PRIMORDIAL SORROW

"All Life Long," the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: "The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me."

- ALEX ROSS

The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Souls of Black Folk," which is where Malone found it. Beneath Symons's lines, Du Bois supplies musical notation for the opening phrase of the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow.

Malone's album, a hushed, meditative collection of pieces for male vocal quartet, brass quintet, and organ, is steeped in melancholy, but it is not the kind of melancholy that you can absent-mindedly sink into, as if wrapping yourself in a comforter on a cold night. Malone and a group of collaborators recently presented a live rendition of "All Life Long," at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, as part of the annual New York edition of the Polish festival Unsound. The titular work, vaguely in the key of A minor, was heard in versions for choir and for solo organ. The music seems, at first encounter, an exercise in trancelike minimalist repetition, with compactly rising-and-falling five-note phrases recurring dozens of times. The words "all life long" unfold as a primordial sigh. There is, however, a harmonic tension at the heart of the conception, as semitone dissonances pierce the texture in almost every bar F against E, D-sharp against E, C against B. As one of these twinges is resolved, another intrudes. The tension subsides only in the last iteration, as the bare interval A-E swells and then breaks off.