Introspections for Organ is a collection of short movements, composed out of a need to process my feelings about the very troubling times we are all experiencing during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and accompanying global social and political unrest.
Back in April I started having severe recurring nightmares. Most often I can’t remember the details of these dreams, but invariably they involve the death of those that I love. Frequently in these dreams I am fighting off some random foe bent on my destruction. I sometimes spend the better part of the dream defending myself, killing so as not to be killed, becoming exhausted in an endless parade of violence and despair. The dreams became so predictable in their general arc that I found myself thinking while still in the dream “not this again”. I would admonish myself mid-dream for reenacting the same drama over and over again, night after night, ending by waking up in the early morning hours in a hugely anxious state. It was during these early mornings that I began composing what became the “introspections” as a way to help me process what I was feeling.
I began composing these movements in April, and completed Introspection 1 on May 17, 2020 (for many year I have taken note the completion date of my compositions as a kind of diary entry—it helps me keep track of my pieces and place them in context). The work starts with a slow, pianissimo ostinato pattern that sets the constant unrelenting pulse for the work, under which is set a very simple melodic line in the pedal. The whole opening statement is somehow off-kilter, with the sustained melody entering and changing pitches always off the beat. This gives way to a plaintive, full organ fortissimo section. Throughout the piece there is a combination of constant driving beat pattern against slow, uncomfortable syncopations, finally moving the piece forward into complex, unconventional counterpoint that mimics in form traditional counterpoint, but not at all in harmonic substance. The result is something that feels both very familiar (conventional even) and at the same time untoward.
My dear friend, the amazingly talented Heinrich Christensen, committed himself to learning these works as they are being composed (as of this writing, I am still adding movements to the work, with five nearly completed). We decided to record them (accomplished by social distancing and using a very long lens to film the sessions) and release one movement serially each week. As Heinrich put it, “It has been oddly cathartic to learn and live with (the introspections) as we transitioned from spring to summer with all the uncertainty of when we can return to any kind of normal life, and what exactly that might look like, especially for making music together.”
--G.G.R., July 23, 2020