Living and Listening with Others: The Gospel According to the Organ

Charlemagne Palestine. Photo: Green Yang.

FutureStops Festival, hosted this past September in Toronto by the Royal Canadian College of Organists, celebrates the renaissance of the organ and its contemporary turn toward generative, ambient music. The programs held at the Cathedral Church of St. James and Metropolitan United Church featured artists Kara-Lis Coverdale, Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, Thomas Mellan, Matthew Larkin, and Charlemagne Palestine, among others. This survey of sound touched on the traditional formats of the fugue and toccata — emblematic of conservatory pedigrees — while also incorporating esoteric techniques more akin to contemporary ambient, and uppercase-S, Sound art methodologies.

The event’s first  program, “Dark Matter,” took place in the Cathedral Church of St. James on September 29. St. James is a place of respite, set aside from the hustle and shuffle of Toronto’s King Street commuters. I enter the sanctuary to the soft hums of Kara-Lis Coverdale. As gentle as a sigh, her sound settles as a familiar drone. Spatially restrained to the sanctuary’s anterior pipes, the organ’s song lingers firmly above the altar. I take my seat, closing the pew’s saloon-like door behind me, and settle into a state of deep listening. I channel my breath, attenuating its depth according to the organ's amplification. Every so often, a few cursory keypresses sever the resolute thrum,  propelling a pulse of bright tones toward the pews, permeating the crowd and easing into my field of attunement. The oak crunches as I adjust my posture, one of the many sounds from my Protestant childhood soundboard. In a way, Coverdale’s activation of quietude and employ of the audience’s otherwise banal presence as causal accompaniment reminds me of John Cage’s 4’33”(1952). Her embrace of the latency summoned by the sanctuary and restrained playing consciously walk the line of intelligibility and quietude, creating a truly ambient music that politely falls into the background as a sort of sonic furnishing. In the repose prompted by Coverdale, we are invited to listen with great intention, de-escalate from the city’s speed not but a wall away, and attune our movements — and consequential crunches — to the composition. We gain an appreciation of our closeness and relation to the congregation, and our actions and resultant soundtrack become part of a collective, happenstance choreography set to Coverdale’s transient performance.

Thomas Mellan. Photo: Green Yang.

Providing a bold contrast to Coverdale’s meditations of de-escalation, Thomas Mellan (the “bad-boy” of organ music — as evidenced by his bespoke black denim jacket adorned with studs and patches) put on an extravagant demonstration of distorted, dissonant classical compositions. An homage to punk methodologies, Mellan’s exhilarating plunges into the instrument’s keys swiftly diffuse the tranquil air once lining the bowels of the sanctuary. His seemingly flippant playing style and over-the-top showmanship distinctly pivots away from traditional organ sounds and stage etiquette. In a series of thunderous growls cast from the organ’s pipes, Mellan radiates jubilance, offering a cheeky subversion of tradition and genre to the mostly uninitiated audience. 

Kali Malone. Photo: Green Yang.

Closing out the first evening, Kali Malone and her featured frequent collaborator Stephen O’Malley performed a set that erred on the side of the sacred. With luminous orbs in hand, Malone and O’Malley approach the altar, set a metronome, and begin to sway in time with each other. Drawling out cascading yawns, the organ’s waves, viscous and thick, color the sanctuary. The warm breaths expelled by Malone’s keypress follow and envelop one another, weaving a vehement sonic fabric that enshrouds legato spells of deep, rich chords with dissonant quivers that ring with citations from her 2019 album, The Sacrificial Code. Though not placed in the same program, Malone acted as a prelude to Sarah Davachi. Their two performances played into each other as if they were a call and response, a canon, creating a harmonious seam between the evenings. 

Sarah Davachi. Photo: Green Yang.

Opening for the festival’s final event, “Forces of Nature,” Davachi took charge of Metropolitan United’s space, fully utilizing its sprawling pipes to produce a spatially astute and texturally profound set of whirring hymns. Carefully selected sonic passages from Cantus, Descant (2020) and Antiphonals (2021) showcase her acoustic awareness, as the cyclical laments of the organ flow upward and outward, developing a familiarity with the architecture’s intricacies and curves. Unlike Coverdale, with her spatially restrained sound, Davachi strategically deploys her refined phenomenological scope to emphasize the instrument’s symbiotic acoustic relation to the site of the sanctuary. Davachi places an emphasis on the organ as an infrastructure in constant conversation with its nurturing architecture. As she plays, her feet flutter along the organ’s pedals to expressively pronounce each fervent, incorporeal “ahhh” and “ohhh” of the organ’s serenades to its counterpart. I spend most of my time listening, with eyes shut, to the depth of sound, envisioning my hands running up against the structure, feeling the building’s reverberance when excited and woe as it rests. 

Matthew Larkin. Photo: Green Yang.

