FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 6, 2017
CONTACT:
Rebecca Bailey, Publicity Coordinator/Writer
Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College
603.646.3991
Exploring uncharted vocal galaxies, Roomful of Teeth performs January 9;
World premiere of work by next-gen composer
HANOVER, NH—Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, an eight-member ensemble that takes vocal music into “uncharted harmonic galaxies and timbres” (Philadelphia Inquirer), makes its New Hampshire debut on Tuesday, January 9, 7 pm, in Spaulding Auditorium of the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.
The program includes Roomful member Caroline Shaw’s 2013 Pulitzer-winning Partita for 8 Voices as well as the world premiere of a work by Nonesuch Records’ Tigran Hamasyan[tee-GRAHN hah-MASS-see-yan], one of the most remarkable and distinctive next-gen jazz pianists.(Roomful and Hamasyan perform the work one day later at New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Hop’s commissioning partner.) Hamasyan is known for combining jazz improvisation with the music of his native Armenia. Titled Ser Aravote, the work is based on a 10th-century Armenia Apostolic text with a unique 17-syllable verse structure. Hamasyan will improvise on piano to accompany the singers.
The program also includes Superstition,by visiting Dartmouth music professor Richard Beaudoin [BOD-win], a composer whose vocal music has sung widely by eminent artists in lading venues in Europe and Boston, where Beaudoin has taught at Harvard and Brandeis universities.
Local singers are invited to try out Roomful’s music and methods in a free “Community Sing” with the ensemble on Monday, January 8, 5:30–6:30 pm, in Spaulding Auditorium. Recommended for people 16 and older of all skill levels and musical backgrounds, it’s a chance to learn and sing a fun contemporary vocal work, in just an hour. No advance rehearsal required, butregister ahead at hop.dartmouth.edu or 603.646.2010 to learn more about the music and give the Hop a rough head count.
A consistent commissioner of new work, the Hopkins Center Programming Director Margaret Lawrence viewed the New Hampshire debut of Roomful of Teeth—an ensemble devoted to the creation of new works—as an opportunity to support an exciting new piece of music. “Partnering with Carnegie Hall on Tigran Hamsayan’s new work grew from an existing opportunity,” Lawrence said.“We joined the project to support it. Witnessing the world premiere of the piece gives Dartmouth students and other Hop audience members a wonderful glimpse into musical creation—and gives the composer and ensemble a great premiere site before heading to New York City.”
Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth has turned the choral and new music worlds on their ears with a repertoire encompassing singing traditions from around the globe and collaborations with some of today’s most exciting artists—all wrapped up in peerless vocal production and a charismatic connection to its audiences. Wrote the Boston Globe, “Experimentation may be this group’s calling card, but its essence is pure joy.”
Dedicated to mining the expressive potential of the human voice, Roomful continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques, gatheringannually at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA, where its members have studied Tuvan throat singing, yodeling, belting, Inuit throat singing, Korean P’ansori, Georgian singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, Hindustani music and Persian classical singing with some of the world’s top performers and teachers.
The group employs these techniques in traditional music as well as new works by such commissioned composers as Judd Greenstein, Merrill Garbus (of tUnE-yArDs), Fred Hersh, Sam Amidon and many more.
Recent projects include The Colorado, a music-driven documentary film that explores water, land and survival in the Colorado River Basin (featuring former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche); collaborations with NOW Ensemble, Kanye West and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME); and performances with the Seattle Symphony featuring Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. The group has performed at venues and festivals in the US, Canada and Mexico, from New York’s Lincoln Center to Austin’s Fusebox Festival. In August 2014, Roomful was spotlighted at the International Federation for Choral Music symposium in Seoul, Korea (one of only three American vocal ensembles invited). The group also was one of the featured ensembles at the 2016 Ojai Music Festival.The group regularly leads vocal technique workshops, master classes, improv-based workshops and concerts at schools and community centers across the country.
