On Entertainment by Steven Libowitz
June Swoon and Sounds of Music in Ojai
M
usic director Peter Sellars and vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth are making their festival debut’s at the 70th annual Ojai Music Festival, which takes place June 9-12 at Ojai Libbey Bowl and environs. Opera, theater, and festival director Sellars specializes in both revolutionary interpretations of existing masterpieces and collaborative projects with a wide range of creative artists, including establishing a reputation for bringing 20th-century and more contemporary operas to the stage, including works by Hindemith, Ligeti, Messiaen, and Stravinsky, as well as creating new works with John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, A Flowering Tree, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary. The composer Kaija Saariaho, who has previously inspired Sellars, is also coming to Ojai for the first time, when two of her most potent and visionary works will be featured, including her new chamber version of The Passion of Simone, a meditation on the life of the French philosopher Simone Weil, which will receive its American premiere with soprano Julia Bullock (who wowed the crowd at the New York Philharmonic concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl last summer). Performing alongside Bullock and instrumental ensemble ICE in the opening night concert are Roomful of Teeth, the genre-busting vocal ensemble that has earned a Grammy, a Pulitzer, and more in fewer than seven years. Roomful also joins ICE for a selection of Saariaho’s chamber music on early Friday afternoon, and performs Partita for 8 Voices by ensemble member Caroline Shaw later the same day, before premiering Shaw’s newest work on Saturday afternoon. Members of Roomful of Teeth also enjoy slots on the final two program on Sunday, including the US premiere of an opera about Kopernikus and participating in the free Street Party Jam in the evening on Main Street in Santa Paula. We caught up with founder/artistic director Brad Wells to talk about the group’s creation, methods, influence, and goals at Ojai over the phone earlier this week. Q. Can you please share a bit about how Roomful of Teeth came about, and how you came up with the name? A. I started the group to scratch
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Steven Libowitz has reported on the arts and entertainment for more than 30 years; he has contributed to the Montecito Journal for more than ten years. Ojai Music Festival is slated for June 9-12 (photo by Bonica Ayala Photography)
an itch I’d had for many years, from about the 1980s on, both regarding getting excited about ways that people use their voice around the world. It seemed that the new music world including classical, which uses it as a single sound, like a patch, a single sound. Men, women. A couple of variables. But it’s all in one mode. I’d been hearing Bulgarian women’s choirs, and Tuvan throat singers, and Inuit singers, and other indigenous approaches – as well as others that weren’t indigenous but had schools of training – and I thought composers would die to get these kinds of colors and emotions and gestures in their scores. So eventually, I decided to see what would happen if I put this a group of highly skilled singers together with some of these styles and commissioning music for the group. The name came out of the desire to get off the buttoned-up classical stage. I didn’t want it to be the “something ensemble” or “something singers.” So I thought, what are some mundane words that are analogs to what we are – which is a chamber vocal ensemble. A chamber is a room, and vocal relates to the mouth, so there’s teeth. I liked the idea that the teeth are the longest-lived part of our bodies. Even after our bodies completely decay, the teeth are there for centuries. And they’re right up against our voices, which disappear as soon as we use it. That kind of contrast, evanescence versus virtual permanence, was a juxtaposition I really liked. You’ve more or less rejected the standard vocal classical repertoire, in favor of something much more foreign to traditional ears. What’s the appeal? So much of it is about color. We started with some things that were really far from classical sound, like belting, overtone singing, and subharmonics. Those things are very radically different – not just sonically but physiologically in terms of the vocal mechanism. The idea was for composers to have access to a wider array of sounds and colors. If I hear something like a culture’s particular call to prayer
that has a distinct vibe, but the voice is still singing a supported sustained sound, it’s interesting but not all that appealing. So that’s how we have approached most of what we do. Right now, one of the things we’re studying this summer is death metal singing. What do singers do when they sound like they’re shredding their vocal chords and getting crazy responses from their fans? There’s lots of emotion and a distinct sound profile that’s so different from anything you would hear in classical. As a composer, having that as an option is very unusual. But I wouldn’t have considered it in play until this group reached out and worked at understanding it and showed what they can do with it. So, it’s another example about broadening expressive possibilities for composers. We’ve been on this jag of very old traditions, like the throat singing, which has been around for 5,000 years. Death metal is just a few decades old, and it serves some role. And I’m fine that death metal will scare a lot of people, especially in the classical world. Roomful of Teeth has been lauded as “a tour de force of vocal mischief-making,” “mixed martial arts for singing,” and “Glee on acid.” Does that kind of description ring true for you? Actually, I cringe at some of them. Like the Glee on acid one. I don’t know how you can categorize us with something so commercial. And when you put your head in our world and get it, it’s not necessarily all that crazy. There are pieces with very quick and amazing shifts, maybe akin to an acid trip. But not most of it. It’s just pretty music. You have often emphasized that the group is a band, not a choir. Can you explain the difference? The role of a choir is to largely go for uniform sound and blends, and we’re often about the opposite, sort of fracturing the voices – trying to find ways to take the voices and techniques and set them apart from each other. And not just the voices, but the individuals. I encourage all the composers to write
• The Voice of the Village •
for the specific singers, not the voice part. Think of them as the people, not the tenor or bass, and what they’re good at. Get to know the singer as a character and a player in the band, and write for him. Even when we have subs, they try to be individuals as singers, not just match vocal parts. How are you feeling about making your Ojai debut, and the particular collaborations? Oh, I’m very excited about coming to Ojai for the first time. It’s a legendary place and especially in our world of new music, it’s a kind of Mecca. We’re doing a large number of pieces, using different formations of the group for each one. For one of them, all the women are doing a piece. There’s a mixed-voice quartet that is performing doing Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone (chamber version) with Julia Bullock. It’s a lot of shape-shifting, even for us. We’re doing this amazing piece by Canadian composer Claude Vivier, Kopernikus - A Ritual Opera, in its U.S. premiere, along with ICE. It’s a big piece, rarely performed, and it doesn’t require a tenor at all, which is all right because our tenor Eric Dudley will be conducting instead. What can you tell me about Caroline Shaw’s piece, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”, commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival? Well, I haven’t heard it much yet, although I’ll be conducting it, but I know it has a new title, “This might also be a form of dreaming”. Normally her work is a cappella, but this one is the first time with her work that we’ll be performing chamber instrumental ensemble with members of ICE. It’s super-cool having her as a member, because it was what I was always dreaming about, to have members of the ensemble contribute repertoire. I didn’t imagine someone so skilled and brilliant as Caroline, but she’s one of the reasons the group loves generating music from the inside. That’s another thing that makes it a band. (The 2016 Ojai Music Festival takes 2 – 9 June 2016