March 21, 2025
Morgan Hall, Bailey Performance Center, Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA – USA
Roomful of Teeth: Raquel Acevedo Klein, Martha Cluver, Mingjia Chen, Tynan Davis, Jodie Landau, Steven Bradshaw, Thann Scoggin, and Cameron Beauchamp (artistic director); Randall Squires, sound engineer.
Caroline SHAW: “Allemande” and “Sarabande” from Partita for 8 Voices
Angélica NEGRÓN: Math, The One Which Is Sweet
Peter SHIN: Bits Torn from Words, Movement IV
Missy MAZZOLI: Vesper Sparrow
Leilehua LANZILOTTI: On Stochastic Wave Behavior
Caroline SHAW: The Isle
Alev LENZ: Fall Into Me (Encore)
Howard Wershil | 27 MAR 2025
There’s a new kind of composer emerging on today’s sonic horizon. Their sounds are fresh and provocative. Anything and everything, past and present, is fair game to fuel their unbridled creativity.
A new kind of performer is emerging as well to facilitate the arrival of these sonic wizards. Confident, talented, precise, and open-minded, they create a future that’s expansive and bright.
With Friday’s performance by Roomful of Teeth, we encounter marvelous examples of the whimsy and unpredictability of some wonderful newer contemporary composers and are privileged to experience the incredible expertise of performers who so capably bring those composers’ music to our attention.
The Grammy award-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth consists of singers Raquel Acevedo Klein, Martha Cluver, Mingjia Chen, Tynan Davis, Jodie Landau, Steven Bradshaw, Thann Scoggin, and artistic director Cameron Beauchamp, assisted by sound engineer Randall Squires, whose expertise ensures that the group is presented at their utmost best.
The concert began with the eight vocalists walking out on stage to positions arranged in a very wide semicircle, equidistant from each other, men on one side, women on the other, with each position accompanied by the expected microphone and music stand. Each performer had donned the garb of their choice, with no apparent goal of uniformity, rendering each a personality unto themselves. In the middle of the semicircle was a small statue, referential to a popular eating establishment. You knew from the start that this was not going to be your grandmother’s neighborhood choir.
The first piece on the program was Caroline Shaw’s “Allemande” and “Sarabande” from Partita For 8 Voices, the composition awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music. This composition, also notable for having been nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, is the only a cappella vocal work to have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Its composer is also notable for being the youngest composer – 30 years old at the time – to have received a Pulitzer Prize.
Caroline Shaw, composer (credit: Kait Moreno)
This delightful and surprising piece fearlessly utilized words, open 5ths, the vocal emulation of phase shifting, interruptive vocal slides, counting, unconventional vocal sounds, including grunts – all materials utilized by other younger composers as well, in many differing ways – yet, in this case, all within the context of somewhat Renaissance-sounding harmonies. Single phrases gave way to harmonic evolutions. Knowledge of the past blended with experiences of the present in a most engaging and entertaining way.
Materials were often treated in an echoing, hocket-like fashion. The prevalence of repetition and bouncing throughout the piece functioned marvelously as unifying elements, successfully defining the form of the composition. The rendition of the piece required great control and precision on the part of the performers, and Shaw took full advantage of the richness of their vocal prowess.
Of Shaw and Partita For 8 Voices, New York Magazine wrote: “She has discovered a lode of the rarest commodity in contemporary music: joy.” And isn’t that a welcome surprise in times that try us all?
Angélica Negrón (credit: Catalina Kulczar)
Angélica Negrón presents us with something quite different, with Math, The One Which Is Sweet. Here, we have a love song that’s also about mathematics. We’re greeted with a pulsating drone, later topped with tonal electronic-sounding pulses made lyrical by passages from a beautiful poem provided by the composer. The sonic environment reminded me somewhat of Paul Lansky’s Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion, but here, the sounds are created organically by humans and not by an IBM Mainframe! Another striking example of creativity resulting from an avalanche of past into present.
As the piece continued, sounds and syllables bounced from vocalist to vocalist, growing to a central section of tutti participation, a powerful basso continuo, and then a sudden area of softer, more flowing materials, giving rise to a palpable sensation of clouds parting, and the sky breaking through. Musical materials seem to somewhat break apart, purposefully, at and beyond the utterance of the word “math,” the entirety finally pleasantly dissipating into thin air.
According to the composer, “This piece speaks to the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in giving, receiving, and letting go of love.”
Peter Shin’s Bits Torn From Words, Movement IV, featured on Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy award-winning recording, “Rough Magic,” begins with several repeated single-pitch mimics by only a few performers at once, later joined slowly by other performers echoing the material a half-step higher. Eventually, all performers participate, but not necessarily all at once, as the materials diverge towards something warmer and almost tonal in nature. The harmonies ultimately rendered are stunningly gorgeous. The movement ceases suddenly, but not unsatisfyingly.
Peter Shin (credit: Jonathan Lee)
Throughout this gentle piece, the precision of the performers’ efforts among themselves to maintain necessary communication and synchronicity was perceptible. As with the evening’s other performances, the experience of this sense of community expressed among the performers seduced the audience into their sense of community as well.
Shin shares with us that “Bits Torn from Words examines the mental health condition of generalized anxiety disorder – how the dread of even the most inconsequential circumstances feels gargantuanly out of proportion to its relative impact… The fourth movement, “GaNaDaRaMaBaSa AJaChaKaTaPaHa (Bridge),” concentrates on the 14 consonants of the Korean alphabet, the very roots
and building blocks of the language, through aspirated articulations layered in chained suspensions.”
