Tag: choral

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 7: Voices Special

I made a two hour mix for NTS Radio of songs with vocals that are significant to me. I had originally set out to focus on experimental vocals, but I realized that so much of what might sound experimental to western ears—Tibetan chant, Inuit throat singing, Chinese folk—is deeply traditional, not experimental at all. Instead, I approached this as two hours of vocal milestones, be they from technical, stylistic, or emotive standpoints. It’s not possible to make a two hour comprehensive survey of strong vocal traditions, nor of the most important singers, though there are quite a few of both categories in here. Putting this together was hard, and while I could easily have spent years digging and rethinking, I set a month time limit to ensure that I would finish it at all.

As I was making this I also thought a lot about how Björk framed her almost entirely vocal record Medúlla as a response to September 11th–both the event itself and the subsequent wave of patriotism and xenophobia that she experienced as a foreigner living in New York. Making an all-vocal album was, for her, a coping mechanism and a means of trying to reconnect with what it means to be a human.

Lastly, a note that this isn’t as listenable or poppy as the mixes that I typically make, though I did try to arc it in a way that feels good. I’m not really sure what its ideal listening environment is–it probably involves headphones–so I hope that you enjoy it all the same! If you’d like an mp3 version you can download it here. Thank you for listening 💜

Tracklist:
1. The Impressions – For Your Precious Love
2. Meredith Monk – Strand (Gathering)
3. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Genesis (abridged)
4. Bessie Griffin & The Gospel Pearls – Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
5. Philippine Madrigal Singers – Pamugun (comp. Francisco Feliciano)
6. Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes – Jusqu’à Ce Que La Force De T’aimer Me Manque (excerpt)
7. Emma Kirkby & Gothic Voices – O Euchari (comp. Hildegard von Bingen)
8. Björk – Pleasure Is All Mine
9. The Ronettes – Baby I Love You (Isolated Vocals) (excerpt)
10. David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir – Arc Descents
11. Unknown Artists – Sumi Yeinyo (Hani Crying Song) (Southern China)
12. The Beach Boys – Surfer Girl (Alternate Version)
13. John Jacob Niles – Go ‘Way From My Window
14. The Tallis Scholars – Spem In Alium, Motet for 40 Voices (comp. Thomas Tallis)
15. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Doll’s Polyphony
16. Young Thug – All Over
17. Ghédalia Tazartès – Une Voix S’en Va
18. Yma Sumac – Taita Inty (Virgin Of The Sun God)
19. Arthur Miles – Lonely Cowboy, Pt. 2
20. Angkanang Kunchai With Ubon-Pattana Band – Isan Lam Plearn (excerpt)
21. The Hilliard Ensemble – Viderunt Omnes (comp. Pérotin)
22. Ustad Ghulam Ali & Asha Bhosle – Salona Sa Sajan Hai Aur Main Hoon
23. Patti Page – Confess (excerpt)
24. Monks of Gyütö Tantric College – Sangwa Düpa (excerpt)
25. Amália Rodrigues – Gaivota (excerpt)
26. Unknown Artist – Akazehe Par Une Jeune Fille (Burundi)
27. Anna Homler & Steve Moshier – Sirens (excerpt)
28. Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir – Stani Mi, Maytcho (Get Up, My Daughter)
29. David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir – Rainbow Voice
30. Lucy Amarualik & Mary Sivuarapik – Song Of A Cooking Seal Flipper
31. Dr. Octagon – Halfsharkalligatorhalfman
32. Judy Henske & Jerry Yester – Rapture (excerpt)
33. The Hilliard Ensemble – Sabbato Sancto – Responsorium 5 (comp. Carlo Gesualdo)
34. Linda Jones – Your Precious Love (excerpt)

The Hilliard Ensemble – Carlo Gesualdo: Tenebrae, 1991

Another expert overview of a favorite composer’s work from the venerated Hilliard Ensemble. Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) was an Italian prince, count, and renaissance composer, who is mostly known for his madrigals, particularly those that disregarded the tonal conventions of the time and explored extreme chromatic progressions and unprepared changes of harmony, i.e. changes without a harmonic bridge. This was arguably without precedent, and wasn’t really seen again until late 19th century impressionism. The music is notoriously difficult to perform live, with careening harmonies making it particularly easy to veer off-key. In spite of the daredevil compositions, the songs are stunningly beautiful, if a bit nervewracking. Stravinsky was a big fan. Aldous Huxley, who once listened to Gesualdo while under the influence of mescaline, wrote the liner notes for a 1956 LP of Gesualdo’s work. Herzog made a pseudo-documentary about him called Death for Five Voices.

