Soundscapes for Meditative Organs by Callie Malone

“All Life,” the title of composer and organist Callie Malone’s latest album, is taken from a poem by British Symbolist Arthur Symons: “The heart must weary and wonder and weep like the sea,/It’s all” Crying all life in vain,/As water makes me cry all night “The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Spirits of the Black Folk, which is where Malone found it. Beneath Simons’ lines, Du Bois provides a musical notation of the opening phrase of the spiritual “No one knows the problem I saw.” So the topic is sadness, songs of sadness, sounds of sadness.

Malone’s album, a quiet, contemplative collection of pieces for vocal quartet, brass quintet and organ, is steeped in melancholy, but not the kind of melancholy you can sink into absent-mindedly, as if curled up in a duvet. On a cold night. Malone and a group of collaborators recently performed a live performance of “All Life Long” at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, as part of the annual New York edition of the Polish festival Unsound. The titular work, vaguely in the key of A minor, has been heard on choir and organ solo versions. At first glance, the music appears to be an exercise in simple, trance-like repetition, with phrases of five rising and falling notes repeated dozens of times. The phrase “throughout life” unfolds as a primal sigh. However, there is harmonic tension at the heart of the concept, as semitone dissonances pierce the texture in almost every bar – F versus E, D sharp versus E, C versus B. And when one of these pricks resolves, another intrudes. The tension subsides only in the final repetition, where the bare AE interval swells and then cuts off.

This is music at once pure and forbidden, redolent of the strict polyphony of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. You might expect the composer to be a solitary hermit, living in a lighthouse on an uninhabited island. Malone is actually a thirty-year-old international girl who grew up in Colorado and played in demo teams in her teenage years. In 2012, she moved to Stockholm, where she became active in the city’s drone music and electronic scenes. Her husband, Stephen O’Malley, who also plays organ on “All Life Long,” is a founding member of the powerful drone band Sunn O))), which has also performed at Unsound. So far, Malone has gained more of a following in the electronic world than in the classical realm. However, the stunning beauty of “All Life Long” may bring her new fans. Its existence is as vast as it is mysterious.

Two days after the Tully Hall concert, I met Malone in Sarah D. Roosevelt Park, on the Lower East Side. As basketball players cheered in the background, she described her compositional techniques, her preferred tuning systems, and her free standing among musical traditions and genres. “I grew up singing classical vocal music,” she told me. “I was in a children’s choir, and then I went to middle and high school arts, where I was a singing major.” But she also gravitated toward Denver’s underground music venues, where she spent much of her youth. At the age of 16, she enrolled in Simon’s Rock, an early undergraduate program in Berkshire, where she began playing in a noise duo.

Malone’s life took an unexpected turn when, on a trip to New York, she met Swedish experimental composer Elin Arkbrough, who told her about the scene in Stockholm and invited her to visit. After an exploratory trip, she decided to move there, eventually entering the composition program at the Royal College of Music. I’ve become a fan of fair intonation, where intervals are adjusted according to ratios of whole numbers. Music created in this vein, such as La Monte Young’s massive drone pieces, has a strange purity quite different from the circular sound of the modern isotemporal system, in which the intervals are homogeneous. Malone also delved into electro-acoustic instruments, taking advantage of the facilities at the state-funded electronic music studio and the artist-run Vilkingen Centre.

Malone had never been a keyboardist — in bands, she played guitar and sang — but she found herself in Stockholm working as an organ tuning apprentice, which led her into the secrets of the oldest synthesizers. “I realized I could translate these experiments I had done on the computer to the organ,” she told me. A decisive leap was made when I had access to historical musical instruments that were tuned to a single temperament, which preserved integer ratios for certain periods. The organ version of “No Sun to Burn,” a piece that appears twice on “All Life Long,” was recorded on the Malmö Art Museum’s 16th-century instrument, which is among the oldest working organs in the world. The piece begins with a sustained F and a gradual descent of E-flat, D-flat, C, and B-flat. As the music moves into the upper register, the thirds take on a strange tinge, at least to ears accustomed to modern tuning.

