Embarking on a fresh voyage, Sarah Davachi drones out at sea on ‘Possente Spirto’ from The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, her latest collection for solo performers and chamber ensembles. The title of the piece alludes to the ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ of the opera LāOrfeoĀ by Claudio Monteverdi, an aria which captures the moment when the bard Orpheus strives to convince the ferryman Charon to allow him to pass into Hades, from where he hopes to recover his wife Eurydice, who has died and gone into the underworld after being bitten by a snake.
In this rendering, which is regarded as one of the high water marks of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period, the elaborate yet heartfelt aria lulls Charon to sleep and Orpheus crosses the Styx, with Davachiās piece capturing the wash and spume and the staggered descent of the journey, written for sustaining continuo and duos of string and brass, with Davachi performing on Mellotron and synthesizers with tape delay while Andrew McIntosh plays viola and Mattie Barbier adds plaintive appeals on the trombone.
The seven compositions which make up The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir were written between 2022 and 2024, and they form in Davachi’s own words a conceptual suite related to:
the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialise and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.
To that end they engage with two takes on the ancient Orpheus myth, both Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo which premiered in 1607 with its dramatic polyphonies and fleshed-out musical narrative, and the Sonnets to Orpheus which were published in 1922 by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
According to the Orpheus myth, the titular hero after sailing as one of the Argonauts on a quest to find the Golden Fleece returns with his golden lyre to Thrace and falls in love with the beautiful Eurydice. When she dies suddenly after being bitten by a snake, he makes a fateful descent into Hades and manages to charm the denizens of the underworld, who allow him to retrieve his beloved on one condition: he must not turn around to gaze upon Eurydice until they have both completed the ascent and returned to the land of the living. Hearing nothing of Eurydice and fearing that he has been deceived, Orpheus turns around at the very last moment, and thereby loses his dear spouse to the underworld forever.
The myth has been inspiring art for centuries, from Virgil and Ovid to its spectre in the Divine Comedy of Dante, from the Orphic Trilogy of the director Jean Cocteau to Marcel Camus with his carnivalesque and bossa nova-infused Black Orpheus and from Moulin Rouge! or Portrait of a Lady on Fire to the last screeching howl of Carrie Page-cum-Laura Palmer at the close of the third season of Twin Peaks. For his part Rilke – who had already published the poem ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.’ in 1907 – was inspired to write the Sonnets to Orpheus by the death of his daughter’s friend, a young dancer called Wera Knoop. Carrying some of his usual themes and sensibilities around mysticism and transformation, introspection and the nature of art, he completed his cycle of 55 sonnets in a ‘savage creative storm’ over a matter of weeks.
The broad instrumentational palette of Monteverdi’s opera served to elaborate two distinct colours or themes, with the pastoral idyll of Thrace represented by strings and recorders plus a continuo – a form of accompaniment similar to a modern rhythm section, which is meant to establish the underlying harmony of the music through a bassline and chord progressions – made up of organs, harpsichords, harp and chitarroni while the underworld of Hades was given over to the deep brass of trombones and cornetts plus a regal. The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir offers a similar diversity but pitches us into the thick of the action, with Davachi stretching the canvas and summarising the death of Orpheus, who according to various accounts met his demise when he was torn to shreds by a group of maenads, with his head and lyre continuing their mournful song as they floated quite detached on down the river.
‘Prologo’ then for solo organ already sounds like a descent, and perhaps even an inversion of the Orpheus myth as the traveller pauses for one last long look back before continuing their steady march, which becomes a winding throng as the bassy low end and shorter reed pipes splinter to incorporate a web of strings, journeying deeper with a sense of foreboding and some creaking of the wind.
Davachi is one of the contemporary faces of drone minimalism, her works of extended duration which are written in various tunings including just intonation and meantone temperaments incorporating strings and keys, winds and brass and an assortment of electronics, with a focus on timbral intricacy and psychoacoustic phenomena in the form of overtones and harmonics. While some of her compositions here are quite flexible in terms of the continuo instrumentation and their overall duration, the recordings on The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir include a trio, a quartet and a quintet with three pieces for solo organ and one piece for solo electronics.
