Roomful of Teeth Is Revolutionizing Choral Music
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Onward and Upward with the Arts February 11, 2019 Roomful of Teeth Is Revolutionizing Choral Music From death metal to throat singing to alpine yodelling, the experimental group is changing what it means to harmonize. By Burkhard Bilger The singers in Roomful of Teeth produce music that’s both primal and sophisticated, ancient and startlingly modern. In a throat, a note is forming. A puff of air, a pulse of the lungs, rushes up the windpipe and through the vocal cords, parting them like a pair of lips. As the cords begin to vibrate, they’re stretched taut by muscles to either side, raising the pitch. The diaphragm pumps more air, rocketing the note up the vocal tract, making its walls hum like the barrel of a woodwind. The sound ricochets back and forth as it rises, gaining resonance with each rebound, till it bursts into the hollow chamber of the mouth, the ringing cavities of the sinuses, and careens off the palate into the open air. The human voice is the world’s most astonishing instrument, it’s often said. It’s capable of everything from a trill to a bark to an ear-splitting scream, from growling harmonics to liquid acrobatics, lofted on the breath like a lark on an updraft. Instrument is the wrong word, really. The voice is more like a chamber ensemble: winds and strings and blaring horns, strung together end to end. It’s a pump organ, a viola, an oboe, and the bell of a trumpet, each instrument passing the sound along to the next, adding volume and overtones at every step. Throw in the percussion of the lips and tongue, and the echoing amphitheatre of the skull, and you have a full orchestra playing inside you. When I joined a chamber choir a few years ago, my first thought was just how much could go wrong. The people weren’t the problem. Most were experienced singers, and there were nice voices all around. It was more the nature of the endeavor. A single voice is complicated enough, but adding others—we were about fifteen singers—multiplies the complexities. Who missed that cutoff? Why do we keep going flat? Even if the notes are right, the rhythms can go slack, the chords refuse to ring. Hitting pitches only gets you so far. The singers have to keep the beat, modulate volume, match vowels, and articulate consonants in perfect synch or sequence. Is that an ah or an ae, a ch or a k? And even then their unison can be soured by a single tenor. Choral harmony is a kind of miracle when it works. It’s not just that every voice is different—that pitch and blend can vary disastrously, that memory is fitful and sight- reading uncertain, that there are too many sopranos and not enough basses—but that we hear things differently. The sound that travels from your mouth to my ear passes through yet another set of sonic permutations. It enters the auricle—the crumpled cone of the ear—and echoes through the auditory canal, strikes the eardrum, chimes the bones of the middle ear, and goes spinning down the sousaphone of the cochlea, tripping nerves inside like keys on a piano. The sound we hear is one set of instruments translated by another, like a game of telephone at the U.N. By the time the brain has decoded and combined it all—Happy Birthday!—it’s a wonder we even recognize the tune. In a room, a chord is forming. Two voices, faint but pure, are joined by a third, softly keening. They rise and swell, twist into dissonance and fade. Deeper voices awaken with a groan, then settle into a slow, thrumming chant. Others join in, then peel away like rain from a spinning tire. They shout and wail, gather into pulsating chords and resolve, at last, into words: “There will be always something you can lean your weight into. There will be always something you can rely on.” The singers, four men and four women, are seated in a half circle around a conductor. As the final chord crests and ebbs, they dart their eyes at one another and grin, the sound still surprising after so many repetitions. “Can someone describe what you just sang?” the conductor asks. “They’re all just major triads. The A pattern is G, F, A-flat—all major chords. Then the B pattern is G, F, A-flat, G-flat. It’s always alternating.” “And do we know the voicing?” “I remember I was on the third.” “Yeah, and the bass was on the tonic.” “That’s what my body was telling me, but it was also telling me that I’m on the ninth.” “And what were you telling your body?” It’s early June, and the rehearsal room, in a rustic lodge on the shores of Lake Dunmore, in central Vermont, has been left unheated, somewhat optimistically. The indoor temperature is in the high fifties, and the singers are bundled up as if for a hike. The conductor, Brad Wells, has on a worn baseball cap and a sweatshirt, and the singers are wearing hoodies, woollens, and puffy vests, some with scarves and beanies. They have the ragamuffin look of Christmas carollers, despite their fierce-sounding name: Roomful of Teeth. They’ve been invited to the lake for a weeklong residency at the New Music on the Point festival. (When the adults leave, their cabins will be taken over by hordes of summer campers.) Mostly, though, they’re here to blow the other singers’ minds. Roomful of Teeth is a kind of lab experiment for the human voice. Its eight singers cover a five-octave range, from grunting lows to dog-whistle highs. Three have perfect pitch, all have classical training, and Wells has brought in a succession of experts to teach them a bewildering range of other techniques: alpine yodelling, Bulgarian belting, Persian Tahrir, and Inuit and Tuvan throat singing, among others. Because the group writes or commissions almost all of its pieces, it can create vocal effects that most singers would never attempt. Roomful of Teeth’s first record won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2013. That same year, one of the group’s two mezzo-sopranos, Caroline Shaw, won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her piece “Partita for 8 Voices.” She was, at thirty, the youngest person ever to win the award. The piece they’re rehearsing this morning was written for them by Merrill Garbus, who performs with the bassist Nate Brenner under the name Tune-Yards. The chants and howls and panting rhythms alternate with moments of sudden beauty—luminous plains swept by shimmering chords —but it’s not always clear if that’s what Garbus intended. She taught the piece to the singers a few years ago, mostly by ear, and never gave them a score. “It’s always a bit of an adventure reconstructing it from collective memory,” Wells says. Although Wells is the group’s founder and artistic director as well as its conductor, his role in rehearsals tends to be more watchful than controlling. He sits facing the singers, hands in his lap, eyes following the score on an iPad, only occasionally offering a cue or an interpretive note. “I want this to be true, but I don’t know if it is,” he tells them at one point. “I’ve heard that when the sun rises in the rain forest, the dawn chorus starts with the insects, then the birds, and then the next more-evolved species.” It would be terrific, he seems to be saying, if this piece could convey the same sense of dawning consciousness, of buzzing chaos resolving into order. The singers ponder this for a moment. “If I wake up at noon, does that mean I’m the most evolved?” “I was up at six-thirty this morning, so I have webbed toes.” Darwin believed that music and speech developed in part out of people mimicking natural sounds. Roomful of Teeth, you might say, is another step in that evolution. The group’s exotic techniques not only use different parts of the vocal anatomy; they’re sound prints of the landscapes where they were developed. In Sardinia, in a tradition known as cantu a tenòre, four men stand in a tight square and sing harmonies pitched to the sounds of their livestock: the lowest voice is a cow, the middle voices are a sheep and the sound of the wind, and the soloist on top is like a shepherd singing to his flock. By combining such sounds with the echoing cliffs of a Swiss yodel, or the lashing rain of Korean P’ansori, and refracting them through the mind of a composer, the group produces music that’s both primal and sophisticated, ancient and startlingly modern. “There were these hard lines that had been drawn around classical voice pedagogy,” Wells says. “The mentality was: everything else is an inferior use of the voice. But if people have been using these techniques in different parts of the world for so long, how could they be wrong? I love a throaty or a belchy voice. I love voices when they crack. I love hearing grit in the voice. It’s really just pushing the bounds of what’s beautiful.” Choral directors make unlikely revolutionaries. Their repertoire is rooted in church music, in which every interval can have meaning and harmony was once a matter for papal intervention. Christian monks sang in unison for nearly a thousand years before they allowed themselves a second vocal line, and then only in lockstep with the melody.