Missy Mazzoli (credit: Marylene Mey)
Vesper Sparrow by Missy Mazzoli, cleverly stretches the idea of a round. The piece stretches phrases, some melodic, some guttural, adding supportive harmonies and rhythms to the mix as the piece frenetically evolves. In short order, the piece becomes extremely rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic, rendering the impression of wild folk dance from an alternate universe. A new section emerges, less rhythmic, with a more pleading mood, reaching a sudden bombastic conclusion to the entire work. I sensed in this piece, as in others of hers I’ve heard, a healthy, playful sense of contemporary irreverence that spices the music nicely!
Mazzoli describes this piece, written for Roomful of Teeth during their 2012 residency at Mass MoCA, as “…an eclectic amalgamation of imaginary birdsong and my own interpretation of Sardinian overtone singing. In this piece, I tried 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.”
After a short intermission, Roomful of Teeth returned with On Stochastic Wave Behavior by Leilehua Lanzilloti. This piece was quite a bit more abstract and introspective than the other compositions, garnering my attention and appreciation. I heard and felt it as ambient music for an analytical mind.
Leilehua Lanzilotti (credit: Laura Banchi)
The piece emulates waves and effect, perhaps as an ocean to a seashore. It utilized constrained sounds, repeated vocal utterings, and shushing. At one point, the music became very soft, with a single tone emerging, eventually revealing harmonies. We heard sliding utterings, various sequences of materials, solos, Hawaiian language syllables, and phasing materials stacked a major second and minor third apart. Unexpectedly, the piece broke into an area that sounded almost hymnal (and beautiful) that sustained for quite a while. The entire sensation of the piece yielded a profound sense of directionlessness that, for me, gave the piece an utterly wonderful sense of timelessness.
In the program notes, the composer points out: “The work is sung completely in ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi,’ a language that is changing, evolving, new, and alive. Similarly, compositional practices that engage new sounds through an indigenous lens embrace native language and ways of knowing as active, living parts of the creative process.”
Throughout the concert, affixed in front of the eight equally and broadly semicircle-positioned vocalists, resided a small figurine of Bob, the mascot for the “Big Boy” chain of hamburger restaurants in the Los Angeles area. The artistic director explained to us that legendary filmmaker and painter David Lenz, who passed away recently, used to go to Bob’s Big Boy every day for seven years and order the same meal “just to clear the hard drive and allow himself to be an artist without any distraction.” Artistic director Cameron Beauchamp had read about this, found it interesting, and made his own artistic pilgrimage to Bob’s, where he obtained the figurine. Before a recent performance at Carnegie Hall, the director inadvertently stained it with his own blood from a minor cut and realized that he was gratified by the unanticipated opportunity to present a fully baptized version of Bob at their Carnegie Hall performance. The figurine now permanently accompanies the group on tour as their special talisman and ambassador.
The famous statue at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, California. (Instagram: @dineandflash)
The final piece on the program, The Isle, by Caroline Shaw, bookended our delightful musical experience. This setting of three monologues from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (by Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero) began with a single pitch, sung by some of the performers as a sustained note and by others as a pulse. Perfect fourths emerged, growing into oddly chromatic overlapping harmonies, interrupting each other, emulating the electronic sounds that, once considered an addition to our reality, are now clearly a part of it. Sometimes harmonies were traditional, yet pulsing with unexpectedly emphatic passages; sometimes, they were rich but yielding back to sustained notes and pulses. Sometimes sections were melodic, but encompassed opposingly guttural sounds. A particular area combining speech and song sounded alarmingly biblical! As the piece continued, we were treated with literally stunning harmonic changes, with this cornucopia of vocal compositional expertise resolving to a classic major chord. Throughout the piece, the audience was once again treated to that sense of connection between the performers that brought us all a valued common experience.
As expected, the audience offered Roomful of Teeth a well-earned standing ovation, but the obligatory response of an encore regrettably failed to materialize, or so it seemed. A moment before the disappointment would have yielded full dissipation of those in attendance, two of the performers wandered out on stage, appearing to begin the dreaded required dismantling of equipment, noticing, with utter surprise, our presence offstage and hastily beckoning the other performers to join them onstage! For me, this very clever gesture on the part of the performers confirmed that entire feeling of freshness, irreverence, and freedom that characterized this very special concert and the performers and composers participating.
Alev Lenz (credit: Laura Lewis)
For their encore, Roomful of Teeth offered Alev Lenz’s Fall Into Me, featured in an early episode of the television anthology Black Mirror. Vocalist Martha Cluver delivered a beautiful, heart-rendering performance of this atmospheric song. As she spun the tale with lyrics sublime, the other vocalists reverently surrounded her with a plethora of recursive, guttural, phase-shifting, electroacoustics-emulating, reverb-cloaked sounds that their talents so ably cultivate, and that the brilliant composers they represent so imaginatively explore and apply.
An extraordinary concert it truly was. The smiling, passionate faces of the Roomful of Teeth performers brought smiles to the faces of the audience as well.
Was the Roomful of Teeth really them? Or was it us?
I think you know the answer. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Roomful of Teeth: roomfulofteeth.org
Read more by Howard Wershil.
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