Movements on a Cliff in Marin
2021
This music was written in April 2020 and was originally called “Tower.” Dissonances on my small reed organ make the whole instrument vibrate, and that sounded good to me at the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, so I used them more liberally than I usually do. I revised the music in February 2021.
In early March 2021, Zack Epcar, Sam Breslin, and I went to a cliff off Highway 1 in Marin County, California to record the piece and make a video. The organ I play is known as a chaplain’s or missionary organ. It folds up into itself to make a heavy suitcase, and was designed at the turn of the 20th century to bring into the field to lead hymns when no chapel or church organ was available. My organ, built in 1904, was allegedly used in WWI to lead services. My music has nothing to do with gods or wars. In any case, there are wonderful old photographs of organs like mine in forests, or meadows, or on the decks of ships. It has always seemed most in service of the instrument’s design to me to play it outdoors.
It was extremely windy on the day we went to shoot, so we recorded the organ with tiny lavalier mics taped inside the instrument. Samuel helped a lot with the wind logistics. Zack stood nearby while I played and improvised camera work from a single location, searching, scanning, wandering. I think of the piece as a whole as an augmentation of the landscape, a small mark on an already complete picture.
Listen on Bandcamp: