Sarah Davachi on her origins with the pipe organ, an edifying past year, and the future

Sarah Davachi on her origins with the pipe organ, an edifying past year, and the future

Words by Tom Curtis-Horsfall

With the end of the year in sight, Sarah Davachi reflects on a frenetic, yet edifying past twelve months.

Words by Tom Curtis-Horsfall

Time and space are fundamental to Sarah Davachi’s mode of music-making. The composer’s electroacoustic-indebted contemporary classical compositions are temporal by their very nature, capturing and manipulating the interactions between the sounds an organ creates and its environs. Environs that are varied, but almost always resplendent. The pipe organ - the instrument Davachi identifies with first and foremost – is typically crafted in conjunction with the architecture of its locality. This idiosyncrasy fascinates the Canadian and motivated her to record in an enviable list of churches across Europe and North America throughout her career. 

Releasing two albums in 2024 alone – The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir and Music for a Bellowing Room, a collaboration with filmmaker Dicky Bahto – it’s ironically a self-imposed lack of time and space which compels Davachi to be so prolific in her output. But, that might all be about to change. 

Talking to The Blank Mag with the end of the year in sight, Sarah Davachi reflects on a frenetic, yet edifying past twelve months. Read on to find out about her origins with the organ, how she’s steadily learning to consolidate her process of recording with live performance, and what the future holds. 

The organ is central to the music you make, and you’ve recorded in some remarkable churches, especially for The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir. I was wondering what initially compelled you to embrace these kinds of spaces: your love of the organ’s sound, or the environment? 

Sarah Davachi: It was more about the instrument, and the sounds of the organ. I grew up as a keyboard player and as a piano player. So early on, when I started feeling like I wanted to compose music, I knew that the piano just wasn't the right fit for me. But I didn't know what other instruments would make sense. I think it was too early for me to articulate what was wrong with the instruments and what I needed. When I discovered organs, there were a lot of things that made sense: partly the way that you play the instrument, in terms of sustaining sound and building chords in a way that you can experience. Being able to bring out overtones, was something that I was interested in musically. I just sort of intuitively knew that that was the sound that I was looking for.

The spaces have become another layer of that. I've had more opportunities to explore different kinds of places where these organs are. Most organs are built for specific spaces, they're built to work in tandem with the acoustic space, or they're actually built for the space. So, when it's a good situation, all of those elements come into play. Everything is in its right place.

Did you have any sort of formative experiences with organs in ornate churches or the like?

Sarah Davachi: No, I didn't grow up religious at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I hadn't been into a church in that sort of way. I grew up in Canada where there aren't, like, ornate churches with organs everywhere. The city that I grew up in used to have an organ competition. It's like the Olympics for piano. It happens in Calgary every couple of years. I used to go to that, I used to go see operas, and just go to see the orchestra play. So that was when I got to experience the organ. Until I had the chance to play one myself, I never heard it in that way and never thought of it as an accessible instrument. It was really like, once it was a first-hand experience, then it kind of made sense to me.

You recently performed at St. Giles Cripplegate with the London Contemporary Orchestra - how was that experience? 

Sarah Davachi: Yeah, it was cool. It's a really interesting church. [17th-century English poet] John Milton is buried there, apparently. Although it's funny because there's a stone floor that says ‘John Milton is buried near here’, but like, where? Keeping it vague. 

But it's not the entire orchestra that I play with when I work with [the London Contemporary Orchestra], it's usually only a couple of members. They're amazing musicians. They're great people. It makes a big difference when you're playing with people who just understand what you're trying to do. It worked nicely. There are two different organs in that space. So, I did one piece with the LCO which was a smaller Chancel organ that blended better with the instruments, and then the main organ I was just playing solo. It was cool. I was expecting that concert to be really nice, and it was. There were no surprises.

“The city that I grew up in used to have an organ competition. It's like the Olympics for piano.”

What preparation goes into translating your compositions to the live arena?

Sarah Davachi: It's kind of a tricky thing. It's something I'm constantly working through, and probably constantly will be throughout my life making music. 

Early on, like when I first started making music, I started composing music in an electroacoustic sense, where I would go and record sounds. I wasn't performing live, and I had negative connotations from performance anyway, just from having played the piano and having come through playing recitals and competitions. That world of performance just didn't appeal to me at all. I liked the flexibility of working in a studio. Of being able to actually focus on the final sound, making a piece that sounded good as opposed to just something you perform once and that’s what it is. I never really thought about performance in a serious way. I would make a lot of music that also couldn't be performed. It didn't make sense for it to be performed live, and I didn't care about it being performed live. 

When I was doing my master's degree at Mills College, that's where I started performing my music for the first time, where I actually had to. Those always felt like these sort of special one-off cases where it was like coming up with something special for that particular performance. The music that I performed live, was just really its own thing. I would sit down and come up with it in the studio, and it would, of course, be very different in noticeable ways. To me anyway… It was just exclusively for the performance. I’d have different live sets that I would perform. But for a long time, there was a disconnect between what I was performing live and the music that I was making and releasing. It got to a weird place where I'd perform something, and somebody would ask ‘What record is that on?’ I’d be like ‘That's not anywhere. You can't listen to that anywhere else’. It was this disconnected thing for me. 

