The Meditative Organ Soundscapes of Kali Malone

“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: “The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, / All life long crying without avail, / As the water all night long is crying to me.” The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is where Malone found it. Beneath Symons’s lines, Du Bois supplies musical notation for the opening phrase of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow.

Malone’s album, a hushed, meditative collection of pieces for male vocal quartet, brass quintet, and organ, is steeped in melancholy, but it is not the kind of melancholy that you can absent-mindedly sink into, as if wrapping yourself in a comforter on a cold night. Malone and a group of collaborators recently presented a live rendition 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, was heard in versions for choir and for solo organ. The music seems, at first encounter, an exercise in trancelike minimalist repetition, with compactly rising-and-falling five-note phrases recurring dozens of times. The words “all life long” unfold as a primordial sigh. There is, however, a harmonic tension at the heart of the conception, as semitone dissonances pierce the texture in almost every bar—F against E, D-sharp against E, C against B. As one of these twinges is resolved, another intrudes. The tension subsides only in the last iteration, as the bare interval A-E swells and then breaks off.

This is music at once pristine and forbidding, redolent of the austere polyphony of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. You might expect the composer to be a solitary hermit, living in a lighthouse on an otherwise uninhabited island. Malone is, in fact, a thirty-year-old cosmopolite who grew up in Colorado and played in experimental bands in her teen-age 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 overpowering drone-metal band Sunn O))), which also performed at Unsound. So far, Malone has won a following more in the electronic world than in the classical sphere. The gnawing beauty of “All Life Long” may, however, bring her new admirers. Its presence is as vast as it is mysterious.

A couple of days after the Tully Hall concert, I met Malone in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, on the Lower East Side. As basketball players hooted in the background, she described her compositional methods, her favorite tuning systems, and her free-floating status 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 an arts middle school and high school, where I was a vocal major.” But she also gravitated toward underground-music venues in Denver, where she spent most of her youth. At the age of sixteen, she enrolled at Simon’s Rock, an early-college program in the Berkshires, where she began playing in a noise duo.

Malone’s life took an unexpected turn when, on a trip to New York, she met the Swedish experimental composer Ellen Arkbro, 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. She became a devotee of just intonation, in which intervals are tuned according to whole-integer ratios. Music created along those lines, such as La Monte Young’s monumental drone pieces, has a strange purity that is very different from the rounded sound of the modern equal-tempered system, in which intervals are homogenized. Malone also delved into electro-acoustic instrumentation, making use of facilities at the state-funded Electronic Music Studio and the artist-run hub Fylkingen.

Malone had never been a keyboardist—in bands, she played guitar and sang—but in Stockholm she found herself serving as an apprentice to an organ tuner, who led her into the arcana of the most ancient of sound synthesizers. She told me, “I realized I could translate these experiments I’d been making on the computer onto the organ.” She made a crucial leap when she obtained access to historical organs that were tuned in meantone temperament, which preserves whole-integer ratios for certain intervals. The organ version of “No Sun to Burn,” a composition that appears twice on “All Life Long,” was recorded on the Malmö Art Museum’s sixteenth-century instrument, among the oldest functioning organs in the world. The piece begins with a sustained F and stepwise descents of E-flat, D-flat, C, and B-flat. As the music moves into the upper register, the thirds take on an eerie tinge, at least to ears accustomed to modern tuning.

A professional tuner inhabits a realm of elementary intervals and chords, adjusting their nodes to match conventional norms. Malone’s music amounts in some ways to a tuning ritual, a testing of the myriad possible combinations of the basic facts of harmony. “I love working in a restrictive system,” she told me. “I give myself three or four or five chords and then see what I can do with permutations, looking for a breadth of different emotional identities.” Chords have cultural identities attached to them: major triads are bright, minor triads are gloomy, perfect fifths are sturdy, tritones and semitones are unsettling. In Malone’s hands, those associations change under the pressure of repetition, particularly in the stark, piercing sound-world of the organ. In another track on the album, “Prisoned on Watery Shore,” she noted, the supposedly diabolical tritone becomes poignant, even sensual, in a landscape of rigid fifths.

Adding to the estrangement of the ordinary is Malone’s quirky approach to rhythm and pacing in her organ music. Somewhat in the spirit of twentieth-century serialist composers, she controls the durations of notes according to a rotating matrix of values. In “No Sun to Burn,” the pattern for the opening descent 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, to eight, two, four, six. That irregular rhythmic sequence, together with the instability of Malone’s ostensibly simple harmonies, generates stealthily accumulating tension. It’s as if the music were being controlled by some slow, clanking medieval machinery—an organ with a mind of its own.

Malone is by no means an impersonal operator of systems. She invests much of herself in her music, although she shies away from supplying too many specifics, for fear of trapping listeners in a limited interpretive framework. While planning “All Life Long,” she thought of the solitary labor of mountain climbing—her father was a vigorous climber and cyclist prior to a life-changing accident—and of Du Bois’s evocations of unending political struggle. (The epigraphs for “The Souls of Black Folk” supply a second choral text, in the form of James Russell Lowell’s abolitionist poem “The Present Crisis”: “Truth forever on the scaffold, / Wrong forever on the throne.”) The album begins with a kind of minimalist motet titled “Passage Through the Spheres,” whose text comes from the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben: “There is a profane contagion, a touch that disenchants and returns to use what the sacred had separated and petrified.” Last year, a concert that Malone had planned to give at a church in Carnac, France, had to be cancelled when a far-right Catholic faction staged a protest, on the ground that she was profaning a sacred space with her “electro” sounds.

The vocal and brass arrangements on “All Life Long” are so immaculately crafted that one could see the pieces becoming repertory items for progressive-minded groups. For the moment, however, Malone doesn’t wish to make the music available outside the format she has devised for it. She rehearses painstakingly with her collaborators to find the right balance of cool precision and expressive warmth. The ensemble at Tully included the vocalists Matthew Robbins, Sam Strickland, Zach Ritter, and Brian Mummert; the trumpeters Luke Spence and Atse Theodros; the horn player Austin Sposato; and the trombonists Nikki Abissi and Jennifer Hinkle, the last accompanied by her impressively serene medical-alert dog, Kita. The trumpeter and composer Sam Nester conducted for most of the evening, until Malone herself took over.

The cumulative power of the event at Tully justified Malone’s wariness about letting her creations out of her grasp. The vocal settings came first, then a suite of pieces for brass. Finally, Malone and O’Malley entered to play the organ, sitting side by side at the manuals. The brass, positioned in near-darkness, augmented the textures in the closing sections. In “No Sun to Burn,” the penultimate work, rays of hope seemed to break through, as the brass dwelled on the notes E-flat, F, and G, summoning an ecstatic haze of overtones. In “The Unification of Inner & Outer Life,” a dissonant fog descended again, with E-naturals grinding quietly against F’s. Yet there was an Arctic calm in that gray, distant sound—no place of comfort, to be sure, but a protected space nonetheless. ♦