The New Yorker Radio Hour - Roomful of Teeth Redefines Vocal Music for the Future

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

For a new music ensemble, Roomful of Teeth has made an extraordinary impression in a short time. Caroline Shaw, one of its vocalists, received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for “Partita for 8 Voices,” which was written for the group. Then, in 2014, the vocal octet’s début album won a Grammy. Their sound is often otherworldly: apart from the singers’ expertise in classical technique, they have incorporated other musical traditions into their sound, including Tuvan throat singing, Korean pansori, yodelling, and more. Almost all the pieces they perform are new compositions written by or for them, and they hold a residency every year, demonstrating their unique capabilities to the composers who are commissioned to write for them. The staff writer Burkhard Bilger visited the residency at MASS MoCA, a contemporary-arts museum and complex in Massachusetts, in 2018. While they may be the only group that can currently perform the full range of their repertoire, Bilger found that their goal is not exclusivity. “If the songs are good enough, and the techniques are appealing enough, then more and more classical singers will learn how to how to throat sing, will learn how to yodel, and belt, and do Korean pansori,” Bilger says. “And Roomful of Teeth songs will start to sound like yesterday’s classical music.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Burk Hart Bilger is a staff writer and a man of wide interests, technology, science, nature, sports, food, southern culture, German history, and much more. Burke also happens to be a good musician. He's been singing and choirs since he was young, and he keeps a guitar in his office. where he's always noodling on it. He taught his kids to play old-time music and launched the Bilger family band. And as his kids grew up,

they in turn expanded his musical horizons. So my son is a bassist, upright bassist and jazz bassist, and was the first one who told me about Room Full of Teeth. So, I don't know, a few years ago, he played me Partita, the Caroline Shaw piece, and I just thought it was astonishing. I've been listening to choral music my whole life,

and I'd never heard anything like this before. Every year, the members of Room Full of Teeth get together for a summer residency. They rehearse new pieces. They bring in composers who are going to write material for them to perform in the coming year. The residency is at Mass Mocha, which is a museum in an old industrial town in Massachusetts. And one summer, Burke Bilger tagged along. Room Full of Teeth is a vocal octet, So four men, four women, who sing contemporary classical music.

They sing only newly composed pieces. So we're sitting in a loft space on the second floor of one of the mill buildings in Mass Moka. It's a huge room with enormous high ceilings, I don't know, 12, 13 feet high. And there's some onlookers, but also kind of a semicircle of composers with a singer in the middle. And this is a process that always happens at Mast Mokka with a song. a roomful of teeth, where they'll spend a day just having each singer introduce themselves to the composers and giving them a sense of exactly what their abilities are, what they like to do, what they don't like to do, where their voice can go, where it can't go, what their

range is. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, it would be really easy to have little bits of bricks like that if it would. Because that would be felted, and then I'd, like, oh, that's just, it's just high. Leslie Gomez is the highest soprano in the group. He was the youngest member of the group when she joined. It was my first year out of undergrad when I heard about the premise

and took a train from New Haven to New York and did a Skype audition with Brad. And I did a Bulgarian folk song, a jazz song, a Schumann art song, and I handled like rage art. And it was like, so relieved. that I wasn't auditioning for grad schools. It's like, I don't have to fit in this weird box. Does it make sense yet? And then heard about this. I was like, that sounds like me.

That sounds better. That's better for grad school. Maybe you can give us an example of you singing the styles you were talking about from the beginning. All the members of the group are trained classical singers, but they incorporate techniques, vocal techniques from all of the world. Over the course of the day, as the singers come in one by one,

they'll showcase all kinds of different techniques. Some people are expert tube and throat singers. Some people can do the deep car car car car, rock. Yodling or belting, so you get a whole range of just astonishing capabilities of a human voice. I've been singing my whole life, and I'm used to what vocal music sounds like, And suddenly it's like hearing a saxophone sound like a violin

