Organ Mass for Herz-Jesu, Graz

I gave a performance in a church service in Graz on May 12. It was my first commission for a full organ mass and performance during actual worship. The workflow followed the formula I have always imagined. I visited the organ and recorded improvisations on it; took them home and worked them over into composed pieces; practiced them, and then returned to perform them. It was November 2022 when I first visited the church and improvised on the organ, and got lots of sonic and thematic material. I enjoyed listening to it for a long time and got attached to some of the little quirks in the chaos of pure improv, and for this reason it was very helpful to have to shape the music into the needs of the worship service.

A commitment to participating in the spiritual worship of strangers through my own contribution was giving a lot of existential questions. But as many of you know I was doing this at age 12-14 every Sunday— and had not done it since. As the gig approached I felt more and more excitement at the psychoactive prospects of this kind of performance.

I’d reviewed the 2022 recordings over and over, and marvelled at the worlds within worlds that the instrument produced.

And I asked the organist who invited me, Matthias, to provide me with the order of service, hymns and readings. I figured that knowing what they’d be talking about in the church service would fill any gaps in inspiration and give me a deeper pool of aesthetic substance to scoop from.

When I received it, I put together my plan with the bits of music I wanted to use and started to sketch the whole thing out, and read the texts of the readings and hymns to see what I could hook some of my ideas on.

The first reading was Acts, 1:15-17, 20c-26. I've seen this kind of numbering in church services, and I never gave it much notice. But as I read the text I realized that this means that verses 18 and 19 are being skipped. And those are the verses where, after having been kicked out of the disciples for betraying Jesus, Judas went back to his field that he bought with his betrayal money and exploded, his guts flying everywhere all over the field, and then they named it the field of blood. And somehow the church decides to skip this verse during the reading in the service! And then they wonder why people aren't coming to church...

The most important thing I learned from this process was the importance of seemingly unimportant passages and bits of music in creating a coherent whole.

After that initial improvisation in 2022, I had a 90 minute recording which I would listen to and enjoy, and daydream learning the best bits and performing them. There are these moments which stand out because they’re catchy and dramatic, and these bits of music would play in my head even when I’m not listening to the recording. Soon enough I sit at the keyboard and learn them, and then I get to enjoy playing and perfecting them.

This leads to a sort of hallucination of a piece of music that contains these catchy bits, sewn together with some sort of connective tissue that keeps the music going, and sounds more polished than what I played when I was improvising. Because improvising means a lot of stops and starts or hiccups or whatever.

But when it came time to write this music, having listened to it so much, I discovered that those stops and starts and hiccups are actually an essential part of what gives the catchy bits their power and excitement. The stops and starts are not memorable in an obvious way, and they are more difficult to notate and practice because they’re not repetitive and obvious like the catchy bits. But their importance in selling the catchy bits was something I was totally unaware of until this process, and I’m so glad I learned to keep them in and give them their time.

The other thing I learned was that chords which resonate beautifully on an organ in November do not resonate beautifully in May. I had a C triad in the left hand which I used as a drone, a sort of extended triad or Gershwin triad you could call it because you need a big hand to play it as it contains a 10th, and that triad resonated like a laser on my recordings from November. In May the effect was sadly gone. I was able to find it, but it was down at A, which I can’t play because the C# makes it too big for my hands. And I wasn’t about to transpose my entire piece. But it shows that the increased pressure in the wind-chests of the organ from the higher temperature of the air is equivalent to three semitones.

So in the future, my goal needs to be to do the initial visit and improvising on the organ days before the performance, not years as was the case here! This will be my goal going forward from now; to visit a church and improvise on the organ one day, and give the performance one to three days after.

After my performance in Graz May 12, as I stood there catching my breath an elderly lady came into the organ loft and clearly wanted to talk to me, and I couldn't tell what kind of interaction she was about to present, but I had some inklings of where she might be going. She thanked me nicely for the performance, and then took on a slightly scolding tone and suggested I should play music which celebrates the sacred heart of Jesus; music that's about love. I smiled and was happy to truthfully agree “yes, yes... that's my mission, absolutely”. I looked on and she continued “some of your music was very nice but some of it was frightening” with a sour look on her face. I replied “Love is frightening sometimes”. Then I continued “If we look for God inside ourselves, the place we're most likely to find God is in the deepest part of our hearts. And that can be a frightening place to go”. I held her gaze for a minute and then touched her shoulder and said “I'm sorry if I frightened you”. She said no, no not at all, and smiled and just looked even more deeply at me than before, and then someone else came up and we moved on. As I was leaving ten minutes later and passed her she said “thank you for listening to me” and I said “ditto” and we smiled. Two days later under a light drizzle and a black sky (my favourite weather) I saw her on my way into the grocery store and said “Guten Tag” enthusiastically with a big smile and seemed to make her day.

This performance was very special for me because it took place on Mother’s Day.