New piano EP + music video: Radiant (with J.S. Bach and my dog Zappa)
I made this little EP, Radiant, to celebrate moving into a new studio space, and with gratitude to my patrons and to Zappa for being such a good girl. Yes she is. 🐕
I’m also marking a ten-month obsession with one specific piece of music during a period of intense change: J.S. Bach’s Prelude & Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1.* Over time, this piece has worn an electrical groove through my body, encoded in much the same way as my legs know how to walk.
You can listen to all five minutes of Radiant right now on Bandcamp or see the music video below via YouTube. Enjoy! And if you keep reading, I’ll tell you a little more about why I made this.
My piano sat directly in the path of a coronal mass ejection as I recorded the Bach. I mean, that’s a narcissistic way of saying that the entire planet was getting blasted, giving people an experience that’s been more frequent this year because of something called the solar maximum, which I understand to be the sun’s version of El Niño. Later that night, the sky would glow an eerie green and purple. My mics aren’t sensitive enough to pick up geomagnetic storms, but I like to think the aurora added some crackle to this performance.
The aurora thrums above the studio.
The aurora is as good a starting point as any for talking about this music. Radiant was born in a new studio space, a small, soundproofed-ish room with green walls beside the bookshop Heidi and I run, where things get a bit fantastical. Our island bookshop-studio in the woods would be a cliché setting for any YA novel about a shy librarian with magical secrets or a wizard exiled to the borderlands. But this is a real place that exists in 2024, in Daajing Giids, Haida Gwaii. It is the centre of our planet. We hope to radiate ideas, art, joy, hope, justice, community spirit, good times, and many other important things that sometimes seem in short supply.
What else is radiant about this EP? Well, for one, Bach’s music has travelled halfway around the globe and three centuries to end up in Haida Gwaii. He wrote the map for Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722. It has become an influential work transmitted through generations of teachers, students, and performance practice. Probably every Western music conservatory has a student playing from it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of professional recordings; Apple Classical alone counts 302 renditions of the Prelude & Fugue No. 2 in C Minor. I’d like to add my drop to the bucket, please.
This piece has become part of the map of my body through intense training and muscle memory. To me, it’s an atmosphere, an earworm, or something much bigger and longer – an ear Dune-worm, maybe. It’s a ghost transmitted across space-time. Thinking about the path between here and Bach gets my speculative fiction-prone imagination working.
To trace that path Leipzig to Haida Gwaii and from Bach to me, a kid from the Prairies, I have to get existential and follow the story of how I got here and who I am, and that includes the ways European musical traditions have spread through colonization and the church. Europe was already colonizing Turtle Island during Bach’s lifetime, although much of the story we know now was yet to be written. Canada, the modern nation-state, wouldn’t exist for more than 100 years. Same with the genocidal smallpox epidemic that almost destroyed the Haida in the 1860s. (Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas gave a talk here recently where he referred to the virus as variola douglas. Not to put too fine a point on it.)
Heidi and I had the privilege of helping Haida Gwaii and the Skedans clan raise a pole at Dead Tree Point, October 2024. Carving by Gwaai and Jaaden Edenshaw.
It didn’t have to end up this way. Imagine if we, the settlers since Bach and the hierarchies that set Canada in motion – the Crown, religious authorities, and nation builders at large – had been courageous enough to uphold all the treaties? What if enough of us had decided Indigenous Nations were our equals from the start and that their cultures did not need our permission to survive? Maybe we’d be living in a better world already, if we had wanted to. Maybe we still can.
It gives me hope to think like this. Living as I do in Haida Gwaii, I can’t play Bach without imagining alternate possibilities, timelines, multiverses, maps, speculative fiction, history as a circle, history as a line, as a moment, a harmony, a spider web of relationships, and a story radiating across the Earth.
This is Radiant.
A440
Bach: Prelude No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847
Bach: Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847
Oh, and what’s A440? Basically, I was tuning the piano and one thing led to another. 440 Hz is the frequency Western orchestras tune to in North America. I’ve always loved the sound of the orchestra tuning, and this is my homage.
Again, you can hear the EP right now on Bandcamp.
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*(“Well-tempered” refers to a tuning method. But I always picture a mild-mannered keyboard instrument greeting its neighbours on the way to the mailbox.)