S2 E06: Notes that shouldn't be sung: Jeff Gavett and Ekmeles
Today, we chat with Jeff Gavett of Ekmeles about microtuning and the mathematics of tuning, audio tech, adventurous programming, and their first live performance in over a year.
Music Excerpts
Performed by Ekmeles, live, February 27, 2021 (program notes | donate)
“Advice to a Migraineure,”(2020) by Jeff Myers (1977)
“i n s t i t u,” (2021) by Rebecca Bruton (1989)
“Four Voices,” (2014), by Nomi Epstein (1978)
“fly blue between light” (2015), by Carolyn Chen (1983)
“Nuits, adieu” (1991), by Kaija Saariaho (1952)
Theme Song: Mr. Puffy by Avi Bortnik, arr. by Paul Kim. Performed by Dynamic
Episode references
Episode Transcript
.Intro [00:00:07] Hello and welcome to In Unison, the podcast for choral conductors, composers and choristers, where we interview members of our choral community to talk about new music, new and upcoming performances, and discuss the interpersonal and social dynamics of choral organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. We are your hosts. I am Zane Fiala, Artistic Director of the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. And I'm Giacomo DiGrigoli, a tenor in IOCSF, the Golden Gate Men's Chorus and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. And this is In Unison.
Zane [00:00:44] Today we chat with Jeff Gavett, director of New York-based ensemble Ekmeles, about the mathematics of tuning, audio tech, adventurous programing and his ensemble's first live performance in over a year, a live streamed concert that took place earlier this year on February 27. We'll play a couple of pieces from that performance during the conversation, but be sure to stick around at the end because we'll be playing extended excerpts of the remaining pieces as well. And you do not want to miss this incredibly cool music. All right, joining us today is Jeffrey Gavett. And Jeffrey is a composer, performer and improviser dedicated to new music. He has appeared with a broad array of artists ranging from the Rolling Stones and the indie rock group Clogs to new music groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, Talea Ensemble and his own ensembles Ekmeles and loadbang. He has been praised as a brilliantly agile singer by The New York Times and holds degrees from Westminster Choir College and Manhattan School of Music. Welcome, Jeff. So glad to have you on the show.
Jeff [00:01:55] Yeah, thanks for having me.
Zane [00:01:59] Giacomo, take it away.
Giacomo [00:02:00] Yes. So, Jeff, we always start these with a little icebreaker. And given that you have performed with the Rolling Stones, which was mind blowing, that's amazing. I wanted to actually ask you a little icebreaker. What was your first live concert that you attended?
Jeff [00:02:17] First live concert? I'm pretty sure it was Billy Joel on the extraordinarily mediocre River of Dreams tour. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, the Bard of Long Island, but...
Giacomo [00:02:32] Oh, yes, I grew up on Long Island. So I think I actually went to that show too. Like it was the one that was at like Giant's Stadium?
Jeff [00:02:38] Oh, I'm not from New York. So I saw it in the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine, I believe.
Giacomo [00:02:46] Yes, I remember that show. I'm sure that was quite formative to your musical, uh, future.
Jeff [00:02:51] It was, yeah, exactly. You can really see that in my my work.
Giacomo [00:02:57] Yes. [laughs] What kind of music did you listen to as a kid. I mean, where did your fantasy with music kind of begin.
Jeff [00:03:07] I have an older sister, she's two and a half years older than me, so my musical taste came a lot from her. You know, much like most things, I think when you have a sibling who's just a couple of years older, they're really cool and you want to be like them. So when she was 12 or 13 or something, she was super into the alternative radio station in our town. And, you know, so I had Nirvana records and Frank Zappa records and stuff growing up because I wanted to listen to what she was listening to. I got more into, I guess, experimental kinds of things through metal, actually. So I actually do have a formative concert experience where I was going to see Tool in 2001, September 20th, 2001. I went to see them on this tour for a record called Literalness, which is a beautifully produced album. Just incredible sound. And opening for them was a group called Fantômas that I had never heard of and I didn't know anything about. And it turns out the singer for Fantômas was Mike Patton, who is this incredible legendary metal, and now like experimental and new music vocalist and their set, Fantômas's set just so totally blew my mind, I, in that moment, decided, like, I am going to have a career in music. This is what I want to do with my life is like create moments like this. And then I was pretty bored by the toolset, even though I loved that album. It was sort of a flat performance, whereas Fantomex was just so physical and vital and moving.
Zane [00:04:47] Where does the group Dream Theater fit in for you?
Jeff [00:04:51] I was never much of a big prog guy for some reason. I really like thrashy, the sort of messier side of experimental things. So Dillinger Escape Plan is my other big listening focus. Them and Meshuggah are my my sort of main listening, I think.
Giacomo [00:05:13] And so that's the stuff that led you on the road to what we'll be talking about today.
Jeff [00:05:17] Yeah. Yeah.
