The first things Adrian Foster draws my attention to as he welcomes me into the Église Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus in Montreal’s Centre-Sud on a late summer evening are the bells.

When the church’s bell tower renovations were deemed unfeasible in 2021, its five bells were lowered. But choir director André Pappathomas had them installed on wooden plinths on either side of the church’s pews.

While the appearance of the bells is striking, they’re not here just for looks. The bells, which vary in size and pitch, and the heaviest of which weighs several tons, have begun a new life as concert instruments for Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur, the experimental and ambient concert series Foster launched in Summer 2024.

“Performers have found their own ways to play them and to bring out their textures,” Foster tells me as we approach the largest bell.

He strikes it in various spots to produce different sounds. “When you have all five of these bells going, you can even make melodies,” he says.

“You can also use the clapper.” I’m intrigued.

Foster gets under the bell and lightly taps the uvula-like sphere hanging within against the bell’s inner lip. “Sometimes after a concert someone will start swinging it, and I have to run over and try to stop them,” he laughs. “They would instantly regret it. It probably risks shattering the windows, it’s so loud.”

The bells are emblematic of what makes Les Vespérales so special. While they couldn’t retain their sacred function of calling the faithful to prayer, the bells have been repurposed by artists who love them to serve a new, largely non-religious audience drawn to their ethereal resonance.

Les Vespérales excels at creating aesthetic experiences that blur the line between the secular and the sacred. Even its pay-what-you-can philosophy seems like a nod to the Sunday mass donation plate, albeit via the inclusive ethic of grassroots concert organizing.

For Foster, reimagining the sacred is not just abstract but a question of preservation.

“There are fewer people going to church, and there are churches all over Montreal closing all the time, and this would typically be a church that would be at a high risk of being closed,” he says. “So, it’s important in this kind of case to ask: what value can we bring to this building that has been an important part of the community here in the Centre-Sud that maybe its religious vocation no longer can do alone? How can we keep this space alive?”

Les Vespérales is one answer to this question, and central to its offering is its unique marriage of sound and space. “What we’re developing here is not just a space to hold any kind of music events, which many churches already offer,” Foster emphasizes. “What we’re really focusing on is new musical creation by artists who are creating new music in this space, for this space.”

A case-in-point is Esther-Ruth Teel, who arrives partway through our conversation to rehearse for Sirens, an audio-visual collaboration with composer Gavin Fraser. Sirens revisits Greek mythology and reimagines the creatures as survivors rather than as agents of sexual violence.

“I’m a little nervous,” admits Teel. In addition to performing the organ and vocal parts live, Teel’s poetry and performance work feature heavily in the piece’s visual component.

“In some of the footage I’m standing on rocks draped in a cloth, but not modest, and so the alarm bells in my head are going off,” they tell me. “But I think there’s something exciting about portraying and reclaiming your body within a church where female-associated bodies especially haven’t been celebrated.”

Like most Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur concerts, Sirens showcases the series’ titular organ, a 1928 electro-pneumatic Casavant Frères whose pipes take up the better half of the gallery above the church’s main entrance.

If the bells are the heart of a church, then the organ is its lungs.

Teel tells me that what initially drew them to the organ was its powerful ritualistic purpose. “Like, at a funeral, if you’re playing something beautiful that’s meaningful to the family, then you’re integrating with their lives in a way that classical concert music doesn’t do in the same way. You’re guiding an experience,” Teel says. “And I feel like this series is really doing that. You’re actually doing something important for people, bringing them on a journey.”

Once we make our way up to the organ loft, Foster admits that he’s never heard a recording that really does the organ justice. “There are some instruments where you can listen to a recording and feel like you’re hearing the instrument pretty well and getting a good re-creation,” he says. “But I find organ recordings are almost always disappointing compared to hearing it in the room. I think it’s because there’s so much about the way that it interacts with the space that speakers can’t capture.”

Sound registers differently throughout a church. Individuals make their own choices about how to make use of these spatial dynamics.

For example, Vespérales’ yearly Winter-Solstice Ambient Night seats listeners directly in the organ loft to create a more direct and intimate experience of the organist. Speakers are also mounted on either side of the gallery, and performers can live-treat sounds from the pipes through effects if they so choose.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience where you don’t see the music being played but hear this disembodied sound which is coming from this massive instrument that is part of this massive space,” Foster says.

His interest in acousmatic sound transformation and non-traditional use of the organ has also led him to commission the creation of a new experimental organ that will eventually become a fixture of Les Vespérales.

Created by the organist Alexander Ross, the LIMINARE, as it is known, is a unique hyper-organ whose pipes can be directly manipulated by performers as they play. While traditional pipe organs are built with a particular wind pressure in mind so their pipes produce stable tones at intended pitches, the LIMINARE organ is microtonal, and its wind pressure can be dynamically adjusted live.

“As you increase the wind pressure more than the pipe is voiced for, it starts to overblow, and when it’s overblowing it will jump to different harmonics and the timbre will change.” Foster demonstrates as LIMINARE’s reeds squawk something like a mad duck.

“This is an instrument that I commissioned that I want to make music with, but it’s here in this space and will be an integral part of this series with other artists coming to explore it on their own and find their own way of making music with it.”

As the sun sets and twilight enters the dimly lit church, a hush descends upon the space.

I think that it would be a good moment to ask Foster about the name of the series. He says that Pappathomas suggested it.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious, because this isn’t a religious series. André says that when we’re doing these organ and electronics performances there’s this kind of cloud of sound around here, and he feels like the sound is like little prayers floating around in the vault of this space.”

I tell Foster and Teel that even the English word “vespers” sounds to me like a portmanteau of “vapours” and “spectre.” It recalls midnight mass when I was a kid, the excitement associated with church at night — smoke, incense, fog.

“I like that,” says Foster. “It makes me think of the ghostly traces of everyone who has filled this space.”◼︎

_{Cover image: Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.}