and sound like a kettle drum and sounding like a bassoon. It's like, I didn't know the voice could do that. It's fun. Western classical singing has for centuries been divided into essentially two techniques. There's choral singing, which is meant to blend and what we call straight tone without vibrato. And then there's belcanto, which is what we hear in opera,

which is a very powerful athletic vocal technique. which is designed to kind of vault over the sound of an orchestra and fill an entire concert hall. What's excluded from those two techniques is everything else in the world that people have done with the human voice. All these wonderful throat singing techniques and yodeling and belting and ways in which the voice can be rough or gritty or kind of mess with all what we think of as kind of pure classical technique. The way composers have used choirs over the last hundred years, I started to feel like there was a certain sense of straightjacketness. Now, Brad Wells is the founder and artistic director of Room Full of Teeth.

He founded this group in 2008 in order to bring in these new techniques. And part of that was inviting singers from all over the world to instruct them in these techniques. We can reach out and bring somebody from Central Asia and hear them sing and ask them questions and have them teach us for a while about a completely. completely different way of using their voice, where the larynx sits, how much constriction, how much air. All those things are really just basic physiological things, and they manifest in all these different ways around the world, and I thought if composers could get their hands on this and see what's possible, and singers could play with it and stretch the color range of

their own voices, then what we understand as choral music might become much more variegated. It's really not about we're going to become tube and throat singers or pansori singers or Kento Tonori singers. Not at all, no. It's really just a kind of pushing the bounds, pushing the walls of what's beautiful in a way. It's like finding what people consider as beautiful and letting composers play with that and see what emerges. One of the composers at Mass Moka this week is Eve Begillarian, a really adventurous New York composer. She's setting a piece by Walt Whitman. to music. But in the meantime, she's trying to see what new kinds of sounds she could make with the

group. So what's your plan for this afternoon? What are you going to do with the group to get ready for this? Driving down, I happen to hear Elvis Presley's cover of Blue Moon. And it's so held back. I mean, he's very close-miked. And from what I can tell, there's different processing on the two double tracks. One of them has a really striking slapback echo. So I'm thinking we can try setting up our own cover of Elvis's cover and try having having different people paired to do different aspects of the tune. I mean, it may be totally dumb. I don't know.

We'll see. It's going. And so I thought what we could do is set up the accompaniment for now, right? It's late in the afternoon in the loft, and Beglaran is working with the group. playing around with the sounds they can make, trying to see what tools might end up working in the piece she's composing. And I put up the lyrics.

Maybe the two of you, to start? To start. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone without a dream of my house. Right? So that you can use all the breath you need to do the whispery consonanty thing. I think you're just by yourself what you're doing. It's really weird.

Can we try this with everybody for, let's just try that. Do the breathy thing, I've just sewn out my jam. I'm sorry. I'm with you entirely, entirely, I'm so with you. Okay, let's hold off on that. Let's you two trade the whispery consonanty thing and let's just see what happens. Can we just track each other in terms of? The glarian and the roomful of teeth singers are kind of feeling their way together through these new sounds, these new techniques.

You might say that what comes out of it are compositions that only roomful of teeth can sing because it's designed so specifically for their voices and their techniques. But the truth is that composers have always been pushing the bounds of the human voice. Mozart, when he wrote the Queen of the Night aria, did it for a specific soprano who could go very high and at a very mobile voice. And little by little, other sopranos learned to do the same thing. Brad Wells hopes that the same thing will happen with a roomful of teeth compositions in the future. If the songs are good enough and the techniques are appealing enough, then more and more classical singers will learn how to throat sing, will learn how to yodel and belt and do Korean pansori.

And Roomful of Teeth songs will start to sound like yesterday's classical music. Staff writer Burkhard Bilger, we heard from members of Roomful of Teeth, as well as the composer Eve Biglarian. They have shows coming up in Boston, New York, Miami, East Lansing, and many more. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us, and if you've enjoyed the show, I just want to remind you you can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on anything you missed.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Karen Frulman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.