sometimes as ghosts, sometimes unrecognisable. Formally, it is not ambitious – a slow procession around a spectrum of timbral colour – but thanks to Mulvey’s ear and sense of proportion, it works.

Initial inspiration
I have not mentioned the album’s eponymous Tyndall effect: after much effort, I don’t see that it has any relevance to the music. This is frustrating. Mulvey goes to great lengths to connect the album to John Tyndall, an internationally important scientist whose hometown was Mulvey’s own Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow. Every piece on this album is inspired by him or his discoveries in some way or another, and the liner notes include a long historical essay by Norman McMillan on Tyndall. Further, the inspiration is precise and detailed in a way that bespeaks Mulvey’s serious interest in Tyndall. It would be nice, then, if any of this mattered to the music. But as Mulvey herself writes in the liner notes, the works only ‘take their initial inspiration’ from Tyndall, and in their final form are ‘purely abstract music.’

If you try to take the ideas that inspire the music too seriously as interpretive guides, you quickly run aground. Take LUCA, for example. This is an acronym for ‘last universal common ancestor’; it refers to the postulated most-recent organism from which all current life evolved and which existed between 4.3 and 3.6 billion years ago. (Tyndall didn’t do scientific work on evolution but was a prominent champion of it.) Mulvey takes from the existence of a LUCA the ‘profound philosophical consequence’ that we are ‘fundamentally interconnected’ and builds a work out of this in which a primal simplicity becomes gradually more complex. But in fact there is no such connection: scientific facts don’t have this kind of close connection to their philosophical interpretations.

Furthermore, Mulvey drops it as a guiding principle as soon as it stops serving her musically: if the course of LUCA is supposed to chart the ever-increasing complexity of evolving life, then why is the point of maximum musical complexity two minutes from the end and followed by an extended passage of relative tranquillity, as if evolution somehow stops or reverses? 

The music on The Tyndall Effect is always interesting and more than occasionally wonderful, but it took me forgetting everything I’d read in the liner notes to appreciate it.

The Tyndall Effect – A Commemoration of Carlow-Born Scientist John Tyndall by Gráinne Mulvey is released on the Divine Art label. Visit https://divineartrecords.com.

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