Organ Music

Listening Through the Body in the Music of Sarah Davachi

| Tyran Grillo

In the music of Sarah Davachi, sound remains suspended beyond the moment of its apparent exhaustion, gathering strange internal populations as its harmonics fracture and quietly reassemble. What initially presents itself as stasis develops a secret grammar of departures, an entire cosmology folded into the infinitesimal distance between two frequencies. The ear, accustomed to locating movement in the passage from one event to another, must relearn the contours of an event whose distances are buried within it. A barely perceptible alteration in pitch opens a wound across the whole duration, exposing the fragile membranes through which consciousness negotiates its relationship with the audible. Each resonance becomes an archaeology of its own disappearance, a spectral excavation of possibilities held captive within the seemingly immovable. One begins to suspect that time possesses no reliable exterior, that every second harbors its own miniature antiquity, and that listening is the delicate violence by which we break into it. Davachi’s compositions inhabit this ontological fissure with extraordinary patience, allowing sound to become estranged from its origins until even the familiar reveals the exquisite foreignness of its existence.

Such music emerges from an imagination profoundly attuned to the afterlives of instruments, particularly their capacity to preserve obsolete understandings of what it means for the world to vibrate. Davachi’s pipe organs carry the accumulated breath of structures designed to give eternity a physical address, while her electronic instruments disclose a more intimate archaeology of voltage and decay. Her engagement with temporarlity subjects the very possibility of consonance to philosophical scrutiny, exposing harmony as a provisional agreement between matter and the cultural imagination. A chord can preserve the memory of an entire system of listening through which earlier ears organized the permissible universe; a single overtone can dismantle that universe without ever raising its voice. Here the Renaissance continues to dream through the nervous system of modernity, and the boundary between the sacred and the mechanical dissolves into a deeper uncertainty about where human intention ends and the secret autobiography of matter begins. Every perception arrives fractionally late to its own happening, already carrying the faint sediment of something irretrievable. Such belatedness gives Davachi’s work its peculiar tenderness, as she asks the ear to become answerable to events that cannot quite be claimed as present.

Recorded in Los Angeles throughout 2020 and released the following year on her Late Music imprint, Antiphonals retreats from the monumental expanses of Cantus, Descant into a more intimate architecture of resonance and remembrance. Entirely composed, performed and produced by Davachi, its eight compositions draw upon the spectral vocabulary of the Mellotron, whose simulated instrumental voices mingle with electric and pipe organs, harpsichord, piano and synthesizer. These instruments seem to speak through one another’s mouths, each timbre trailing an afterimage that cannot be returned to its source. The title evokes the ancient liturgical practice of alternating voices, yet these exchanges unfold within a solitary consciousness, each utterance answering another across the immeasurable distance between sound and its recollection. One hears the same mind assuming the roles of supplicant and sanctuary, of an unseen singer whose throat has been replaced by corridors. The album’s silences acquire the thickness of walls that have absorbed centuries of prayers without ever understanding a word.

The opening “Chorus Scene” puts a rusted harpsichord on the edge of mutability in the night, its brittle articulations attended by electronic tones that soften the undercurrent with their song. The instrument seems to be reading a letter from the future in an alphabet made entirely of hinges. From this uncertain threshold, “Magdalena” touches us with the organ-shaped song of a thought that finds our secrets, working itself into an iron filament pulled through the marrow. As synthesized wonders reveal their light amid the darkness, we are taken into an inner sanctum that cannot be located on any map of the body. The melodies never quite consent to being possessed. They pass through attention in the very act of teaching attention how to receive them, leaving the heart momentarily stained by colors for which vision has devised no name. A more secular beauty enters by way of “Gradual of Image,” whose folkish accessibility makes room for the wandering soul that might reach out for a melody and discover an entire history of touch concealed inside it.