The professional tuner inhabits a world of intervals and primary chords, adjusting their nodes to conform to traditional standards. In some ways, Malone’s music amounts to a tuning ritual, a test of countless possible combinations of the basic truths of harmony. “I like working in a restrictive system,” she told me. “I give myself three, four or five chords and then see what I can do with the permutations, looking for a wide range of different emotional identities.” Chords have cultural identities attached to them: major triads are bright, minor triads are dark, perfect fifths are strong, and tritones and semitones are annoying. In Malone’s hands, those associations shift under the pressure of repetition, especially in the world of the stark, piercing sound of the organ. In another song from the album, “Prisoned on Watery Shore,” she notes that the supposedly devilish tone of the tritone becomes poignant, even sensual, in a scene of deadpan fifths.

Adding to the alienation from the ordinary is Malone’s quirky approach to rhythm and tempo in her organ music. Somewhat similar to twentieth-century serial composers, it controls note durations according to a rotating matrix of values. In “No Sun to Burn,” the opening landing pattern is two beats, four beats, six beats, and eight beats. The upper line follows the same pattern, six beats behind. In the next section, the pattern changes to four, six, eight, two; then to six, eight, two, four; And finally, eight, two, four, six. This irregular rhythmic sequence, combined with the instability of Malone’s apparently simple harmonies, generates surreptitiously building tension. It is as if the music is controlled by some slow, medieval instrument – an organ with a mind of its own.

Malone is by no means an impersonal systems operator. She invests a lot of herself into her music, although she avoids providing too many details, for fear of trapping listeners in a limited interpretive framework. While planning All Life, she thought about the solitary act of mountaineering — her father was a strong climber and cyclist before a life-altering accident — and about Du Bois’s evocations of never-ending political struggle. (The epigraph to “Souls of the Black Folk” provides a second choral text, in the form of James Russell Lowell’s abolitionist poem “The Present Crisis”: “Truth is on the scaffold for ever, / Error is on the throne for ever.”) It begins with a sort of simple motif entitled “ Passage Through the Spheres,” the text of which comes from the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben: “There is a worldly contagion, a touch that disappoints and returns to using what has separated and petrified the sacred. Last year, a concert Malone had been planning was cancelled was held at a church in Carnac, France, when a far-right Catholic faction organized a protest, on the grounds that it was desecrating a holy place with its “electric” sounds.

The vocal and brass arrangements on “All Life Long” are so immaculately designed that one can see the pieces becoming reference items for forward-thinking groups. However, for now, Malone does not want to make the music available outside of the format she created for it. She painstakingly rehearses with her collaborators to find the right balance between exquisite precision and expressive warmth. Tully’s band included singers Matthew Robbins, Sam Strickland, Zach Ritter and Brian Mummert. trumpeters Luke Spence and Atsi Theodros; trumpeter Austin Sposato; and trombonists Nikki Abisi and Jennifer Henkel, the latter accompanied by her impressively calm, clinically alert dog, Kita. Trumpeter and composer Sam Nester conducted most of the evening until Malone herself took over.

The cumulative force of the event at Tully justified Malone’s anxiety about letting her creativity out of her control. The vocal settings came first, then a group of brass pieces. Finally, Malone and O’Malley entered to play the organ, and sat side by side at the booklets. Placing copper in near darkness resulted in increased tissue in the closing sections. In “No Sun to Burn,” the penultimate work, rays of hope seemed to penetrate, as the brass settled on the notes E-flat, F, and G, summoning a fog of ecstatic tones. On “Unifying Inner and Outer Life,” a discordant haze descended again, with electronic naturals grinding softly against the F. And yet, there was an arctic calm in that distant gray sound, no resting place certainly, but a sheltered place nonetheless. ♦