Perhaps somewhat relatedly, Gesualdo was also known to exhibit characteristics of serious mental illness, was a repeat murderer, and a masochist, leading some to suspect demonic possession. After the murders, the story goes that he was so paranoid that he went on a tree-cutting rampage around his castle so as to be better able to see potential threats from far away. It’s also believed that he may have ordered his own death. He’s become a vampire-esque figure of fascination for many (I can’t help but think of Gilles de Rais), an interest that seems a bit fraught to me–but I can’t argue with the music. Enjoy!

Gavin Bryars – The Sinking of the Titanic, 1990

A piece with a long, dense backstory, and many different iterations. As such, The Sinking of the Titanic feels very much like a living work-in-progress, just as contingent on the live performance as on composition, which is part of what makes it so special. Bryars explains the piece’s inspiration here and details its growth and performances here. The piece is a consideration of the sounds generated by the string sextet who played on the boat deck of the Titanic as it sank, and what the sounds would do if the music had continuously played into the water:

Bride did not hear the band stop playing and it would appear that the musicians continued to play even as the water enveloped them. My initial speculations centred, therefore, on what happens to music as it is played in water. On a purely physical level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce much of a sound (it was a string sextet that played at the end, since the two pianists with the band had no instruments available on the Boat Deck). On a poetic level, however, the music, once generated in water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more sound-efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the ship to the ocean bed and remain there, repeating over and over until the ship returns to the surface and the sounds re-emerge. The rediscovery of the ship by Taurus International at 1.04 on September 1st 1985 renders this a possibility. This hymn tune forms a base over which other material is superimposed. This includes fragments of interviews with survivors, sequences of Morse signals played on woodblocks, other arrangements of the hymn, other possible tunes for the hymn on other instruments, references to the different bagpipe players on the ship (one Irish, one Scottish), miscellaneous sound effects relating to descriptions given by survivors of the sound of the iceberg’s impact, and so on.

Bryars began writing it in 1969 and recorded a 25 minute version of it in 1975 as a first release for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records (Eno himself produced the recording). After Robert Ballard discovered the Titanic’s wreck in 1985, Bryars dramatically reworked the piece to include additional sonic elements detailed above, as well as two children’s choral ensembles. The work was performed at the Printemps du Bourges festival in Belgium in 1990 in a Napoleonic-era water tower, with the musicians performing in the basement of the tower and the audience listening on the ground floor. The empty top floors of the tower acted as a giant reverberation chamber. For this recorded version of the live performance, Bryars added the sound of other ambient spaces, including that of the swimming bath in Brussels where the piece was performed “live” on a raft in 1990.

The Tallis Scholars – Spem In Alium, 1985

Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) is considered by many to be one of the most important English composers ever to have lived, and is definitively one of the most important composers of early choral music. His crowning achievement, “Spem In Alium,” is a ten minute long 40-part motet that borders on psychedelic: ceaselessly shifting, simultaneously hyper-precise yet almost shapeless. From Wikipedia:

The motet is laid out for eight choirs of five voices. It’s most likely that Tallis intended his singers to stand in a horseshoe shape. Beginning with a single voice from the first choir, other voices join in imitation, each in turn falling silent as the music moves around the eight choirs. All forty voices enter simultaneously for a few bars, and then the pattern of the opening is reversed with the music passing from choir eight to choir one. There is another brief full section, after which the choirs sing in antiphonal pairs, throwing the sound across the space between them. Finally all voices join for the culmination of the work. Though composed in imitative style and occasionally homophonic, its individual vocal lines act quite freely within its elegant harmonic framework, allowing for a large number of individual musical ideas to be sung during its ten- to twelve-minute performance time. The work is a study in contrasts: the individual voices sing and are silent in turns, sometimes alone, sometimes in choirs, sometimes calling and answering, sometimes all together, so that, far from being a monotonous mess, the work is continually presenting new ideas.

