As part of our 2016-2017 season we’re giving each of our core singers a turn at the helm of the blog. The below post below comes from our tenor, Steven Bradshaw.
I begin my tenure with Ekmeles on December 1st, diving into Zosha Di Castri’s bold work The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named for 6 voices and electronics. The first thing that struck me about the score was the space it left for each musician to make decisions. It’s a certain type of composer that writes this way and her technique is conducive to the kind of music-making I’m interested in. The piece jumps back and forth quite sporadically between rhythmic speech and complex harmonies, interspersed with vocal figures of a more approximate nature. Studying the piece and shaping the performance of my part has been an unusual process. While the artistic choices available to us in the harmonic sections are more-or-less familiar, the sections of speech and approximate vocal phrasings — wailing, screeching, growling, glissandos, whistling, and white noise — are very enveloping. It’s an expansive sound world beyond traditional vocal repertoire, made even more-so by the amplification which unlocks another layer of possibility. No longer bound by the acoustics of Miller Theatre, the sounds of a mysterious forest teeming with life emerge from a landscape of electronic drones and glitches. Blood-curdling howls and whispered hissing can be heard equally in this thick atmosphere. My part alone calls for shrieking high Es followed shortly by a long drone waving microtonally and drifting into white noise before eventually choking out and gasping desperately for air in the span of less than a minute.
The text, it seems to me, gives voice to a consciousness that cannot express itself in this way. It reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful writing in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the author tells the story through MoonWatcher: the hominid. Healey’s poem reflected through the prism of Zosha’s menacing score seems to speak to the chaos and insanity of nature. Music and the written word have a unique ability to unlock a point-of-view that is truly… other.
Tags: Zosha di Castri