Dreams and sonnets
Roomful of Teeth brought their vocal magic to the Bay Area on Sunday, April 23, courtesy of the SF Opera and SF Performances, who joined together to welcome this exhilarating octet. Performing to a sold out show in the newly renovated Taube Atrium Theater above Herbst, it was clear from their first entrance that the four women and four men who make up this group have created a canvas for the human voice that partakes of the whispering of rock stars as well as the tight harmonies of other a cappella groups.
Titled “Shaw and Shakespeare,” their program combined meaty passages from Shakespeare with texts that at first glance sounded like the nonsensical – and arresting – placeholders that Philip Glass used in Einstein on the Beach.
The first half of their program was Partita for 8 Voices, a twenty-five minute long work by Caroline Shaw, a composer who is also a member of Roomful of Teeth. Written during three summer intensives with the octet, Partita won a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013, the first ever for an a cappella work. Sunday was its West Coast premiere.
This group’s vision is about the breadth of the human voice, which they explored with perfect chords, dirty consonants, and percussive breaths. And while exploring that breadth, they also questioned the intersection of spoken and sung, all with intensity and humor. One could best appreciate their approach by knowing their training: while they are all classically trained singers, they have supplemented that with Tuvan throat singing, the chest voice of the Caucasus mountains, Persian and Indian classical singing, the brassy sounds of Broadway, and the heavy rhythms of rock.
Carefully miked to capture the subtler parts of voice, Partita began with spoken voice. “To the side…to the side…and around…through the middle…five, six, seven, eight!” Those odd words gained a rhythmic certainty and then burst into sung chords, and we became aware that they were describing square dance patterns. “The detail of the pattern is movement,” one intoned, and others repeated in an overlapping that turned it into murmurs, and a road map into the piece. There were cryptic and truncated statements that turned mystic in their brevity. “Fall away,” spoke a soprano. “Time and time again,” answered a baritone, and then the women sang, “far and near are all around.” Then they joined in chords that suddenly stretched hugely, with the four women going high and the men cranking out low bass notes for an earth-shaking harmony.
Much of the work was wordless vocalizing, a mix of “hmms” and “ngahs” and pure “ahhs” that created a primal language of forceful beauty. This fit well with the four movements, named for four dances.
The third movement, Courante, began with the percussive breaths of the women, as rhythmic as a Javanese monkey chant, and the men finally joined with soft bass hums that built to a climax that was startling in its intensity. They turned to the quiet soulful melodies of Appalachia, then slowly built their crescendo back into joy. The people seated around me were turning and nodding at each other, an awareness of a satisfying unfolding. And in the final Passacaglia, they returned to the confusion of cross-talked texts and sudden rich harmonies, words stripped of meaning and soaring into song.
Defying easy classification, Partita felt more like a dream.
And then began the second half of the program, turning from wordless dance to the deep texts of Shakespeare. In The Isle, a second piece by Shaw, she re-developed the murmur of voices into undercurrents and the deep breathing rhythms of waves, (“ni ni ni ni ni ni” they sang). That opening shifted into three passages from The Tempest: Ariel’s soliloquy, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” Caliban’s stuttered and savage innocence, and Prospero’s promise to “abjure” his rougher magic and seek the music of the heavens. The texts were woven in between the denser textures and quite easy to follow, and that allowed the loveliness of Shakespeare’s language to drive the emotions.
They followed with two pieces composed for Roomful of Teeth last year by British composer Anna Clyne, based on Shakespeare’s Sonnets VIII and LXV, and this was also the West Coast premiere. Sonnet VIII has particular feeling for musicians, describing tuned strings as the harmonies within a family. Clyne set up a bass drone and then suspended the sung words over it, first by mezzo and then in duet with tenor. There were whispers and low notes that slowly stepped past each other for tight dissonances, and lots of lovely fifths, and a pure “hoot” of high unison that slowly disappeared.
Sonnet LXV raged against the rust of time and the quick fading of beauty with long hisses and powerful repetitions.
They ended the night with QuietUs by Eric Dudley, another composer who is a founding member of Roomful of Teeth. Written last year, this curious work combines a passage from Hamlet and a sonnet on time, mixed into vocals that were rich and yearning. There was melancholy here, and birth and death, and the simple upward shapes of the music laced the lament with the hopes of a prayer.
—Adam Broner
Photo below of Roomful of Teeth at their performance in San Francisco April 23. From left to right: Estelí Gomez, Martha Cluver, Caroline Shaw, Virginia Warnken Kelsey, Eric Dudley, Thann Scoggin, Dashon Burton, Cameron Beauchamp; photograph by Stefan Cohen.