Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir

A Closer Listen

Our review of Two Sisters, Sarah Davachi’s 2022 album, compared the listening experience to going to church. It’s a similar feeling playing her latest release, except possibly on a grander scale, akin to finding a pew in an ancient cathedral on a quiet afternoon while the organist practices for the Sunday service. Davachi creates music that is equally intimate and epic; compositions recorded on pipe organs that feel like they have been crafted for an audience of one. Chamber pieces that shift so carefully and subtly that you hold your breath for fear of disturbing the moment. Taking us back to the cathedral setting, you don’t want to move less the seat you’re on scratches the stone flags. This isn’t about ‘respecting the music’ in the way a cough threatens to disrupt a classical performance, but it feels that a Sarah Davachi work requires a certain amount of reverence. The notes reverberate, the tones whirl and pool into shape and the rest of the world drifts away.

There’s a sense that the pieces on The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir are extracts from a greater ongoing continuum. The album’s closer, “Night Horns” (for solo organ), feels like it began way before the record button was pressed and will continue playing long after you’ve finished reading this review. Years longer, perhaps – centuries, even. I guess the only reason the piece has the duration it does is that 23 minutes is the maximum ideally allowed on a side of vinyl. By bookending the album with solo pipe organ works, Sarah Davachi invites us to consider the album as a slow rising-and-falling across a long-form narrative arc that flows back to the beginning again. There’s a noticeable peak in the record at around its midpoint. On “Trio For A Ground”, the mezzo-soprano Lisa McGee appears briefly like a flash of sunlight through a stained glass window.

The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir is described by Davachi as a ‘supplement of sorts’, being the third part of a trilogy, begun with Two Sisters and 2021’s Antiphonals. This is a sequence in which Davachi explores a conversation between her electroacoustic work and her compositions for chamber ensembles. Whereas previously, she saw them as disciplines occupying two different worlds, they have increasingly overlapped in recent years. The studio-based electroacoustic pieces, such as “Constants”, exist totally within Davachi’s control, whereas the composed pieces are released into the wider world, where sympathetic musicians interpret the score. This ceding of control to an ensemble is most apparent on “Res Sub Rosa”, performed by the Harmonic Space Orchestra, and the only track here that Davachi doesn’t play on.

The myth of Orpheus in the Underworld is referenced by Davachi in the album’s liner notes, with inspiration coming from two different voices – Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets To Orpheus from 1922 and Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo. The tale of Orpheus has long fascinated musicians, understandably so, as it presents a strong argument for the power of music beyond death (Orpheus’ head still sings when removed from his body). There is no obvious channel from there through to this suite of compositions, aside from “Possente Spirto” referencing part of Monteverdi’s work. We could view The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir as a sequence of mournful laments, but that would miss out on how music nourishes and uplifts us, even the sad stuff. These aren’t funereal dirges but are sprinkled with delicate, subtle light amidst the shade, ancient and everlasting. (Jeremy Bye)