Together the compositions feature four pipe organs: an electric-action instrument built by Veikko Virtanen at the Temppeliaukioa Church in Helsinki, a meantone mechanical-action organ built by John Brombaugh for the Fairchild Chapel at Oberlin, a Tamburini opus 544 mechanical-action instrument in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi of Bologna, and a mechanical-action organ built by Aristide CavaillĆ©-Coll back in 1864 in the Ćgilise du GesĆ¹ of Toulouse, which was deconsecrated in 2000 and converted to become a full-time concert venue.
Still for all of the parallels with the continuous composer Ćliane Radigue, from the radiant whorls and glacial shivers of her electronic work to the bespoke acoustics of her Occam series, in addition to everyone from La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros to contemporary organists or just intonation adepts like Kali Malone and LĆ©o Dupleix, it is clear that Sarah Davachi is drawing from a deeper well on The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, where in addition to pipe organ and Mellotron she utilises the Korg CX-3 electric clonewheel organ, the iconic Prophet 5 and the Korg PS-3100.
Her penchant for psychoacoustics evokes Alvin Lucier and the auditory distortion products of Maryanne Amacher, while the sonority of her music from its pungent strings and rumbling brass to its sometimes crackling surface textures and cycles of decay might suggest the changes and dissonances of progressive rock, a submerged or sublimated kosmische whose swaying textures are grounded by that motorik beat or the drowsy haze of psychedelia. She fits right in on Sean McCann’s label Recital with its more refined airs and abstractions but would not be out of place at the other end of the spectrum, where one might find the sub-bass pulses and prurient shards of industrial noise or power electronics.
‘Prologo’ makes use of the Temppeliaukioa Church and Fairchild Chapel organs, with Davachi remarking that the Brombaugh organ at Oberlin was especially valuable for its meantone temperament, quite typical of the early seventeeth-century organ designs on which it was based. ‘Possente Spirto’ meanwhile opens more warily through its continuo of Mellotron and synthesizer, navigating mists of thought and clime before Mattie Barbier’s trombone blows like a bugle cry, doling out an officious type of greeting while temporarily barring the way ahead. Andrew McIntosh’s viola is buried within the mix until the seven-minute mark, when the atmosphere becomes suffused by a few rays of hope, perhaps indicative of a newfound sense of clarity with the droning bows of the viola signalling this mental shift.
‘The Crier’s Choir’ bears a lighter touch, as higher-pitched flute and reed stops make for a wispy sound which gradually unfolds the fullness of the organ. We then enter a more liminal and even purgatorial space which carries the slight sunken feeling of looking out, coffee in hand, over greying skies from the confines of a highway rest stop. Then the ‘Trio for a Ground’ takes us down a couple of octaves for a long and barely shifting drone which finally introduces the mezzo-soprano voice of Lisa McGee, whose spectral coos linger at the edge of the frame as Davachi’s organ burbles underneath while Eyvind Kang and Pierre-Yves Martel enter from around the six-minute mark on the viola d’amore and viola da gamba. With the sympathetic strings of the viola d’amore adding resonance, steadily the pipe organ moves down through its range as though surveying built up layers of strata.
‘Res Sub Rosa’ is devised in septimal just intonation for a wind quintet culled from the Harmonic Space Orchestra. The composition is led out patiently by Rebecca Lane on the big bass flute with Sam Dunscombe and Michiko Ogawa on bass clarinets, before the trombones of M.O. Abbott and Weston Olencki enter at around three minutes, like a cortege which keeps solemnly adding guests. Maintaining these three tiers like an inverted pyramid with the bass recorder at the base, the trumpets add a sense of uplift to the track which lilts and sways through the final third, before the instruments depart from whence they came in that selfsame order.
An electronic counterpart to ‘Res Sub Rosa’, with ‘Constants’ we are met with a wash of noise which the electric organ cuts through from afar by virtue of a wistful motif, as though a seaman up to his eyeballs in spume and spray saw bright skies and tranquil waters like a mirage in the distance. Somewhere along the way the sounds of the organ and the unpredictable oscillations and fragmentations caused by tape delay and synths get mixed up, with the result a vessel which seems no longer imperilled but queasily settled.
Then a Mellotron produces a whirlpool or undertow which tethers our hapless vessel in place. And a coda on the electric organ which promises resolution through the development of the melody sticks on one long drone, as The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir arrives at its final piece. ‘Night Horns’ for solo organ offers a throbbing and pulsing drone which seems to wrestle with the urgency of expression, the low end joined prior to the four-minute mark by a harmonious middle section as Davachi much like the heedless Orpheus wafts beguilingly downstream.
