The Isle begins with a cloud of murmuring voices—a musical imagining of something hinted at in Shakespeare’s stage directions in The Tempest. The calls for “a burden, dispersedly” and “solemn music” suggest an off-stage refrain and/or perhaps something even more otherworldly. In Shakespearean Metaphysics, Michael Witmore writes: “Like the island itself, which seems to be the ultimate environment in which the play’s action takes place, music is a medium that flows from, within, and around that imaginary place into the ambient space of performance proper. If some of the courtiers from Naples and Milan are lulled to sleep by the island’s ‘solemn music,’ the audience can hear this music in a way that it cannot feel the hardness of the boards that the sleeping players lie on.”
In taking cues from this reading of the play, I’ve constructed my own musical reading of the island of The Tempest. Three monologues—by Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero—are set in three distinct ways. Ariel’s initial song of welcome appears, for the most part, homophonically, although its break from the quasi-robotic delivery (into the “burden, dispersedly”) points to the character’s vaporous and ethereal nature. Caliban’s famous description of the island as “full of noises” finds its home in a distraught and lonely monodic song, ornamented and driven by extraneous sounds. Prospero’s evocation of the various features and inhabitants of the island (from the final act) breaks apart into spoken voices that eventually dissolve into the wordless voices of the beginning, mirroring his pledge to throw his book of spells into the sea (and possibly to return to the island’s pre-lingual state).
The harmonic material of the beginning and the end of the piece (the murmuring voices) is a 24-chord progression that includes all major and minor triads of the Western 12-note system (for fun). As Prospero says: “But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (Solemn music.)”
—Caroline Shaw
Psychedelics is, in part, an effort to integrate the many vocal techniques and effects mastered by Roomful of Teeth into one (semi-)coherent whole. The term psychedelic here is meant to evoke a plethora of bright and vivid (almost surreal) colors blended and twisted in strange, otherworldly ways. My aim was to create a piece that aggressively challenged the notion of what a long-form choral piece can be—both in terms of its delivery and subject matter. I think the human voice is a magically flexible tool—so much more so than an instrument you hold or blow into. The possibilities are in a sense limitless, especially when working with performers like Roomful of Teeth with a sense of adventure and an exceedingly high level of technique.
In terms of actual subject matter, the piece is an attempt (albeit an abstract one) to reckon with a psychological breakdown that I experienced as a young adult, and to parallel that with the seemingly apocalyptic strains of our current collective state—my objective being to humanize and somehow come to terms with the inevitability and, ultimately, healing nature of destruction. In this sense, the term psychedelic refers more to the ability to observe startling and strange occurrences with a fluid, dreamlike sense of attachment. I have begun to believe the human apocalypse will happen slowly, incrementally, both in our shared physical world and our individual spiritual worlds, and that apocalypses—similarly to wildfires in the West—are part of a natural process, a shedding of skin, and house within them beauty in the guise of elegy. By fully taking notice of our fate as our culture sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss and we continue to pollute and destroy our world, I think we can take possession of the resulting sadness and heartbreak, we can own the process, and come to accept and embrace our role in it. As I’ve heard said, “Things only reveal themselves in passing.”
Lyrically, my aim was collage rather than traditional narrative—a fabric of text that reflects the growing chaos of stimuli in our society interrupted by moments of clarity and longing. There are a number of cultural reference points, but they are meant to form a swarm of images, not a literal, linear narrative.
—William Brittelle
Canta la Piedra-Tetluikan (A Song of the Stone) is a piece inspired by a poem from the talented Nahua writer Mardonio Carballo, who wrote it for the opening of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, devoted to the art of Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania.
The four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—have a profound and symbolic significance in Mesoamerican cultures, as they represent a deep connection with nature and their surroundings, reflecting as such their complexity in human existence. Each one is associated with different aspects of life, nature, and cosmovision from these cultures. Earth is sacred and appears as a mother who nurtures and sustains life, water symbolizes flux and renewal, air is associated with wind and the transmission of thought, while fire symbolizes transformation and power.