I’ve been listening to this album for ten years and it’s still disorientingly beautiful. The other works in this collection are gorgeous in their own right, with “Sancte Deus” and “Miserere Nostri” being personal favorites. Not included are his “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” cited as his other masterwork; I’m also a chump for “If ye love me“…there are plenty of other compilations worth seeking out. Happy December, but also, listen to this all year round.

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Monks Of The Monastery Of Gyütö – Tantras Of Gyütö: Sangwa Düpa / Mahakala, 1988

The most frightening thing I’ve ever heard. Makes the entire pretense of heavy metal look like Sesame Street. Recorded at Gyütö Tantric University, one of the great colleges of the Gelugpa, the Established Church of Tibetan Buddhism, by David Lewiston, protégé of Thomas de Hartmann, decade-long resident musician at the Gurdjieff Foundation, impetus behind the Nonesuch Records Explorer Series (fans of the Voyager Golden Record are familiar with his work), and responsible for a huge body of recordings of world music made in the very small window of time during which lightweight portable recording equipment allowed for high-quality recordings to be made in remote places and traditional music hadn’t yet been ravaged by globalization. Happy Halloween, y’all.

Hildegard von Bingen – A Feather on the Breath of God, 1984

Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, poet, doctor, visionary, Christian mystic, and polymath. She founded the practice of scientific natural history in Germany, lived to the age of 81 at a time when the life expectancy was early 40s at best, and wrote the oldest surviving morality play (sometimes called the first musical drama). Despite having no formal musical training, she was responsible for some of the most hauntingly beautiful and enduring music to come out of medieval Catholicism. Her compositions broke many of the existing conventions of plainchant, using extremes of register, dramatic leaps of pitch, melismas and flourishes to express rhapsodic, overflowing emotion. Sublime delivery of this collection of her songs by UK ensemble Gothic Voices and soprano Emma Kirkby, globally renowned early music specialist. Perfect hurricane soundtrack music.

David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Hearing Solar Winds, 1983

“This recording was made in L’Abbaye du Thoronet, a 12th-century Cisterian monastery in Provence, where I had previously brought the choir in 1978. The simple harmonic geometry of the abbey seemed perfectly proportioned to magnify the choir’s music and let it resonate within its sacred space. Working there was an incredible challenge: our sensations, our breathing, and even our thoughts and emotions became intensely amplified.”

–David Hykes, liner notes

Hearing Solar Winds is a milestone for the human voice. Much of Hykes’s work originates from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism and western Mongolian khöömi, or overtone singing. Yet in this context, recorded live in a French abbey over the course of two evenings, it’s a completely different beast from traditional throat singing. It’s less active and more drawn out, less human and more ghostly. It shimmers–did a songbird get trapped in the abbey, or was someone playing an unimaginably tiny glass flute? “Telescoping,” and of course “Rainbow Voice,” quite literally sound like light being split through a prism: when producing harmonics, “the voice acts as a kind of sonic prism, ‘refracting’ sound along a frequency spectrum which extends upward from the fundamental tone.”

Elsewhere, Hearing Solar Winds is as much about sonic illusion as it is overtones. Several tracks employ the Shepard scale, which is a “sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves, with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole.'” Upon first listen, the effect is disorienting and even a bit nauseating, as it’s difficult to understand where you are, tonally. If you don’t mind losing track of your body, Hearing Solar Winds becomes less of an album and more of an hour long meditation–cosmic not because of shimmering synth pads or floating arpeggiation (there are none) but because of its direct sonic verticality. This is the real deal.

Incredibly, Hearing Solar winds is David Hykes’s first album. He went on to release five more albums with the unbelievably precise Harmonic Choir, and five more without them. (Side note: “Rainbow Voice” was featured in the soundtrack for Dead Poets Society.) He’s worked extensively with sound healing and spirituality, developing a comprehensive approach to “contemplative music” called harmonic chant, about which there’s a nice interview with him here. I would highly recommend a rainy day listen of Hearing Solar Winds on good speakers, without doing much of anything else.

