At Vancouver New Music Festival, Blake Hargreaves takes the pipe organ into secular new worlds of sound
As part of Vox Organi, the Budapest-based musician explores the contemporary and the improvisational, unravelling the mysteries of the instrument
Blake Hargreaves
Blake Hargreaves plays Pacific Spirit United Church on October 19, as part of the Vancouver New Music Festival 2023’s Vox Organi
GIVEN THE RESOLUTELY noncommercial nature of Blake Hargreaves’s various musical endeavours, it’s surprising to find out that he began his musical explorations as a mercenary. After initially falling in love with classical music and the piano by way of his father’s cassette collection, he soon moved on to singing in a local choir, thanks to some of his junior high school friends.
“I found out that they got paid to sing in the choir, and that made it really interesting,” Hargreaves recalls with a laugh, in a Zoom conversation from his home in Budapest. “And around the same time, the choir found out about me. The choir director actually came to our house and rang the doorbell and said ‘I understand you have a musical boy.’ It was a church choir that, under his direction, was ambitious, and trying to be more of a concert ensemble, and I was lucky enough to be there then.”
Hargreaves’ tenure didn’t last long. “Horrified” when his voice broke, he resisted being reassigned to the altos. In the process, however, he found his true calling: as an organist.
“By that time I had realized that the organ was really where the power was in the ensemble, so I just started turning pages,” he explains. “Eventually I took lessons, and pretty quickly my teacher could see that I was creative on the instrument. I befriended the church sexton who let me stick around after choir practice and play. As a 13-year-old, it was pretty exciting to be able to do that—to be able to move that much air and make that much noise, because it was a big instrument. Three 32-foot stops on it!”
Hargreaves might have been content to become a church organist in some mid-sized Canadian town but for a separate chance encounter, thanks to his older brother’s interest in rock music—and, more specifically, the Grateful Dead. “I had just turned 14 and went and saw them in Vermont, with 100,000 people,” he notes. “The band wasn’t that good—this was 1994, so they were really overcooked by that point—but the vibe and the whole atmosphere and the mentality, I think, that was impressive.”
Known for their freewheeling jams, the Dead opened him up to the expansive power of improvisation, which in turn led to an interest in detuned electric guitars and noise music—a fascination that hasn’t entirely abated but that has been absorbed into his ongoing work as an organist. This, he explains, has taken on various forms. One of Hargreaves’ projects is an ongoing survey of historical pipe organs in Canada, the United States, and Europe, which involves him visiting various venues and, often with minimal preparation, recording long-form improvisations.
Another, which he’ll demonstrate at Pacific Spirit United Church on Thursday (October 19), as part of Vancouver New Music Festival’s Vox Organi, is performing solo organ recitals in which he’ll mix his own compositions with improvised passages. In both, one of his aims is to connect the organ’s original function as a delivery mechanism for numinosity with a contemporary, secular artistic practice.
“If you compare it to all the other things that were sort of around then—ships and castles and stuff—the organ just seems such an unlikely creation,” he says. “So much energy and resources would be put into something that only one person could play. I still find it a bit mysterious, in the way that some people think that old monuments were put here by aliens: it feels surprising, especially given the religious milieu. But I’ve been reminded recently by a book I’m reading that thinking of the religious world as a conservative world is a little bit off the mark. People who believe in angels and demons and miracles and all that, it’s not a very conservative mindset. You know, people being raised from the dead and all of that… It’s much closer to a Lord of the Rings fantasy world, and I guess it’s from that foundation that it was decided to take this instrument and really build it into this incredible contraption.”
“It fits the buildings,” he adds, “and the buildings themselves are another example of things going way out of proportion, in a beautiful and amazing way. So when I play, it’s an invitation to connect to that part of the human spirit that is off on this tangent.”
Although Hargreaves’ recent recording projects have mostly involved historical organs, he’s looking forward to unravelling the mysteries of Pacific Spirit United Church’s considerably more modern instrument, built by the esteemed Casavant Frères of Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec in 1964.
“Inside every instrument, there’s hidden a piece of music—and I may or may not be the person who can find it and channel it out that day,” he says, stressing that the “may or may not” component is why his public performances are more structured than his recorded improvisations.
“I am just not willing to go out there and possibly fail—to play the instrument for an hour and have nothing come out that I would consider music,” he says. “I’m not at that level. And I also think that getting to that level involves making a lot of compromises in terms of developing a bag of tricks that over time can make the music start to feel kind of rote.
“For me, I don’t want that exciting feeling of having something come out that I never would have sat down and composed, that just seems like it’s a total surprise, to go away,” he adds, laughing. “I have tons of experience recording improvisations, and having that experience has taught me that I can’t be relied on to play anything good, you know! So I won’t put an audience through that.”
One suspects that Hargreaves is being far too modest—but also that, like all the other Vox Organi participants, he’s going to deliver organ music like nothing we’ve ever heard before.
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