“The Acoustic Synthesizer”: The Organ in Current Experimental Music
As I was perusing some of the notable experimental releases of last year, along with looking ahead to 2024, a little trend jumped out at me. Releases by Sarah Davachi, Ellen Arkbro, and the upcoming LP from Kali Malone got me reflecting on the role and significance of the pipe organ to current experimental music. What is it, if anything, about the organ that makes it appealing for contemporary composition? This article isn’t meant to be a be-all-end-all of why the organ is cropping up in multiple prevalent experimental releases these days (check out David Sanson wondering about this rise of the organ as well), but simply a rumination into its qualities and importance to these three composers.
I chatted briefly about this topic with fellow Torn Light staff member, Jon Lorenz, and he brought up the 2012 record, Music For Church Cleaners by Áine O’Dwyer as a potential catalyst for the surge in interest for organ in experimental music. Music For Church Cleaners is part organ music, part field recording, as the album captures O’Dwyer playing the pipe organ at St Mark’s Church in London on Saturday’s while the staff cleaned. Pieces of conversation punctuate performances and vacuums add to the ambience, all while O’Dwyer plays organ in a contemplative tone.
Listening to Music For Church Cleaners reminded me of the meditative quality of the organ in a church, the reverb and environmental sound creating an immersive space. Her use of the organ pedals act as built-in drones, accentuating the organ’s predilection for this style of playing. The association O’Dwyer makes between the organ, drone, and ambience certainly could have laid the groundwork for its prevalence in experimental music today.
After reading interviews with Davachi, Arkbro, and Malone along with listening to their recent albums, a few similarities formed connective tissue between these musicians and how the organ serves their compositional interests. Texture and timbre, deep listening, tuning, and the significance of an organ’s church environment all play a role in how they interact with the organ, as well as in their musical processes as a whole.
Sarah Davachi in particular emphasizes timbre and texture when discussing her music, which can be described as drone and minimalist. She told Sound of Life in 2022, “I think one of the biggest criticisms you see when you read about drone music and minimalist music is the unbelievably ignorant idea that ‘nothing is happening.’” Through her music, Davachi hopes the listener will engage with other facets of music outside of melody and rhythm, especially timbre and harmony.
Davachi’s compositional passions were realized when she took an electroacoustic composition seminar in college, where she could explore her “ideas about texture and harmony and time.” At Mills College during her master’s degree, Davachi had the time to indulge in both her experimental leanings and her passion for baroque music, exemplified through her love of figures such as Éliane Radigue and La Monte Young, as well as fifteenth and sixteenth-century early music. These two seemingly divergent interests converge into what is characteristic of her compositional style.
The organ — which played a significant role during the Baroque period of Western classical music, perhaps most famously through the music of Bach — is deliberately slowed down in Davachi’s music. Doing so allows the listener to absorb the instrument, hearing what it has to offer outside of traditional melody. As she states, “the pipe organ is an acoustic synthesizer, and there’s nothing like that level of timbral articulation.” Davachi emphasizes how nimble and versatile the organ is in shifting the color of its sound, which comes to the foreground in her style of drone. This timbral shifting and emphasis on long tones can be heard on Davachi’s most recent release, Long Gradus. The album groups together different combinations of instrumental timbres, including a section for brass and organ. The instruments blend uncannily, lingering on open harmonies that resonate and accentuate different overtones on each chord.
Ellen Arkbro has sought out the organ for its variations in tuning. While most of us are accustomed to what is referred to as equal temperament, which divides an octave equally into twelve notes, Arkbro has recorded on an early organ in meantone temperament, which adjusts tuning so that intervals spanning a third are perfectly in tune. The use of this temperament nowadays can be idiosyncratic, requiring the listener to adjust their hearing to a tuning which isn’t commonplace in music elsewhere.
Arkbro grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, developing a love for punk and jazz. She eventually enrolled at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) inher home city, beginning her path of electroacoustic composition. She has even studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, bringing a drone influence into her work similarly to Davachi. Also like Davachi, Arkbro considers her music “slow music.” For her, experiencing the in-tune quality of meantone temperament comes from encountering it slowly. She told The Quietus in 2019, “I think about [the music I am currently making] as slow music focusing on a certain type of sound, or rather a very specific experience of it: that moment when an in-tune-sound somehow becomes one with the space which you are listening in.”
This immersion into in-tune sound can be heard on her most recent record, Sounds While Waiting, an album that allows chords of various tunings on the organ to resonate, to simmer and reveal subtle changes that otherwise might be missed. Using the meantone organ allows this experience to manifest, emphasizing how the organ is so tied to space and function. Arkbro said, “It’s such an interesting object, such a complex instrument, that has taken people so many many years to build. Every instrument is different and is built for a specific space, and you have to travel there to hear it.”
Arkbro has also discussed the role a church plays in setting the environment for the music that comes out of an organ. Albums like Music For Church Cleaners foregrounded the organ within space, and Arkbro hints at the way a church helps a listener enter a more deep listening headspace. “Something happens when people enter a church,” she stated to The Quietus. “They get a little bit quieter and a little bit more aware of their surroundings.” Davachi has talked about this effect as well, saying to Aquarium Drunkard in 2018, “The way you listen to the music [in a church] is so different from being in a bar or whatever.” Organs in churches offer differences in acoustics and aesthetics from other experimental venues.
However, Kali Malone’s approach to organ removes it somewhat from this context. She is known for close-miking the organ in her recordings, resulting in a sound detached from the organ’s typical relationship with reverb and room noise. Malone also is based out of Stockholm, moving there after meeting Arkbro at a house show in Massachusetts. Her love of the organ developed when she interviewed the organ tuner Jan Börjesson for her thesis. Like Arkbro, Malone was intrigued by the tuning possibilities for the organ. While in conversation with François Bonnet, she stated, “My creative process uses tuning as a catalyst for composing, leading me to seek intervallic relationships that provoke profound sensory and emotional resonances.” She was even drawn to the accompanying sounds made by playing an organ, the wooden clunk of a pedal, for instance. “All Life Long,” the title track from her upcoming LP, lingers on every interval, both within a chord and as she moves from harmony to harmony. All are connected, and yet each chord also exists in its own space.
In many ways, Malone is seeking the same goals as Davachi and Arkbro. At nineteen, Malone conducted a piece by deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. She told The Guardian last year, “I want to create an immersive environment so that when it’s over, you don’t know how much time has passed.” The presence of mind and openness of deep listening can be found across Davachi, Arkbro, and Malone’s work. Each composer requires willing effort from the listener to hear music in a different way from how they may be accustomed — through emphasis on timbre and long harmonies, unorthodox tunings, and entering a contemplative state to receive music, ideally in live performance, but also through recordings. The organ provides an avenue with which each composer has explored these concepts. It is an instrument proven to be versatile, malleable, and meditative, an ideal participant for the realm of drone and minimalist music.
– Hannah Blanchette
January 23, 2024 | Blog