Rounding out the survey, Matthew Larkin’s formal and traditional series of fugues aptly demonstrated the genesis of the instrument and showcased its iconic tones. His performance stood out as the most choreographed of the programs I attended. Between each piece, he cycled through conservatory formalities. He rose, with blazer buttoned, to introduce each one — The Seventh Fire (1991, rev. 2022) by Daniel Foley, and Toccata and Fugue, Op. 30, No. 1 (2009) by Andrew Ager — then unbuttoned to take his post at the helm of the instrument; rising, again, and buttoning once more, to bow in the wake of each piece’s cadence. He repeated this sequence at each of his interludes. While he was not the only person to have such “accoutrements,” his augmentations did not add to or supplement the work as much as they detracted from the program: a gesture to the tired, good-mannered etiquette of the conservatory. 

In the latter half of Larkin’s playing, a figure stood up from the front row and lurked past the altar, continuing through to the cathedral’s alcove. Clearly, I wasn’t the only audience member feeling ambivalent about this performative politeness, and truthfully, I found this aside to be far more intriguing than Larkin’s Baroque-esque farce. The figure returned several minutes later, lugging a carry-on suitcase and fumbling an armful of reusable grocery bags overflowing with what appeared to be garments. I could now clearly make out the person’s outfit: an eclectic collection of patterns and prints, a well-loved and bejewelled trucker hat, unremarkable shoes, and a pair of reading glasses strung around their neck by a leash. As Larkin played on, they set the luggage down, took off their shoes, and unpacked the bags on the preparatory table, as if to organize the body-and-blood-to-be. Turning away from the table, they opened the suitcase, revealing an entourage of stuffed animals neatly seated as if perched on a bleacher. This, of course, was the eccentric Charlemagne Palestine. Larkin’s final cadence sounded. 

Sparing no time, Palestine grabbed the contents from the table and took to the stage. Prudently, he dressed the organ and its surroundings with vivid garlands of scavenged textiles. The fabrics trailed off the instrument’s body and piled into colourful puddles at the instrument’s feet. Beside the organ’s bench, he erected a miniature Roman column decorated with drapery and a sparse table setting of two wine glasses. In one he decanted white wine, in the other a portion of water. This tableau prefaces and extends Palestine’s vibrant character, an attempt to deepen our immersion into his sonically figured heterotopia to come. Taking a glass in each hand, he swirled their contents, clinked them together in a “self-cheers,” and helped himself to a sip of each drink to signal the commencement of the festival’s culmination. 

Palestine performed his ever-expanding Schlingen-Blängen: a nebulous piece spawned from his performances and travels over forty years. He prefaces his playing with deeply stirring hums, trills, and underlying babbles. He then pauses. Listening, he heeds the reflections of the decaying initiations. Using these kindling croaks as an atmospheric and acoustic attunement of the space, he proceeds in composing a schematic of dense drones to follow. Patiently, Palestine sits, slowly and discreetly placing weights on the organ’s keys, concatenating selected root notes as a robust foundation to the composition. He pulls the stops — the “effects” that alter the instrument’s timbral qualities — to taste, amassing a gale of sonic wind. Quickly, the church becomes congested by the whelm of the organ. Its crescendos of full-bodied, tonally rich squalls rattle and refract off the ribs of the sanctuary, making mimeophonic voices in the collisions and folds of the waves. The resultant synthesized murmurs resound from the choir’s loft in a cacophonous chorus. Instinctively, I scan the shifting soundscape for a grounding signifier: a diagnosable timbre to mark as index and place to relate, ponder, and mull. In this case, the whereabouts of familiar tones remain unplaceable within the composition. I am discombobulated by the sonic entanglements.

Leading us in an aural consecration, Palestine disarms prejudice and scrambles the senses to fracture; he makes apparent the dynamic between the site of the instrument, the architecture in which it is bound, and the body of the listener. Masterfully maneuvering these relations, he renders the ineffable into jarring, incidental voices synthesized near to the point of sonic personification. This revelatory performance reminded me of the constant presence of sonic bodies in our lived experience. How we grieve in the inconvenience of their pollution, bask in the stillness of their ambience, and welcome their company as the cherished, quotidian soundtracks we play back from our pockets. We so frequently forget that we carry sound, sustain it in our gestures, and buffer it in our bodies. It is in the last breaths of Schlingen-Blängen, this new wave sermon of sound and site, that Palestine delivers this liturgy. “The organ is the greatest synthesizer in the world,” he pontificated, in good faith, hoping that we, the congregation, carry out this word. 

The affective awakenings convened by FutureStops Festival marked an enriching foray for Toronto’s arts community into the emanating discourse of experimental organ music. The comprehensive survey meaningfully demonstrated how sounds, bodies, and organs synthesize experiences and exposures, distilling and filtering them into new sacred knowledges. 

by Liam Mullen

Liam Mullen is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Toronto, Ontario. His practice figures ambient and granular knowledge translation processes to inspire alternative methods of reading, invigorate critical conversations, and add nuance to problematics.