Yet this tenderness has a shadow. In the distorted reaches of “Border of Mind,” the music brings us face to face with our wounded selves, while “Rushes Recede” offers the uncanny sensation of a stained-glass heart cradling hymnody in its blood-bearing chambers. These interiors are neither wholly consoling nor wholly threatening; their beauty consists in refusing to conceal what the light discovers. Elsewhere, the drones of “First Cadence” and “Doubled Flutes” pour illumination at dream speed, stretching the interval between recognition and understanding until the two appear to have been born in different centuries. Even the withheld motion implicit in “Abeyant” suggests a harmony engaged in the delicate work of self-awareness. Underlying this hushed communion is the suspicion that the ear can encounter its deepest interior only by listening to something it cannot identify as its own.

That suspicion undergoes a more concentrated trial in Basse Brevis, co-commissioned by Radio France and INA GRM and premiered at the 2024 Présences festival dedicated to Steve Reich. In this eighteen-minute enmeshment of organ and synthesized voices, Davachi extends her minimalist investigations into the intricate relationships between timbre and duration, letting the gradual evolution of sonic material become an exercise in perceptual displacement. The distinction between instrument and artifact grows porous, gradually erasing the fingerprints of its own manufacture. Between instrumental resonance and musique concrète, abstraction acquires an unexpected tenderness; each tone feels at once exposed and inaccessible, a piece of matter dreaming that it possesses an inward life. The listener is asked to inhabit a structure whose dimensions change only when one stops measuring them, an acoustic building secretly rearranging its egresses around the person standing inside.

Something resembling an uncovering of sin touches the sky with its highest flames. The music conflagrates into the ashen skeletons of our most untoward thoughts, and for a moment we wish to crush them into powder and throw them into the nearest river. Davachi instead refashions these remains into a subtle yet crucial monument to the life we used to live and from which we now deviate in search of something pure and good. The gesture is troubling precisely because the monument refuses to entertain absolution. It preserves our former selves without granting them the privilege of innocence, allowing the listener to experience memory as a material still undergoing its own composition. Formal exploration and emotional immediacy occupy the same perceptual space; one feels the mind approach its deepest disfigurements by way of almost imperceptible changes in resonance. And while the piece seems to end where it started, a global circulation of thought has occurred, slingshotting consciousness backward in order to move on.

The scale of this investigation expands dramatically in The Will of Tongues, which stretches beyond two hours across three LPs. Thirteen compositions probe the boundaries of harmonic perception, gathering five solo works for historical pipe organs recorded across North America and the Netherlands alongside choral writing and microtonal instrumental encounters. An extended chamber work intertwines a string trio with organ and tape, deepening the inquiry. Musicians including Whitney Johnson and Eyvind Kang enter this field of resonances, with Lucy Railton and ensembles such as Chamber Choir Ireland contributing to its intricate human circuitry. Davachi’s enduring interest in tuning theory assumes an almost biological dimension: musical ideas migrate between instrumental bodies, undergoing tiny mutations until their identities can no longer be secured by the material that first carried them.

The first of its dispersed “Interludes” begins with strings whose metallic dissonances hover over fragile harmonies, opening a texture so encompassing that the very distinction between surface and depth seems briefly suspended. Farther along, an answering woodwind meditation restores a more harmonious balance to this cosmos, though its equilibrium never loses the memory of disturbance. When the brass eventually take their turn, their collective breath suggests one larger organism laboring to pronounce a consensus vowel. The movement among these instrumental families produces an antiphony on a scale more bodily than architectural, carrying forward the private exchanges of Antiphonals into a community of resonant flesh. The choral “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” introduce another series of arches, enchantments born of everyday interactions and the small interruptions that arrest us at the fragile edge of life. Their organ ancestry can be heard passing through the human throat, where resonance becomes newly vulnerable to the possibility of breaking. What holds a mirror to the soul here is also capable of cracking it. A voice does not merely occupy a note; it must risk an entire body to keep that note alive.

At the center stands the massive two-part “The Rose Dialogues,” meshing strings and drone with an eye turned on the imperfections of the flesh. Its title opens a botanical wound: thorn enters blood, and the rose begins to resemble an argument between what can be touched and what can only be imagined through touch. The senses negotiate this profound disconnect between the physical body and the metaphysical world by giving us a taste of what lies just beyond their own grasp. The music maintains a delicate interval between corporeal resistance and spiritual appetite, allowing each to reveal the other’s unfinished dimensions. Around this central wound, the organ works pursue their own forms of divided speech. “Canto Solo” and “Canto Duo” undulate at the pace of a tidal shift, in which even one tone can contain the outline of an interlocutor, and even dialogue can disclose the intolerable loneliness of being heard.

