Listen to this. A choir tries to sing a series of consonants: “N th bgnng wz th wrd, nd th wrd wz wth gd, nd th wrd wz gd”. Another chorus responds with the words of Song of the earth that rotates by Walt Whitman sung to a melody inspired by a sixteenth-century mass by the Flemish Josquin Desprez: “Did you think those were the words, those vertical lines? Those curves, angles, dots? No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the earth, in the sea. They’re in the air, they’re inside you.”
It’s a pass of rough magic, the new album by the Americans Roomful of Teeth, a study between erudition and imagination of what is possible to do with voice and words, without music. In a sense, it is a psychedelic journey in which signifiers wander in search of elusive meanings. It’s a record about the magic of language and the potential of singing in the 21st century. If you’ve never heard something like this before, it might change your mind about vocal music by taking you into uncharted territory, which is far from sacred singing, operatic, jazz-derived vocal ensembles, yet encompassing them all. A song that provides an updated definition of beauty that contemplates non-uniformities.
The piece on the consonants is called None more than you. Like all compositions of rough magichas been written For And with the Roomful of Teeth (and in this case also for the Dessoff Choirs). It is composer Eve Beglarian’s homage to Whitman on the bicentenary of her birth in 2019. It is inspired by the passage of The deadly disease in which Kierkegaard states that “necessity is to be compared to consonants: in order to pronounce them, possibility is needed. If this is lacking, if a human existence has been brought to the point of having no possibility, it is desperate and it is in every moment in which it lacks the possibility”. It is an idea that Beglarian translates by asking Roomful of Teeth to sing only the consonants of the beginning of the Gospel according to John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”), an impossible task and desperate.
Those who write that Roomful of Teeth are right “gleefully dismantle the traditional definition of ensemble singing” (NPR). They are cultured, but forget the bel canto, they mix a great variety of musical languages, from those of folk origin to the avant-garde of the twenty-first century, they use techniques that take from every tradition of the world without worrying about cultural appropriation , have an academic culture and can collectively count on something like five octaves of range. They are the Avengers of vocal music. Led by Brad Wells and Cameron Beauchamp, who share the task of artistic directors, they include talents such as Caroline Shaw, singer, violinist and composer straddling cultured and popular music, capable of writing vocal music from Pulitzer (the astonishing Match for 8 voices interpreted on their own disc by Roomful of Teeth), compose string quartets, collaborate with Kanye West. In a sense, Roomful of Teeth are a living experiment on the potential of the voice and on breaking down stylistic barriers. Being damn good they have a damn small audience.
In a world where you don’t have to listen carefully to anything to understand it, because everything has to be transparent, accessible and, if necessary, memorable, Roomful of Teeth are part of a musical tradition that forces you to feel carefully and even look for meaning in what they do. The effort pays off even if at first glance their style can be unsettling. They can also result in rebuffs as in the attack of Psychedelicsthe three-part composition by William Brittelle which opens rough magic with a series of vocalizations between the surreal and the alien that seem to have been randomly assembled for so long they are unsettling. «The purpose» wrote Brittelle, another important figure in the definition of a music genre fluid suited to more curious contemporary audiences «was to boldly challenge the notion of what a long-lasting choral piece can be, both in terms of performance and subject matter. The human voice is a magically flexible instrument, much more than an instrument you can hold or blow into. In a way, it has unlimited possibilities, especially when you work with people with great technique and a sense of adventure like Roomful of Teeth».
Through abrupt transitions between jazz vocals, soft harmonies, babbling, peaks in the highest register, grunts, pitched parts, operatic singing and ecstatic moments, Psychedelics reconstructs the experience of a nervous breakdown and at the same time evokes the apocalyptic state in which the world finds itself. It takes you to an altered or dreamlike dimension and is therefore a psychedelic piece in its own way, as the title suggests. Self The Isle by Shaw takes its cue from Storm by Shakespeare presenting “for fun” a 24-chord progression including all the major and minor triads of the western temperate system (take note Ed, with stuff like that no one will ever take you to court), Bits Torn from Words by Peter S. Shin evokes generalized anxiety disorder with impossible trills inspired by the Korean tradition of pansori, with shaky tones that express the irrepressible desire to speak and to be heard, in practice a great gig in the sky in a conservatory room.
When you think you won’t make it out of the consonant game of None more than you, the voices of the singers of the Dessoff Choirs mix with those of the Roomful of Teeth and it is as if they help them to pass from the state of necessity, that is to say the decomposed diction, to a sense of limitless possibility. A struggle to find words is consumed in headphones, a small parable on language and the search for meaning. You end up cradled by an almost transcendent music. “No one more than you is the present and the past, no one more than you is immortality”, recites a chant that seems to dissolve into vocalizations that seem to float in the air. It’s a moment of unreal stasis that you wish would never end. rough magic it is like this, it is anxiety and ecstasy, in its uncompromising originality it says things about us, it is supernatural in its executions and very human in its themes. Perhaps Whitman foresaw Roomful of Teeth when he wrote that “human bodies are words, myriads of words”.
