Roomful of Teeth Continues SFP PIVOT Festival

The Roomful of Teeth “family portrait” (photograph by Anja Schütz, courtesy of SFP)

The second offering in this season’s PIVOT Festival, presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and curated by Gabriel Kahane, consisted of a program performed by members of the Roomful of Teeth vocal ensemble. This was a vocal octet led by Artistic Director Cameron Beauchamp (who was also one of the vocalists), whose other members were five women (Estelí Gomez, Jodie Landau, Virginia Kelsey, Caroline Shaw, and Martha Culver) and two men (Steven Bradshaw and Thann Scoggin). The group made its SFP debut in April of 2017, and this is their second appearance.

This is an ensemble known for its talent for eliciting a wide variety of thoroughly engaging sonorities. Harnessing those sonorities in the service of texts, whether narrative or reflective, is another matter. Where reflection, which tends to be preferred genre, is concerned, the ensemble can establish a setting in which the words themselves are secondary, if not tertiary.

The opening selection by Caroline Shaw, “The Isle,” is a case in point. Taken on their own merits, the sonorities summon up a mental image of a small isle in the middle of a vast sea. However, as fragmented words begin to emerge, the attentive listener will recognize that this song does, indeed, have a libretto. On further listening, one encounters familiar texts from William Shakespeare, after which it is a modest leap to the conclusion that the isle itself is the setting for The Tempest. Whether the ensemble selected this work to begin the evening with auditory calisthenics is left for the listener to decide!

In any event, Shaw’s composition is excellent preparation for the novice listener encountering the ensemble for the first time. Sadly, the remainder of the program amounted to little more than “more of the same.” The second selection was the fourth movement from Peter Shin’s “Bits torn from words,” which amounted to a study of the diversity of phonemes. On the other hand, Angélica Negrón’s “Math, the one which is sweet,” composed on a 2022 commission from the New York Philharmonic, amounted to a case study in what linguists would call “referential opacity.”

In the second half of the program, Kahane joined the ensemble, playing both piano and electric guitar for a performance of his Elevator Songs. As was the case with the first half, no text sheets were provided. Kahane explained that members of the audience would be able to find the texts online after the performance had concluded. I have to say that, personally, I felt that this undermined any effort on the part of a listener to appreciate how a composer achieves interplay between words and music, suggesting that such interplay did not matter very much to this particular composer. Nevertheless, there were at least a few moments of engaging (and sometimes amusing) staging and what sounded like a (very) brief “guest appearance” of a fragment from the second (A major) intermezzo in Johannes Brahms’ Opus 118 collection of six short piano pieces.

Taken as a whole, the evening struck me as one in which self-indulgence rose above any consideration for the audience. On the other hand, much of that audience provided the performers with enthusiastic applause after each selection. Could it be that “being there” was all that mattered?