Within Mardonio’s poem, each element repeats like a sacred mantra, intermingling with images and symbologies from our human condition and our ancestral wisdom stretching back to life’s origin. Their profound beauty was the point of inspiration in creating a structurally unique musical piece that evokes ritual and dance sensations around nature and the universe’s origin. Stone transforms into a sacred object that unites and sings, in turn the Nahuatl words’ cadence and specific repetitions guide the creation of rhythmic patterns and melodies that conjure up varied sonorous emotions implicit in the poem. My idea was to create multifaceted music where poetry, nature, sacred numerology, and ancestral art intermingle and become enriched by creating diverse sonorous worlds.
—Gabriela Ortiz
Liquid Borders represents a sonorous reflection of certain consequences—human and quotidian, historic and social—that have been generated by the political (artificial) creation of borders, walls, and territorial divisions. In and of themselves, these constitute limitations to the freedom of humankind to act and exist in the broadest philosophical sense.
The piece consists of three movements, the first being “Liquid City,” alluding to the cultural, social, and economic borders between rural Mexico and the capital.
Musically speaking, in Liquid Borders I chose to elaborate on a formal construction model that would allow me to respond to border concepts, recognizing at the same time that their components and meanings are always fluid and changing, and that the selfsame cognitive process is an unstable constellation of networks, fusions, and hybrids. The material I used ranges from the most abstract, in terms of rational conceptualization, to the most audibly concrete—always in constant, organic flux—creating thus variable dimensions of reading. The main idea was to transgress the borders of time and space via a kind of reintegration of musical memory.
The instrumental colors that characterize each movement reflect a sonorous geography—proposed within metaphoric and aesthetic contexts, across diverse borders, reintegrated with their surroundings in alternative ways.
Last but not least, the metaphor of a liquid border alludes to the possibility of encountering a multicultural space, one with apparently irreconcilable differences that nonetheless exposes our shared elements of human expression: communication, tolerance, and understanding—a fundamental challenge that has yet to be met, one without which neither our survival as a future society nor our well-being can be guaranteed.
—Gabriela Ortiz
Cuarteto en chico was composed for four drums of similar timbres and inspired by the musical styles, techniques, and rhythmic structures of the Afro-Uruguayan candombe. These large ensembles include three different types of drums of differing sizes and ranges.
This piece extracts the polyrhythmic use of drums in candombe as a platform on which the composer builds rhythms that, when intermingled, weave great musical patterns. The piece is divided into three movements, the second movement contrasting with the other two because of its slower tempo and the use of softer sticks—in this case with a felt head that changes the color and softens the attack against the drum head.
—Ricardo Gallardo
This original quartet, which is dedicated to Peace, is based in the performance of traditional instruments from Colombia called guacharacas. The traditional way of playing has been altered in order to incorporate a series of innovative techniques that allow us to appreciate a diversity of sounds coming from an instrument that, at first view, would seem to have a very limited number of sound possibilities. Besides the guacharacas, a marímbula (an Afro-Caribbean instrument) is used in the middle and last sections of the piece.
—Leopoldo Novoa
Mallet Quartet is scored for two vibraphones and two five-octave marimbas. I had never written for five-octave marimbas extending down to cello C. On the one hand, I was delighted to have the possibility of a low bass and on the other hand apprehensive since just slightly too hard a mallet that low can produce noise instead of pitch. Eventually, after a bit of experimentation, this was well worked out.
The piece is in three movements—fast, slow, fast. In the two outer fast movements, the marimbas set the harmonic background that remains rather static compared to other pieces of mine like Double Sextet (2007). The marimbas interlock in canon, also a procedure I have used in many other works. The vibes present the melodic material—first solo and then in canon. In the central slow movement, however, the texture changes into a thinner more transparent one with very spare use of notes, particularly in the marimbas. I was originally concerned this movement might just be “too thin,” but I think it ends up being the most striking, and certainly the least expected, of the piece.
—Steve Reich