Hard Choices

There's a long article in last week's New Yorker (of course it's a long article - it's The New Yorker) about the contemporary choral-music ensemble Roomful of Teeth. It's a great article, informative, entertaining and well written, but you can save yourself a lot of time by just absorbing the title, Roomful of Teeth Is Revolutionizing Choral Music.  That's pretty much the gist of the article.

A lot of interesting things are happening with the human voice in music these days, from death-metal growls to aboriginal throat singing to yodeling to odd-sounding harmonies in newly invented chords. Bands like Dirty Projectors and the inimitable DakhaBrakha have been doing this for years now, and now Roomful of Teeth are taking it even further, featuring no instrumentation but the human voice, pushing the human larynx to its limits, and taking these sounds into the neo-classical, chamber music realm.

In very-much-related news, Roomful of Teeth will be kicking off this year's Big Ears Festival, performing one of the opening sets on Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m.  The only unfortunate part is they're performing at the same time as Irreversible Entanglements, so we have to choose between spoken-word poetry over a free-jazz backing, or a state-of-the-art choral performance.

But wait, there's more!  The ever-reliable Bryce Dessner of the Brooklyn band The National has written a composition called Triptych featuring texts from Patti Smith and Essex Hemphill that reportedly explores the eroticism and inspirations of photographic provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe. The work will have its world premier at this year's Big Ears Festival at the beautiful Tennessee Theater (think The Fox set in the Smokies), and the libretto will be performed by none other than Roomful of Teeth in front of enormous projections of Mapplethorpe’s iconic photographs. 

So that's two chances to see Roomful of Teeth over the span of one extended weekend, and even though it may be at the expense of Irreversible Entanglements, their front-person poet, Moor Mother, will be performing alone that same Thursday night as Teeth, so we may be able to at least sample some of all of the above.