Landscapes of Listening
by Vic Brooks

Since the earliest documented installations of large-scale, multi-timbre pipe organs in twelfth-century ecclesiastical buildings, the instrument has remained synonymous with the architecture that houses it. Unlike almost any other instrument, including its portable organ cousins, it cannot travel. The instrument has a symbiotic relationship with the building in which it is installed and is voiced for the room’s specific acoustic properties. Every note depends on the compression and movement of air, the material properties of the instrument’s design, the pressure deployed by the player’s hands and feet on the keys and pedals, and the time it takes sound to travel from the pipes, reflect off the walls, ceilings, floors, and objects within a given space, and return to the listener’s ear.

Before the invention of sound recording in the late nineteenth century, music itself was similarly bound to place. A performance existed only in the moment and place of its sounding, with its traces surviving in the memories of those who experienced it. Yet the advent of sound reproduction and electronic amplification for the first time dislocated that bond, opening the sonic field of music to new regimes of listening.

Kali Malone’s approach to the shifting connections between the pipe organ, its mediation through her playing, and the audiences who listen to her music continually reconsiders these relations between time and space in sound. For her landmark 2019 album The Sacrificial Code, pieces from which will be performed in Organ Concert, Malone close-miked three different pipe organs, recording each at such proximity that the resonance of the surrounding architecture—the time of reverberation that connects what we hear to our perception of the scale of a space—essentially disappeared. Rather than presenting an organ mediated through the vast reverberant spaces in which it is normally experienced, she isolated the direct sounds of the instrument itself, removing what she has described as “environmental identifiers.” In doing so, Malone produces a subtle but profound displacement that becomes audible through its absence, particularly if one is accustomed to hearing an organ in churches or concert halls. The organ remains physically fixed in place, while its sound is detached from the architecture that ordinarily expands its sonic field through our psychoacoustic perception of space. The result is an intense focus on the instrument itself and its remarkable capacity to layer multiple voices that resemble entirely different instruments, from strings to winds, produced through the combination of different sets of pipes into a multitude of sonic textures.

Alongside works from her album All Life Long (2024), Malone will perform Concentric Circles of The Choirs of Angels at Aspen Chapel, a composition currently presented in the Giardino Mistico as part of the Vatican Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. There, binaural headphones immerse individual listeners within the landscape of the music, overlaying the sonic environment of the pipe organ’s sound field (as though listening within an enclosed architectural space) onto an entirely different visual and perceptual field as visitors wander across the garden and pause in the shade beneath a tree.

For AIR, Malone returns the experience of listening to its architectural home, re-synchronizing the music with its presence in place. At Aspen Chapel, her compositions unfold within an acoustic and sensory environment that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. The Chapel’s nineteen-rank Moeller pipe organ was itself transplanted from the private home of Kenneth and Almira Snyder in Kenilworth, Illinois. In 1968, the Chapel building was redesigned around the instrument during its planning stages, while its architecture, inspired by the adaptation of French wheat mills into roadside chapels, reflects its founder Reverend E. M. Yost’s ambition to create a space that is “universal and common in structure” for Aspen’s international and interfaith community. Much like the instrument it houses, and like Malone’s approach to musical composition and reception, the Chapel is itself a site assembled from different places, times, and traditions.

Those histories extend to the Chapel’s stained glass windows. Conceived by Jean-Jacques Duval, the pioneering, New York–based French artist associated with Abstract Expressionism, they flood the interior with shifting fields of amber and gold as the mountain sun marks time as it moves across the building. Duval conceived his windows as continuous architectural fields of color to be experienced as a “container” that envelops the viewer’s field of vision rather than something to be observed like a picture, in the same way that music produces a sonic landscape that fills every inch of the space. The fractured slabs of thick, hand-blown glass, modeled into sinuous forms through stark lines of lead, refract light into subtly shifting patterns, much as Malone’s activation of the organ’s stops—its principals, flutes, strings, and hybrids—combine into gradually evolving fields of timbre and harmonic color.

Malone’s music draws upon more than a thousand years of musical tradition that developed alongside the evolution of the pipe organ. Medieval tuning systems and Renaissance polyphony shape her slowly evolving harmonic cycles, allowing multiple musical voices to drift gradually into and out of alignment. Much like her displacement of the instrument from the time and space of the buildings that house it in The Sacrificial Code, the performance generates a feeling of temporal suspension and recurrence. Malone does not seek to reconstruct historical musical forms or languages. Rather, she activates long-standing collective cultural memories that stretch our experience of time and space. Recalling Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, the noncontinuous survival of images and motifs across cultures and centuries, her performances produce echoes that are transformed through each moment of experience.

The pipe organ’s sound is inseparable from Aspen Chapel’s architecture, just as the shifting high alpine light is inseparable from Duval’s stained glass, and the thin mountain air is the medium through which both music and light continuously reshape the atmosphere and our perception of the room. Malone’s performance in Aspen cannot, therefore, be separated from this place, nor can it be fully documented or reproduced. It exists only through the shared experience of listeners gathered within this particular architecture, at this particular moment, where sound, light, architecture, and memory become inseparably intertwined.

[1] Kali Malone, notes on The Sacrificial Code (2019 edition), https://kalimalone.bandcamp.com/album/the-sacrificial-code-2019-edition.

[2] Gregg Anderson, “Origin of the Purpose and Architecture of the Aspen Chapel,” Aspen Chapel, February 24, 2019, https://www.aspenchapel.org/Articles/1000154241/Origin_of_the_Purpose_and_Architecture_of.aspx.

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Kali Malone’s Organ Concert was presented at Aspen Chapel on July 30, 2026, as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Learn more about the performance here.

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