The timing of the pandemic accidentally lined that up. I was starting a new album which was specifically me attempting to sort of merge those two things, or to think about them in a more direct way – the music that I perform live and the music that I record, and how those two things interact. Then COVID happened. I guess, when I didn't do anything live, I was hit by the realisation that the performative aspect and the compositional ideas that I would come up with when I was thinking about how performance was a lot more influential on how I compose music. It had a bigger impact on my compositional process, and how I think about sound and music than I ever really gave it credit for. In the last couple years, I've been a lot more interested in music that can work for both spheres. But it is still a struggle. You want something to just exist in the moment. You don't want to have to think about – it sounds gross to say it – your music in a promotional way.

When can you sense a composition is complete? Or is it ever complete? 

Sarah Davachi: Luckily, I don't really have a problem with that. It's a very common thing people struggle with, when to end a piece or when to stop working on it. I don't know what it is like. It's more of an intuitive sort of thing, whether it's a live piece or whether it's a studio piece. I think I have kind of a sense of what I want it to sound like. As I continue working on it, there are certain things where it's like, ‘Okay, I don't like this part. I want to change it to this, and this should be more like this’. I just get a sense of how it should be.

There’s a gothic nature to your music, perhaps because of the iconography of the organ and the physical spaces you occupy when recording. I was wondering if making the music you make helps purge any sort of darkness in your own personal life?

Sarah Davachi: That's an interesting question. I'm sure that the music that people make for whatever reason or however it comes out, they're working through something in some way. Maybe, I just like stewing in those kinds of feelings. For me, it’s always there. I think I just find myself sort of drawn to that kind of sound. I don’t know if I was ever a ‘gothy kid’, or whether it’s been overt or hidden a little more. To me, the cathartic aspect is more in the feeling of the sound, the experience of the sound, as opposed to the emotional. That emotion just seems more expressive in the kind of music that I make, and I don’t imagine it ever ending. I guess that means I’m not working through anything!

You said the Ancient Greek myth Orpheus inspired some of, if not all of the pieces on The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir. What else outside of music have you drawn inspiration from recently? 

Sarah Davachi: It's often film. Not in the sense of the narrative structure of film, but the production. Shots, setup, colouring. The world that’s created in a film is really interesting to me. When I make albums, I think of production in that sense. I like to think of those parallels, to notice the deliberate decisions that have been made to construct that space. How does that affect the narrative, or whatever is trying to be done with the medium. In an emotional sense, it’s creating that emotional scene. 

I'm one of those people who goes through the world and takes note of different things that are interesting, adding to my toolkit of things that I can pull from later on.

“I'm one of those people who goes through the world and takes note of different things that are interesting, adding to my toolkit of things that I can pull from later on.”

Reflecting on the past year, has there been any particular achievement or moment that has stood out either personally or professionally? I don’t mean this to be like a therapy session by the way…

Sarah Davachi: No, it’s nice. Especially in experimental music, it can be easy to remove the person, to make it this ‘conceptual thing’. It’s a good question. I don’t think there’s been any particular moment that’s pushed or pulled me in one direction. I’ve always seen myself working in this iterative way towards something. 

I’m a person who thinks in years. In calendar years – I think of 2024 as its own thing, and so on. I find every year I get closer towards a realisation of how I want to work, and how I find that resolve. Like everyone, I second guess which way I should do things, and how I can assess what I should or shouldn’t be doing. From a musical perspective, working through things and completing projects gives me a greater sense of following my instinct, of trusting myself. 

I also feel like this year has been a total blur.

Doing what you do I’m sure has its fair share of challenges. But have there been any hurdles you’ve had to face that have been specific to the past year? 

Sarah Davachi: It's something just in the nature of being an artist, being a musician, and being somebody who works freelance. You’re always going to be living in this sense of moderate to extreme insecurity, depending on the state of the world. One thing that I've noticed, because I'm a Canadian, a significant portion of the income that I came to rely on to work on my projects would come from grants from Canadian arts organisations. This year, in particular, it's been harder to get grants. Now the pool of people who need grants has gone up like, tenfold. There are so many more people needing that kind of support, and just there isn't the budget anymore to support it. It's scary. That’s one tangible thing that has really changed. Year by year I assess my situation, like ‘will I be ok?’ ‘Do I have enough projects coming in?’ ‘Do I feel secure enough that things aren’t going to completely collapse in my life?’ I’ll just keep assessing. 

You’ve put out two albums this year and have generally been prolific throughout your entire career. What urges you to create so consistently?

Sarah Davachi: I wonder about this too. Early on in my career, I never noticed it in that way and now I definitely do. I'm reaching a point where it’s ok to slow down. It doesn’t feel like that’s the pace I work at, it’s just how it happens. I get excited by the idea. I like working on albums. I like seeing things through to some kind of end. I like having that result of having a recording and presenting it in a way that feels reflective of how I want it to exist. My brain is always just sort of ‘on’ in that way. I'm not pushing myself to go faster. I think I push myself because I have to be self-disciplined.

Over the last couple of years, I've taken on way too many things, more than I can balance. I've just always been like that, having a lot of different things going on. If I really want to go deep and work on one project, I can do that, and then if I need a break from it, I have something else that's maybe slightly different that I can put my energy into. I like having that balance. Learning other things and bringing it into the project I’m actively in the middle of. It's just the way that I like working. I know it's not for everybody, but it suits me.

That said, do you have any irons in the fire for 2025? 

Sarah Davachi: I think 2025 and even 2026 are pretty mapped out!