The group’s eponymous debut album, released in 2012,won a 2014 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and included Shaw’s Partita, which made Shaw the youngest composer to win a Pulitzer. An iTunes exclusive EP of Partita ranked no. 1 on iTunes Classical charts. The group’s second full-length recording, Render, released in 2015, featured works by Wally Gunn, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Caleb Burhans, ensemble tenor Eric Dudley and artistic director Wells.
Roomful’s extraordinary capabilities start with the breath and versatility of its members who (collectively) also conduct, compose, are sound engineers and renowned instrumentalists; sing with such groups as Seraphic Fire, Ekmeles, Ensemble Caprice, Convergence, Cantus and Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices; and perform as vocal soloists with top orchestras and choruses in Classical, early music and new music.
MORE ABOUT…
Brad Wells
Wellsdirects the choral program, oversees and teaches studio voice, and leads courses in conducting, arranging and voice science and style at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. He has held conducting positions at Yale University, Trinity College, University of California at Berkeley and California State University, Chico, and has directed choirs of all ages. His ensembles have performed throughout North and South America, South Africa and Europe. In 2007, Wells commissioned and led the Williams Concert Choir in the world premiere in Palestrina, Italy, of Judd Greenstein’s Lamenting. In 2006, he assisted with the world premiere of Philip Miller’sREwind: A Cantata for tape, testimony and voice in Cape Town, South Africa, and conducted the US premiere at the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival in New York City.
A champion of Estonian choral music, Wells has led the US premieres of works by numerous Estonian composers. He has lectured and published articles on the physiology and acoustics of non-classical vocal styles and the role of singing in film. As a singer, he has performed and recorded with such ensembles as Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (under Nicholas McGegan and Philip Brett) and the California Choral Company (under William Dehning). In 1998, he was the recipient of the Aidan Kavanagh Achievement Prize from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Wells received the Doctor of Musical Arts (2005), Yale University; Master of Musical Arts (1998), Yale University; Master of Music (1986), University of Texas at Austin; B.A. (1984), Principia College.
Caroline Shaw
Shaw is a New York-based musician appearing in many different guises. Trained primarily as a violinist from an early age in North Carolina, in 2013 she became the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her enigmatic composition Partita for 8 Voices (also nominated for a 2014 Grammy for Best Classical Composition). She made her solo violin debut in 2015 with the Cincinnati Symphony (MusicNOW), became the inaugural musician in residence at Dumbarton Oaks in the fall of 2014 and was the Composer in Residence for two years (through 2016) with Vancouver’s Music on Main. Shaw has performed with ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble), the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Alarm Will Sound, the Mark Morris Dance Group Ensemble, the Knights, Victoire, the Yehudim and many others. (She has also appeared incognito as a backup singer and violinist on Saturday Night Live with Paul McCartney, Letterman with The National and the Tonight Show with the Roots.) While committed to maintaining a busy freelance career as a violinist and singer performing primarily contemporary classical music, she has taken commissions to create new work for the Carmel Bach Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Guggenheim Museum (FLUX Quartet), The Crossingand the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Other personal projects include the development of an evening-length theater work, Ritornello, and a slowlyevolving ambient electronic album. Shaw studied for 15 years with Suzuki violin pedagogue Joanne Bath before working with Kathleen Winkler at Rice (B.M. violin) and Syoko Aki (M.M. violin) at Yale. She is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton. She has been a Rice Goliard Fellow (busking and fiddling in Sweden) and a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow, and was a recipient of the infamous Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study historical formal gardens and live out of a backpack for a year. As a teenager many years ago, she spent a life-changing summer playing chamber music at Kinhaven Music School in Vermont, which is probably why she would prefer to perform barefoot whenever possible.
