The Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth is out to discover how far human voices can stretch.
Through study with masters from traditions the world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques, and through an ongoing commissioning process, it forges a new repertoire without borders.
The group, which performs November 17 at Penn State’s Schwab Auditorium, has studied Tuvan and Inuit throat singing, yodeling, belting, Korean P’ansori, Georgian singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, Hindustani music, and Persian classical singing.
“Experimentation may be this group’s calling card,” writes a Boston Globe reviewer, “but its essence is pure joy.”
Conductor, singer, and composer Brad Wells founded Roomful of Teeth in 2009, but the seed for the ensemble was germinating much earlier.
“Back in the 1980s, when I was in college, I started thinking about forming a vocal ensemble dedicated to new music,” says Wells, who directs the choral program at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Wells, who doesn’t sing with the octet but sometimes accompanies on percussion, likens the ensemble to an instrumental band.
“I think, in some ways, it’s like a jazz band more than a rock band. You think of the saxophone section and the trombones. This group definitely does have its kind of sections. And, yeah, there are parts where there’s improvisation or some freedom, but the scores are also very clear and finely crafted, for the most part,” he says. “The expressiveness and the flexibility comes in the group’s pacing overall in responding to each other, as opposed to somebody doing a drum solo in a band.”
A New York Times reviewer calls the group’s eponymously titled 2012 debut album — a Grammy winner for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance — “sensually stunning.” A second album, Render, came out last year.
In 2013, octet member Caroline Shaw became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Partita for 8 Voices, which will be featured in the Schwab concert.
Working with professionals, Wells says, means his job is more about guiding vocalists and shaping works than about teaching.
“They’re very quick. They figure out things in their own particular ways but with great confidence,” he says. “So it’s more about supporting them and getting the ideas of the piece to cohere and make sure everyone’s on the same page.”
Roomful of Teeth works with a variety of composers.
“What we do is get the composers to know the singers as well as they can, see what their capabilities are in all these different techniques that we’ve studied. … In some ways it’s similar to what people need to do if they’re writing an orchestral piece,” Wells says.
“With the singers in Roomful of Teeth, it’s much more complicated than just a soprano and an alto. It’s a soprano who can yodel all over the place, and she can belt, and she can throat sing, and she can growl, and all these things that she’s uniquely capable of in ways that are different than everybody else in the group. So the composer should know what her strengths and her limitations are, and what those techniques are grounded in.”
Eileen Leibowitz sponsors the concert. WPSU is the media sponsor. For information or tickets, visit cpa.psu.edu or phone (814) 863-0255.
