Though it’s not vocal music, it is music by an incredibly prolific and wonderful composer of vocal music, and I think a great decision on the part of a publisher to reach out electronically:
Universal Edition has put online the scores to each of Wolfgang Rihm’s string quartets, celebrating their performance at the 5e Biennale de quatuor à cordes. It’s a wonderful opportunity to peruse these scores at your leisure, without leaving the comfort of your desk!
Ekmeles sings new works written for them & instruments by Columbia University composition students Taylor Brook, Courtney Bryan, Natacha Diels, Bryan Jacobs, and Alec Hall
In the midst of preparation for our upcoming show at NYU, I thought I might point you towards the websites of the composers who have written new works for us: Friedrich Heinrich Kern, Wang Jie, Adam Mirza, and Maria Stankova; and a YouTube clip of a piece by Efraín Rozas. It’s always interesting to see how a composer’s vocal works relate to their instrumental writing, and it’s been great to be able to use the internet to find a context for our new pieces.
Ekmeles joins Eve Beglarian, Vicky Chow and Ana Milosavljevic for an evening of Beglarian’s music on the Avant Music Festival.
We’re glad to be bringing back Randy Gibson’s Circular Trance in an extended version for this year’s Avant Music Festival.
I’ve been enjoying this 8-hour Classical Christmas themed playlist on Spotify. While it’s not all actually Christmas music, it’s all festive and quite enjoyable, with good performances selected. For the contemporary listeners in you – enjoy Crumb’s “A Little Suite for Christmas A.D. 1979″, complete with score. Check out the other videos on this user’s channel for an incredible selection of recordings paired with scores.
The consonant staff
I’m looking right now at a piece by Evan Johnson for solo voice called A general interrupter to ongoing activity. The composer describes it in the performance notes as being “comprised of overlapping, mutually imbricated, sometimes self-canceling structures laid out over a landscape of several different independently treated types of more or less vocal, muscular action…”
An example of the rhythmic structure of the pitch staff
The notation for the piece parses the voice into its component parts – a staff for breath, one for fricative and consonant sounds, teeth clicks, whistles, tongue (pressure and clicks), voicing and vowels, and finally pitch. The amount of information on the page is mind-boggling – add to these concerns a rhythmic language involving tuplets nested 3 or 4 deep, and an extreme degree of specification in dynamics and articulation. Traditional vocal notation involves a staff with the pitches on it, words below, dynamics above, and occasionally articulation markings. This traditional notation is a kind of shorthand, in that it assumes the singer is coming to the score with an understanding of language, phrasing, idiom, style, and a myriad of other historical assumptions. In a way, General interrupter is technically totally prescriptive; an alien musician wouldn’t need to know these traditions to interpret the score. However, the mere quantity of information here demands a kind of interpretation, a filtering of the demands of the score through the ability and body of the performer.
A sparse page from "General Interrupter"
Aside from the idea of the voice expressing manifold levels of often physically self-contradictory musical information, what interests me most in the piece may be the notation itself. While some pages are dense with ink and high prime number tuplets, others are reduced down to a single staff, with rhythm notated proportionally and graceful slurs arcing across the page.
I see in this kind of writing the voice exploded, its infinite variables found so intriguing that it becomes impossible to choose a single possibility. In contrast with say, the string quartets of Aaron Cassidy, whose decoupled instrumental actions create a dramatically physical choreography that produces an explosive music, exploding the voice creates dramatically physical, extremely small inner conflicts, invisible to the audience. I think this distinction is important to note, and that using the voice in this way is a departure on a journey inward – maybe this is really the implosion of the voice – a new hermeticism.
I’ve just started reading the wonderfully written—and delightfully named—blog 5 against 4. I especially recommend the series of responses to James Dillon’s Nine Rivers, complete with score and recording for the truly curious among us! Having missed the recent New York premiere, I am delighted to have the opportunity to peruse the work itself along with such deep criticism! Enjoy.
Ekmeles sings new works written for them by NYU Graduate Composition students Wang Jie, Friederich Kern, Adam Mirza, Efraín Rozas, & Maria Stankova
I was talking with Sasha Zamler-Carhart, director of Ascoli Ensemble, about the ways that our ensembles approach tuning. Ekmeles’s approach to tuning Gesualdo in 31-note equal temperament is a mostly harmonically focused – 31ET being a keyboard temperament -and is about aiming for pure verticalities. Sasha’s group, specializing in Medieval music, and often reading from original manuscript parts, approaches tuning in an entirely linear sense. Of course they make sure they begin lines and cadence together, but reading from parts and singing in Pythagorean tuning – which is beautifully melodic, but only harmonically satisfying for major seconds fourths and fifths – has led them to consider tuning in this way.
Our most recent project, the premiere of Randy Gibson‘s “Circular Trance“, was an almost totally vertical experience. Scored for an array of sine wave drones in addition to the seven singers required, the piece’s complex just intonation tuning system requires us to constantly listen vertically, and to subsume our voices into the tuning of the drone. Perhaps the most linearly conceived work that I’ve ever performed is the first movement of Johannes Schöllhorn‘s “Madrigali a Dio”. The pitches for the singers are graphically specified on a 3 line staff representing the full compass of the voice, so that the pitches are only determined relatively within each voice, and are free to interact with the other voices at any interval, tempered or otherwise.
Despite these extreme examples I think I do my best work tuning diagonally, imagining both the melodic contour of my own individual part, and the way it will interact with the other parts as they go along. In reality, tuning with an ensemble of voices is a constant game of listening and subtle adjustments. Rules and approaches to tuning are a jumping-off point and a reference; but in practice, the voice is both a producer of an infinite continuum of pitch, and fallibly organic.