The boundary-destroying ensemble Roomful of Teeth is at the
forefront of new music written for the voice. Since 2009, founder and Artistic
Director Brad Wells and his core group of 8 versatile singers — which includes
Eastman alumni Martha Cluver and Eric Dudley — have
created an indomitable, singular sound that has since garnered a 2014 Grammy
for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. On February 27, Roomful of
Teeth will bring that sound to Kilbourn Hall, in a
concert that will include ensemble member Caroline Shaw’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning
composition “Partita for 8 Voices.”
With a voracious appetite for vocal traditions from all over
the world, the group makes music that sounds as if it’s coming not from humans
with vibrating vocal cords, but from some unknown, ethereal and mystical
source. CITY recently spoke to Wells over the phone about Roomful of Teeth’s
origins, its kaleidoscopic musical performances, and success in the classical
music world. An edited transcript follows.
CITY:
How did you decide to form Roomful of Teeth? Was there a niche that needed to
be filled?
Brad
Wells: I think that’s a good way of putting it. I think my love of
“new music” and my love of the remarkable, wide range of sounds that the human
voice is capable of — I think those two things coexisted and intensified
starting in college. So I got very much into “new music” in college, but also
exploring John Cage and Luciano Berio and Stockhausen
and the mid-century modernists who were exploring the sort of unabashed sound
worlds that the voice was capable of. And that intrigued me.
At the same time, I was falling in love with Steve Reich and
Meredith Monk and albums that had a kind of very clear, evident sonic beauty on
the surface, and substance as well. And then over the years, getting to know
different singing traditions from around the world and how they opened up
emotional terrain that I didn’t hear necessarily accessible using bel canto
technique, the kind of burps and hiccups and laughs and raspberries that was a
lot of the kind of mid-century modernists’ extended vocal technique.
Is
Western music inherently limited then by its sense of structure and form and
almost arbitrary imposition of what’s appropriate?
I don’t think I feel confident coming down sort of hard on
one side or the other. There are two things that I think of in response to that
question. One is that with any language that we construct our ideas in, whether
it’s spoken language or musical language or probably anything else, the
structures of that language reflect things about who we are, and about our
culture and all that — and they shape what’s sort of in-bounds and where we
tend to reside versus what’s left natural. And that makes me think about how Western
notation privileges certain things over other things. It’s really precise in particular
ways, but not very precise in other ways. We’ve got basically our
equal-tempered scale that allows us to move from key to key with this
confidence…But what we don’t have is, say, the Indian music’s much more
nuanced sense, and a lot of other music’s nuanced sense of intonation, and how
intervals can respond to one another.
The
need to be adaptable when it comes to the interpretation of different works is
really essential. And I think that perhaps, students of music, whether they
attend a formal institution or not, can benefit from a broader approach, like
the one that you take to the ensemble.
I feel like a lot of Roomful of Teeth’s discussions with
singers in schools of music around the country are around these issues. The
more flexible you are as a young musician, odds are the more hireable you’ll be, and the more exciting a musician you’ll
be.
At the same time, there’s no one right answer. There are
going to be a lot of singers who really should specialize in Western classical
singing, and not get caught up in feeling like they have to become a Swiss Army
Knife of the voice, the way I’m kind of pushing my ensemble to be. Because they
are going to continue that Western operatic or bel canto tradition at a really
high level, and it takes a degree of specialization to keep that level that
high.
At the same time, that’s not for everybody. And I know lots
of voices aren’t built to do that full-time. They have some of that in their
toolkit, but they would probably benefit from having some other things
developed as well. So that’s where we live, and I think encouraging that kind
of flexibility in young singers is part of what we’re up to. Not as a kind of
“apply this across the board,” but as an option.
Roomful
of Teeth takes an almost kaleidoscopic approach to musical styles. It sounds
like the incorporation of world music is both part of an organic evolution
toward broader expression, but also an intentional thing that you wanted to
explore within the group. Is that an accurate assessment?
Absolutely. I think that’s pretty much at the core of it.
It’s easy in certain pieces, like in “Otherwise,” to think of the composing of
those works, to some degree, kind of like cutting out swatches of material and
leaving them together, and getting these interesting juxtapositions of very
different patterns or colors — or whatever analogy you want to use — up against
each other. To a degree that’s true, but the way we think about it is less like
“Sing in that technique,” or “Sing in this technique.” It’s more like, “Sing
with that sound that you have, based on your experience studying that tradition
or that style.” So, for instance, the “bing-bom” kind
of rhythmic thread in “Otherwise” is clearly derived — if you had seen what we
were up to that summer when I wrote that piece — we had been studying the
Sardinian folk style called “cantu a tènore,” where three of the four singers in a quartet do
that kind of thing.
One
of the things that sets the ensemble apart is the fact you have composers like
Caroline Shaw and yourself in your ranks. How does this affect your preparation
of non-Roomful of Teeth composers and the dialogue that ensues?
I’m realizing the longer our history gets, it puts some onus
on me to bring outside composers as up-to-speed as possible, and make as few
assumptions as possible about what they know and what their comfort level is in
writing for such a particular group.
For those of us in the group, there’s now 10, 15 different
singing traditions we’ve studied, and these master singers, some of them have
returned for a couple different summers, or we’ll be in touch with them through
the years with some questions. That all is in our vocabulary, and when we write
for the group, we can make references to those things, those experiences.
Did
Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy win in 2014 change how you view success and its
relationship to artistic integrity?
I hope not. It’s funny, in the classical world, a Grammy, I
think, it’s helpful, it’s nice. I think it was just a
really fortunate thing for the group to both win a Grammy and then some months
before that, Caroline’s Pulitzer helped put us on the map. So that in the
classical world, people became familiar with us fairly quickly. But from the
beginning, the project was colored by my personal inclination, which is, I’m
more about art and music connecting with an audience in a real place at a
particular moment, than getting caught up in what I think has been part of the
problem with new classical music for the last hundred years, which is kind of
the Beethoven Syndrome: “Whether or not people like it or get it at first
hearing, it will be around in 50 years and will be held up as something with
great integrity.”
I feel like that has it kind of backwards. All art should be
about connecting with people right now, because you’re writing about your
experience right now. And if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. And
sometimes pieces are too difficult to get, for whatever reason, on first
hearing, on first viewing, on first reading, and it takes some time for people
to kind of adjust to what the artist is up to. But I feel like that shouldn’t
be the aim. I feel like the aim is, you just wanna
connect. You just wanna move people, you wanna excite people, youwanna somehow make the moment heightened and transformative.
So whether or not you have an award or great recognition, I feel like that’s
what it should be about. And it’s not about popularity, it’s about connecting.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2017.