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Mix: Winter (Indoors)

I made this mix for ambient indoor listening, thinking about the last few moments of winter and a little bit of thawing for spring. It’s heavy on vocals, folk, and acoustic instruments, so it may be more of a background listen. If you like it, download it here.

Tracklist:
1. 0:00 Arthur – Wintertime
2. 2:50 The Durutti Column – Sleep Will Come
3. 4:38 Bridget St John – Many Happy Returns
4. 6:51 Harold Budd – Albion Farewell (Homage to Delius, for Gavin Bryars)
5. 9:22 Connie Converse – There is a Vine
6. 10:54 Woo – Taizee (Traditional)
7. 13:06 Unknown – Pumi Song
8. 14:13 John Jacob Niles – Go ‘Way From My Window
9. 16:27 Clara Rockmore – The Swan (Saint-Saëns)
10. 19:19 Lewis – Like To See You Again
11. 23:41 Unknown – IV
12. 25:39 Patti Page – The Tennessee Waltz
13. 28:32 Gigi Masin – Parallel Lines
14. 30:57 Yasuaki Shimizu – Suite No. 2: Prélude (Bach)
15. 34:55 Donnie & Joe Emerson – Love Is
16. 37:55 Rosa Ponselle – The Nightingale and the Rose (Rimsky-Korsakov)
17. 41:11 Henri Texier – Quand Tout S’arrête
18. 42:43 Molly Drake – I Remember
19. 45:41 Virginia Astley – Sanctus
20. 47:40 Nico – Afraid
21. 51:11 Arthur Russell – A Sudden Chill

Mix: Winter (Outdoors)

I made this mix with the hope that you’ll listen to it outside in headphones. If you like it, you can download an mp3 of it here.

Tracklist:
1. 0:00 David Sylvian – Preparations for a Journey
2: 3:10 Stellar OM Source – Alpine Architecture
3. 5:30 Meredith Monk – Strand (Gathering)
4. 7:20 Bernard Xolotl – Perseverance (Excerpt)
5. 13:10 Actress – Untitled (Excerpt)
6. 14:50 Emerald Web – Flight of the Raven
7. 16:40 Muslimgauze – Sapere Aude
8. 20:00 Deutsche Wertarbeit – Auf Engelsflügen
9. 25:10 Woo – Hopi
10. 28:00 Dip in the Pool – Rabo del Sol
11. 32:40 Kraftwerk – Ananas Symphonie
12. 35:00 Don Slepian – Sea of Bliss (Excerpt)
13. 37:00 Drahcir Ztiworoh – Elephant Dance (Excerpt)
14. 41:40 The Hilliard Ensemble – Veni Creator Spiritus (Comp. Pérotin)
15. 48:40 Fripp & Eno – Wind on Water
16. 54:10 Li Garattoni – Here is Silence
17. 55:50 Roedelius – Wenn der Südwind Weht
18. 59:40 Barbara Buccholz – Öd

The Hilliard Ensemble – Pérotin, 1989

When I was in high school, a burned copy of this CD made the rounds among the “cool” choir kids. It was passed discreetly with knowing nods, intended for the ears of those who would “get it.” To this day, it’s still one of my favorite choral compilations (if only I were still in high school, maybe I could still be cool), but I think it speaks to a much wider range of people than a few self-aggrandizing choir dorks might have imagined. Performed by the venerated/veteran Hilliard Ensemble* (they mostly perform early music, but have also dabbled in Gavin Bryars and John Cage, and have collaborated a lot with Arvo Pärt), this is a collection of works written by the legendary Pérotin, who lived sometime in the late 12th and early 13th century and was responsible for some of the earliest polyphonic music of which we have written and attributed documentation. (Gregorian chant is earlier and is monophonic.) All that aside, this music is spacious, vibrant, and dovetailing. It doesn’t mind if you’re uninterested in Christianity or choral music or even the western tradition.

*If anyone’s going to be in London around Christmas, the Hilliard Ensemble’s last performance ever will be on December 20th at Wigmore Hall. They’ll be performing Pérotin’s “Viderunt Omnes,” one of the few existing examples of four-part organa, among others. It will be a seriously historical moment, so don’t miss it. Tickets here.