In Ecclesia

Electroacoustic

About In Ecclesia

When considering the purpose of chants written for the cathedrals and monasteries of the medieval era, to drone on and on and imbue listeners and singers alike with a trance-like sense of the eternal, I began wondering what situations in my own semi-atheist, semi-deist experience do the same for me. The answer, I quickly realized, came in the form of the ecstatic bodily response I get from heavily amplified music. And drone metal, musically speaking, isn’t all that far from chant.

As such, I married one of the oldest chants in the book – the dorian cantus firmus from Fux’s Gradus Ad Parnassum – to the sound of the spaces I love most and feel most comforted by, that of the communion we all take in the concert hall or circle pit. Hence the title, In Ecclesia, as this is my church.

I wrote the piece for Ignition Duo. I am grateful to them for their hard work in refining it and for the awesome recording they released on their first album, Ablaze Amidst The Horns.

In Ecclesia appears on:

Perfomances of In Ecclesia

  • 04/29/2018 Ignition Duo UCSB's Karl Geiringer Hall Santa Barbara, CAMore Info
  • 05/19/2017 (h)artDrive Queens New Music Festival Long Island City, NYMore Info
  • 05/07/2017 (h)artDrive National Sawdust Brooklyn, NYMore Info
  • 03/05/2017 Friction Quartet, Ignition Duo Hot Air Music Festival San Francisco, CAMore Info
  • 02/20/2017 (h)artDrive Branded Saloon Brooklyn, NY
  • 11/20/2016 (h)artDrive Spectrum New York, NYMore Info
  • 01/30/2016 Ignition Duo Neck of the Woods San Francisco, CAMore Info
  • 05/30/2015 Ignition Duo Seventh Avenue Performances San Francisco, CAMore Info
  • 10/09/2014 Ignition Duo Center for New Music San Francisco, CAMore Info
  • 09/21/2014 Ignition Duo San Francisco Conservatory of Music San Francisco, CA
  • 04/26/2014 Ignition Duo UCSB's Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall Santa Barbara, CA