Tigran Hamasyan
Hamasyan fuses jazz improvisation with the rich folkloric music of his native Armenia. Turning 30 in 2017, he’s one of the most remarkable and distinctive jazz-meets-rock pianists of his generation. A piano virtuoso with groove power, Hamasyan’s latest adventurous project is 2017’s An Ancient Observer, his second solo album, his eighth overall as a sole leader, and his sophomore recording for Nonesuch. (Overall, this is his eighth recording as a sole leader.) Accolades for his music include the top piano award at the 2013 Montreux Jazz Festival, the grand prize at the prestigious 2006 Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition, the 2015 Paul Acket Award at the North Sea Jazz Festival and the 2016 Echo Award (the German Grammy) for best international piano album of the year for his superb recording Mockroot. Wrote NPR Music in 2015: ““With startling combinations of jazz, minimalist, electronic, folk and songwriterly elements…Hamasyan and his collaborators travel musical expanses marked with heavy grooves, ethereal voices, pristine piano playing and ancient melodies.” He has recorded with his electro-acoustic powerhouse trio as well as the Yerevan State Chamber Choir for his 2015 Luys i Luso project focused on Armenian sacred music stretching stylistically from the fifth to the 20th century. Hamasyan has toured internationally for a fan base that ranges from adventurous jazz aficionados to progressive hardcore metal listeners.
Richard Beaudoin
American composer Beaudoin is the architect of the microtiming technique. Iconic recordings are slowed down and transcribed in minute detail, then treated as a palimpsest, forming a parchment over which the composer manipulates, reorganises and interweaves original material to create innovative compositions of startling beauty and originality.
Born in 1975 in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, Beaudoinstudied at Amherst College with Lew Spratlan and performed and coached chamber music at Greenwood Music Camp before withdrawing from college to to study privately in London with Michael Finnissy. At 23, he became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. After returning to Amherst College t and completing his bachelor’sdegree in 1998 , he moved back to London, where he completed a master’s degree in 2002 from the Royal Academy of Music. In 2005, while studying at Brandeis University (where he completed a PhD in musiccomposition and theory in 2008),he was invited by Amherst College to be the Joseph E. and Grace W. Visiting Professor of Music. He taught at Harvard University for eight years (2008–2016) as faculty member in composition and analysis. During 2016–2017, he held the posts of Lecturer at Brandeis University and Visiting Research Fellow in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He is currently teaching as Lecturer in Music at Dartmouth
Hopkins Center for the Arts
Founded in 1962, “the Hop” is a multi-disciplinary academic, visual and performing arts center dedicated to uncovering insights, celebrating diversity and nurturing talents to help Dartmouth and the surrounding Upper Valley community engage imaginatively and contribute creatively to our world. Each year the Hop presents more than 300 live events and films by visiting artists as well as Dartmouth students and the Dartmouth community, and reaches more than 22,000 Upper Valley residents and students with outreach and arts education programs. In addition, the Hop continues to mentoryoung artists, support the development of new workand provide a laboratory for participation and experimentation in the arts.
RELEVANT LINKS
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/roomful-of-teeth
CALENDAR LISTINGS
Roomful of Teeth with Tigran Hamasyan, piano
Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth takes vocal music into “uncharted harmonic galaxies and timbres” (Philadelphia Inquirer) with a borderless repertoire encompassing singing traditions from around the globe and collaborations with some of today’s most exciting artists. This program includes Roomful member Caroline Shaw’s 2013 Pulitzer-winning Partita for 8 Voices and the premiere of a Hop co-commissioned piece by Nonesuch Records’ Hamasyan, one of the most remarkable and distinctive next-gen jazz pianists.
Tuesday, January 9, 7 pm
Spaulding Auditorium, Hopkins Center for the Arts
$25-35, 18 & under $17-19, Dartmouth students $10
Information: hop.dartmouth.edu or 603.646.2422
Community Sing with Roomful of Teeth
Bring a voice and an open mind to this chance to learn and sing a fun contemporary vocal work with Roomful of Teeth. Whether or not you currently sing in a chorus or a cappella group, we want you! Participants learn a choral work and sing it all together, in just an hour. No advance rehearsal required. Register ahead to learn more about the music. Recommended for ages 16+.
Monday, January 8, 5:30–6:30 pm
Spaulding Auditorium, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
Free
Registration (recommended but not required): hop.dartmouth.edu or 603.646.2010.
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