Music for Sixteen Socially-Distanced Vocalists

Yesterday evening Volti, the Bay Area’s a cappella vocal ensemble that specializes in new music, presented the second of the four mini-concerts constituting its 42nd season. This second program also marked composer Danny Clay’s second contribution to the Volti repertoire, the first having been Playbook Choruses, which was premiered by Volti in May of 2018. Regular readers should know by now that Clay’s approach to creation (a noun that may be more accurate than the traditional usage of “composition”) involves guided improvisation rather than the constraints of score notation. As a result the performance of Playbook Choruses had more to do with strategic guidelines that Clay offered, rather than explicit instructions.

Earlier this month this site discussed a video of Clay’s Sounds in Motion, in which he cultivated his technique by creating a lexicon of graphic primitives as a notation for guided improvisation. The work was performed by two choral groups based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, each of which used Clay’s lexicon to create works to be sung by the other. The video then provided “score following” for each of the pieces that was recorded.

Clay’s new work for Volti is entitled Singing Puzzles. Volti’s Artistic Director Bob Geary challenged Clay by asking him to create a choral composition for vocalists all of whom were remote from each other. As Sounds in Motion had been a product of Clay working directly with his two choral groups, Singing Puzzles was the result of Clay spending six successive Monday evenings with sixteen of the Volti singers, four in the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass vocal ranges, respectively, along with Geary himself. Clay described the experience as follows:

Proceeding through a dizzying thicket of musical obstacle courses, verbal prompts, and visual challenges, the virtuoso musicians screamed, cursed, imitated crude sound effects, impersonated turtles, brutally butchered IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet … not the beer] symbols, sang beautifully, and conjured up just about every sound the human voice is capable of into their recorders. Elements of the choral experience — such as group rehearsals, coordinated singing in time, visual cues — remained, but deconstructed in bizarre ways that only a year like 2020 could deliver.

Indeed, the first movement of Singing Puzzles captured the spirit of the last of Clay’s sentences, coming across a bit like a “concerto for conductor and chorus,” in which the vocalists exercised their own lexicon of responses to Geary’s lexicon of cues.

For the most part the video dwelled on the visual side of the performance technique of the sixteen vocalists:

courtesy of Volti

However, the first section amounted to a call-and-response in which one first saw Geary deliver a cue, after which one observed the vocalists responding. Over the course of the video, one encountered other visual cues, many of which reflected Clay continuing to explore the symbolic lexicon he had prepared for Sounds in Motion. The entire performance lasted for about half and hour, and it would be fair to say that there was never a dull moment. Indeed, so much came out of all the effort that had gone into making Singing Puzzles that the uploaded YouTube video of last night’s stream is likely to hold up for several viewings, allowing the listener to join the performers in puzzling out just went into performance and what came out of it.