Other correspondences develop across the album’s expanse. Separated by the intervening music, “The First Tuning” and “The Second Tuning” appear as windows turned toward each other from different buildings, each illuminating a bright expanse in which the blood drops of the human condition become impossible to ignore. To tune is to admit that there exists a difference between where we are and where we mean to arrive, however minute or unreachable that distance may be. Buried among these proliferating relationships, “Four Narrow Forms” pulls the organ’s breath until it seems to have nothing left to say. Yet this extremity is also strangely generous. The instrument’s apparent depletion exposes the physical effort sustaining what we too readily call eternity, reminding us that even an apparently disembodied resonance depends upon mechanisms that can fail. From this recognition emerges an acoustical codex of hesitation. Listening must remain vulnerable to phenomena too gradual to possess.

Across these works, Davachi stages an encounter between the mortal body and the impossible duration it has invented instruments to imagine. Perhaps the deepest provocation resides in the suggestion that our ears are themselves historical instruments, tuned by choices made before we ever drew breath. Consonance, in this sense, becomes an inherited belief whose laws can be revised by the slightest disobedient overtone. There is tenderness in that possibility, though it carries an ethical question disguised as an acoustic one: Whose future listening are we helping to make possible?

Martin Davids/David Yearsley: In the Cabinet of Wonders

| Tyran Grillo

The organ is a colossus, the violin a slender voice. By sheer mass and volume, they seem destined never to agree. One threatens to drown the air in thunder, the other to disappear beneath it. And yet, in 17th-century Hamburg, they discovered a shared breath. High in the gallery of St. Catherine’s church, they spoke not as rivals but as companions, drawing crowds who came to hear scale converse with fragility. What could have been a contest was a study in equilibrium, like a skeleton learning, haltingly, how to stand upright.

It was in this bustling hub that Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663) and Johann Schop (c. 1590–1667) met across air and string. Their sounds descended like thought itself, Scheidemann’s pipes carrying the gravity of heaven, Schop’s bow and strings tracing the precarious outline of the human voice. What emerged was more than music. It was a convergence of opposites: cleric and townsman, traveler and citizen, the enduring and the fleeting. In that reverberant space, the city heard itself briefly whole, briefly hushed, before motion returned and the pulse of everyday life resumed.

Under Scheidemann’s quick, laughing hands, sound sprang outward, ricocheting through stone and space with wit and momentum. The organ became less a monument than a body with many lungs, capable of sudden whispers as well as exuberant exhalations. Alongside this abundance, Schop’s violin did not retreat. It danced. Its lines flashed with surprise, then slipped without warning into shadow, like muscles tightening and releasing beneath the skin. Between them unfolded a living exchange, in which the church itself became a resonant demonstration that opposites, when truly listening, can cohere into a single organism.

This album invites the listener into a corporeal experience, one that breathes, sweats, remembers, and occasionally stumbles forward in exhilaration. The music of Schop and Scheidemann, as reimagined by 21st-century analogues Martin Davids and David Yearsley, circulates like blood through civic arteries, passing between church lofts, dance floors, and private chambers, rarely holding one posture for long. What binds the recording is neither style nor chronology, but a shared faith in music as something handled, inhabited, and exchanged socially. Sound is treated as anatomy rather than abstraction. What we hear are the bones of it all, flexing, testing their reach, discovering what they can bear.

Schop’s Intrada à 5 from Erster Theil newer Paduanen opens the album by wrapping the senses in gauze. The interwoven voices refuse hierarchy, relying instead on mutual dependence. Each line anticipates the others’ weight and direction, like ribs designed both to protect and expand. This is consort music already aware of its future disassembly and reconfiguration, carrying that latent plasticity within it. The partnership feels so complete that separation seems almost injurious. From the outset, beauty is not the goal but the consequence. Expression rests on marrow and sinew, and imagination requires a listener willing to inhabit the charged space between intention and realization.

