Repertoire Notes
Roomful of Teeth presents a dynamic program of music spanning the group’s 16 years of collaboration with today’s most compelling composers, including works from both of their Grammy Award-winning albums. Vesper Sparrow by Missy Mazzoli is based on text from Farnoosh Fathi’s poem ‘Home State’, from her recent book Great Guns . The piece is an eclectic amalgamation of imaginary birdsong and Mazzoli’s own interpretation of Sardinian overtone singing. It tries to capture the exuberance and energy of these individual singers as well as a bit of the magic that is created when this group comes together. Wayfinding, observing nature and respecting the ocean have been present and important to composer Leilehua Lanzilotti since childhood. On Stochastic Wave Behavior was composed as part of the US National Science Foundation-funded ‘A few waves do most of the work’ project, and this piece celebrates and reflects on today’s dynamic landscape where science and indigenous knowledge celebrate the power of nature. The work is sung completely in ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, a language that is changing, that is evolving, that is new, is alive. The Isle by Caroline Shaw begins with a cloud of murmuring voices – a musical imagining of something hinted at in Shakespeare’s stage directions in The Tempest . The calls for “a burden, dispersedly” and “solemn music” suggest an off-stage refrain and/or perhaps something even more otherworldly. In Shakespearean Metaphysics , Michael Witmore writes: “Like the island itself, which seems to be the ultimate environment in which the play’s action takes place, music is a medium that flows from, within, and around that imaginary place into the ambient space of performance proper. If some of the courtiers from Naples and Milan are lulled to sleep by the island’s ‘solemn music’, the audience can hear this music in a way that it cannot feel the hardness of the boards that the
sleeping players lie on.” In taking cues from this reading of the play, Shaw has constructed her own musical reading of the island of The Tempest . ‘Speaking in Tongues’ is the first song from Elevator Songs by singer-songwriter/composer Gabriel Kahane. The entire Elevator Songs songbook includes fizzy hooks, slippery chord changes and the sublime counterpoint of eight voices combine to create a singular, panoramic vision. It sounds like nothing so much as itself and yet, for all of its freshness, it is, first and foremost, a rich and resonant collage of the timeless travails of the human condition. Math, the one which is sweet by Angélica Negrón is the sound of getting lost in new love – of giving in to excitement, savouring anticipation, surrendering to daydreams. It’s the thrill of getting to know someone new, and the lens of tenderness through which everything about them is perceived. It dismantles and plays with the false dichotomies of love: logic and emotion, order and abandon, repression and disinhibition. It’s an invitation to these dualities, like two people falling in love, to coexist in the dazed delight of newfound connection. This piece speaks to the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in giving, receiving and letting go of love. Psychedelics by William Brittelle is, in part, an effort to integrate the many vocal techniques and effects mastered by Roomful of Teeth into one (semi-)coherent whole. The term psychedelic here is meant to evoke a plethora of bright and vivid (almost surreal) colours blended and twisted in strange, otherworldly ways. Brittelle’s aim was to create a piece that aggressively challenged the notion of what a long-form choral piece can be – both in terms of its delivery and subject matter. The piece is an attempt, albeit an abstract one, to reckon with a psychological breakdown that the composer experienced as a young adult, and to parallel that with the
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