British organist James McVinnie has announced the release of a new album called Counterpoint which will be out on December 3rd via Bedroom Community. It is a double portrait album of music by Philip Glass and J S Bach recorded at the organ of Trinity College, Cambridge. “Music In Fifths” is the first excerpt.
McVinnie writes: “This is in some ways an album by mistake. I’d made two tracks of music by Philip Glass during the lockdown, using organ samples, and didn’t quite know what to do with them. Lockdown also allowed me to revisit some of Bach’s most austere and extraordinary keyboard music which I’d learnt over a decade ago: I realised in an instant that the minimalist primers from the 1960s I’d made share so much of the same emotional directness and intensity of Bach’s music that was so deeply imbedded in my muscle memory and musical consciousness. From this kernel flowered the central tenets of my Counterpoint album.”
Listen below.