Much of the album’s gravitational pull lies within the orbit of ’t Uitnemend Kabinet of 1646, where Schop’s violin resurrects itself as heir and provocateur. His reworking of Alessandro Striggio’s Nasce la pena mia unfolds like a slow-motion game of double dutch, the ropes of austerity and playfulness turning with deliberate care, demanding full coordination to avoid collapse.

The Lachrime Pavaen after John Dowland presses further inward. The soul twists into a Möbius strip of emotional transference, sorrow folding endlessly back upon itself without settling. Chromatic figures reach deep into the gut to retrieve a half-digested grief and hold it up for inspection. Yet nothing here feels morbid; instead, it suggests that emotion without physicality would simply cave in, that even pain needs a skull in which to resonate.

Scheidemann answers this inwardness with motion and propulsion. His Galliarda ex D sets fire beneath the feet, insisting on the intelligence of movement. Rarely do both touch the ground at once. The sound remains perpetually mid-step, angled toward what follows. Dance here is a matter of orientation, a way of thinking forward with the entire frame. That energy carries seamlessly into the Canzon in G, whose relaxed atmosphere allows light and shadow to exchange places with quiet charm, the organ responsive rather than domineering.

At several moments, the album reveals its improvisatory foundations. The performers’ Intonatiofunctions as connective tissue, recalling a time when much of this repertoire lived between the notes, sustained by trust, familiarity, and shared risk. This ethos extends into Scheidemann’s setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. Told in two verses, the first establishes the firm outline of a torso, while the second pencils in the extremities.

The relationship between instruments grows aerodynamic in Scheidemann’s intabulation of Giovanni Bassani’s Dic nobis Maria. The cadence is measured yet generous, giving the violin space to breathe while the organ subtly lifts and supports. Imagined as wind and wing, the pairing becomes a lesson in controlled flight, with ornamentation serving as lift. This play of disguise reaches its height in the Englische Mascarada, where the organ steps forward alone. It imitates viols, recorders, and cornetts, its movements almost tactile. The backdrop assumes the foreground, and scale itself learns to play, shedding weight without surrendering substance.

Schop’s sine titulo from ’t Uitnemend Kabinet may be the album’s quietest act of defiance. Tone, transition, and spirit nourish one another organically, as if the piece were activating its own nervous system mid-flight. The violin’s occasional double stops flare like shooting stars across an otherwise stable sky, fleeting, unnecessary, and wholly persuasive.

As the program draws toward its close, its communal heart comes fully into view. Schop’s Præludium, the first work ever published for solo violin, clears the air with intent, a measured breath before speaking plainly. What follows, an improvisatory fantasy on his chorale tune Werde munter, mein Gemüte, unfolds as a conversation restored. The organ answers phrase by phrase, until the violin can no longer remain apart and joins the coda. Harmonies shimmer. What emerges is gratitude, rooted in shared labor. The album concludes with the Pavaen de Spanje, whose stark colors and abrupt shifts return us to orbit.

By its end, the recording has quietly redrawn the boundaries of historical performance. This is no reconstruction, but a living metabolism, a system dependent on circulation, exchange, and constant adjustment. The music does not ask to be preserved so much as inhabited. It leaves the listener with the sense of having moved through a body rather than examined an object, of having felt joints flex, lungs fill, and organs hum in sympathetic response. The final sounds do not conclude so much as release, sending us back into the world more aware of our own inner architecture, and perhaps more willing to trust it when it makes overtures to leap.

In the Cabinet of Wonders is available from False Azure Records here.

David Yearsley: Handel’s Organ Banquet

| Tyran Grillo

Every good meal begins with a premise, and this one opens in the kitchen rather than the chapel. The cover caricature sets the tone before a single note is heard: George Frideric Handel rendered as a hog, snout forward, hunched over the organ in mid-18th-century satire. It is a reminder that iconography and appetite have always shared a table. Organist and scholar David Yearsley accepts the joke with a grin and sharpens it into art, giving Handel not only hands but feet with which to prepare. Since Handel himself rarely bothered with pedals in his scores, save for the Organ Concerto in B-flat Major, opus 7, no. 1 (HWV 306), Yearsley’s approach feels less like historical correction than culinary invention, an act of inspired seasoning rather than academic garnish.

