This piece is a collaborative project with organist Karin Johansson. Karin Johansson is a church and performance organist and artistic researcher based in Malmö, where she has worked both as an organ professor and prefect at the music academy. Since she was working on a project around creating new forms and taking on choral preludes, she invited me to create a collaboration, where I was one of four composers commissioned to make a work. The piece is an improvisation structure based on a set of materials.
We met first to discuss what we would do. I told her about a recording by Hungarian organist Zsigmond Szathmáry I had heard that year.x Karin replied that she was impressed by that recording, but also did not relate to the brutality of. We discussed the subtle and the gentle, and agreed that this work would draw upon each of our contemplation of these qualities and how they related to both urban places and to the churches where the organs we would work with were situated. We also began conversations about places, and how they hold memory. And since a meeting between my background in free improvisation and Karin's in liturgical improvisation seemed an interesting cross-point, we decided to begin by playing together.
We began in Autumn of 2016 by taking a field trip to S:t Mariakyrkan (Saint Maria's church) in Helsingborg. There Karin began telling me about organs, organ makers, different systems of stops, and her own practice of liturgical improvisation. We played there for a while, and I asked her what ways she liked best to play, in order to make a piece suited to her. Then Karin sent me some choral preludes by Buxtehude and Los Angeles by Messiaen as common material to work from.
Returning to the organs in the music academy basement, I sketched out a structure of materials to arranged in modules: a set of materials for subtle improvisation; a bass drone and a chordal drone, set into beating and difference tones with partial stopping; a rhythmic figure on another drone, to be played against the rhythm of the beating and difference tones, and; a small bit of melodic material to be elaborated upon in improvisation. I then improvised all these materials, and sent them to her. The piece was then created through our on-going conversation, sending improvisations, based on improvisations, back and forth for each aspect of the piece. Some of the improvisational material I initially sent remained constant, while other materials were completely reworked and transformed. In the end, we had a score of modules; an improvisational structure/score.
The first performance we made was in Viken, on the south-western shore of Sweden. Although it is far from Stockholm, the church shares a nautical bent with the city. The second performance was at S:t Mariakyrkan in Malmö. The organ at this church is an unusual instrument,with duplicate or similar stops mirrored to the left, and to the right. This gave us the wonderful opportunity to perform the work together, where I employed methods of playing organ stops taken from working with synthesizers while Karin played the rest of the instrument. In both performances, Karin made a direct transition from the Buxtehude choral preludes she brought to the process of making the piece into Ghost Prelude, almost as if the previous work had melted into the next. In Viken, she made this segue more than once, which I have included here.