This recording is not about dutifully reheating the classics. It is about tasting them anew, discovering how familiar flavors bloom when exposed to different heat, different hands, different feet. Yearsley plays Handel as one might approach a well-loved recipe, respecting the ingredients while daring to improvise at the stove, if not—at the risk of a poor analogy—allowing a rat to pull some hair under the toque.

We start with a clever pairing: Sinfony from Messiah (HWV 56) combined with the Fugue from Suite in E Minor (HWV 429). The unmistakable opening arrives like a dish you have known since childhood, instantly recognizable, deeply comforting. Yet Yearsley plates it with unexpected accompaniments, adding decorations of improvisational whimsy and alert, in-the-moment thinking. The transition into the fugue is seamless and generous, the musical equivalent of warm bread passed across the table. There is solace here, and a sense of being gently welcomed back for seconds.

As with rosy steps, the morn (from Theodora, HWV 68) follows, a radiant oratorio aria that unfolds theatrically on a stage of its own making. Its inner pulse is sensual and full of promise. The music breathes with unanswered questions and lush excitement, each phrase suggesting that the best bite may still be ahead.

At the center of the table sits the Passacaille in G (HWV 399), the giblet bag of the Trio Sonata in G Major. On the organ (no pun intended?), it acquires a lively delicacy, sumptuous yet never heavy. The lines spiral and turn, dancing themselves toward oblivion with an umami that belies their craft. Time seems to loosen its grip here, as though the dish refuses to cool.

Lord, to Thee, each night and day (another Theodora morsel) returns us to the world of aria, moving with grace through fluid key changes that feel both inevitable and surprising. The progression is palpable in its mouthfeel, each modulation a subtle shift in seasoning. When the turn toward the end arrives, it does so quietly, gloriously, a kind of musical retribution that needs no raised voice to make its point.

The communal platter arrives with O praise the Lord with one consent (opening chorus of Chandos Anthem no. 9, HWV 254). Verdant colors and resplendent textures ply the ear, expanding William Croft’s 1708 St. Anne hymn tune into something plush and enveloping. The result is sonic velour, draping the dining surface in lavishness, even if the organist’s feet are working overtime to keep its stitches from fraying.

With Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo, HWV 7), Handel’s most famous lament from his first London opera of 1711, the organ sings without words. Its vocal qualities survive the transfer intact, barely eroded. Vegetal stops add depth, enhancing the meaty base without overpowering the line. It is a reminder that sorrow, like flavor, often deepens with slow attention.

The heartier courses follow. The Trio Sonata in F, op. 5, no. 6 (HWV 401) sheds its ensemble skin to become a solo affair, compressed into a single instrument yet expanded by the breadth of Yearsley’s imagination. The central Allegro dazzles with its tessellated structure, each piece fitting snugly against the next, while the subsequent Adagio melts everything down into a rich, savory gravy that coats every note. Close behind comes the Concerto in G minor/G major, op. 4, no. 1 (HWV 289), another full-course meal in a full-course meal of full-course meals. Highlights abound, from the delightful second-movement Allegro to the concluding Andante, a light-footed wonder that dances around the table, refusing to sit still.

For dessert, Yearsley offers his adaptation of the “Amen” from Messiah, recast as a Fuga in D. It culminates in a pedal cadenza that is itself a four-part fugue played only with the feet. The effect is brilliantly virtuosic and deeply satisfying, as organic as farmers market ingredients transformed by a confident cook who trusts the produce and his palate.

A bonus track serves as the final flourish: A Hallelujah Concerto, an improvisation on Handel’s most beloved chorus. Composer and performer seem to spur one another on, whipping the soufflé together until the peaks stand just right. It is exuberant, inventive, and impossible to resist. A finish to end all finishes, at least until the next course.

When the last resonance fades, the table is cleared, and the listener is left pleasantly full. Satisfaction lingers, along with the faint sense that something mischievous and marvelous has just occurred. You may want to keep your napkin as a souvenir. It bears the marks of a meal well enjoyed and proof that Handel, in the right hands and feet, still knows how to cook.

The album is the third release from False Azure Records, an exciting new label where old and new make merry. My ear continues to follow them with keen interest.