Giacomo [00:05:18] Ekmeles, which we were just chatting about this before. And Zane, what did you look up? What is the, what does Ekmeles the word actually mean?
Zane [00:05:26] Well I did get this from Ekmeles's website of course, but it does state on their site that in ancient Greek music theory, tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios, in other words, tones not appropriate for musical usage. That's what the term at least means in ancient Greek music theory. Is that right, Jeff?
Jeff [00:05:48] Yes. Yeah, it's Aristoxenus, if I remember correctly.
Zane [00:05:53] Wow, fascinating. But it's also a New York City vocal ensemble.
Jeff [00:05:59] Uh Huh.
Zane [00:06:00] Can you tell us a little bit more about Ekmeles and how it got started?
Jeff [00:06:03] Sure. Yeah. We did our first show in 2010, which is kind of crazy to think about now, actually in the in the same church where we just did our show on Saturday.
Zane [00:06:16] Oh, cool.
Jeff [00:06:16] Which is right up the street from where I live. So I got to walk to work yesterday, or Saturday, which is quite nice. The group came about because I always had this interest in doing new things and in singing. I went to Westminster Choir College for undergraduate and there's not a lot of really out there experimental stuff happening there. They do some newer music, but a lot of it is, I'm sure you know, that there's like, a new music scene and a new choral music scene, and they're interested in different things generally. There's overlap, of course, but there's, uh, you're likely to hear a different kind of music at an instrumental new music show than you are at a choral show that has a new piece on it. So I did some new things, but wasn't the kind of stuff that I was really excited about. And I was especially interested in the flexibility in tuning and other kinds of musical parameters that the voice had when it was unaccompanied. So I had the experience of being in a choir and someone saying, oh, give the singers the pitch, but not at the piano. Don't play the chord at the piano. Just give us just like the tonic or something. Give us a note, because that way it'll be more in tune. Right? That's what they'd say. And I thought, what, the piano is not in tune? Like, did we not tune the piano? Like if the notes on the piano aren't the right notes then what are the right notes? And how do we know what they are? Like, it's not magic. We don't just pick out. We don't we aren't born knowing how to sing a major triad.
Zane [00:08:09] Right.
Jeff [00:08:10] You know, we're not. And that the piano is is different and that we have some sort of, like, intuitive way of being more in tune than the piano. We're picking a specific thing for a specific reason. So I wanted to know what that was. So that got me interested in microtones especially and in thinking about tuning by frequency ratios and tuning related to the overtone series. So that, uh, that experience, followed by going to Manhattan School of Music for their contemporary performance program, got me interested in starting a vocal group. I wanted a venue to explore these kinds of ideas. And there was also a really wonderful group called, and there still is actually, die Neue Vocalsolisten, out of Stuttgart, and they are a sextet with the same voicing as us that has commissioned a ton of incredible music for more than 30 years now I think. So there is a whole ton of repertoire that they had been doing in Europe that was not done in the U.S. at all. And it was a special kind of music for voices that wasn't being done, wasn't being heard. And I loved that music, I wanted to do it, so that's how the group got started. We did our first show in 2010 and we've been going strong ever since, even throughout this year when we couldn't all be in the same place.
Zane [00:09:40] Amazing. Why do you think that is? That in in Europe, all these new music pieces were being done by choirs and in the States, we just weren't doing it at all. Why do you think there is that disparity?
Jeff [00:09:53] I think there's a different kind of, uh, dedication to new work in places that have state funding. I think a lot of it is economic and that composers and ensembles that know that they have support can just do whatever kind of work that they want to do, commission more things because someone's being paid to do it more reliably, and just explore a little bit in a way that's different than when we have to jump from grant to grant like we're crossing a river on slippery stones.
Giacomo [00:10:40] Given the nature of the music and that this is so cutting edge, especially for choral music, as a director, what do you consider when you program a new performance set?
Jeff [00:10:52] Well, uh, I want to have some kind of connection or continuity thematically. That's one of the main things that interests me, is not just doing a potpourri. Uh, I want the pieces to stick together thematically, musically, emotionally, something. So that's one of the prime concerns. The other, I guess the way that I normally do it is we have one or two premieres. We'll have some new pieces that are coming in that will set up a kind of framework. So we have, say for this Saturday's concert, I knew I would have a piece by Jeff Myers for four voices and electronics. I knew I would have a piece by Rebecca Bruton for four voices without electronics. So I thought, all right, here we go: four voices, we have the option to have electronics and we have one thing that doesn't have it, so we're building some more things that contrast or compare with that. Different kinds of notation, different focuses on what's important in the voice. For example, Nomi Epstein's piece from that concert is all written on graph paper. There's no specified notes, just very specific relationships between notes and ways of moving between them. And then Kaija Saariaho's piece that we did at the end of the concert was a way for us to keep having some electronics on the show.
Giacomo [00:12:33] We saw also on your site that one of the things that you have concerned yourself with recently, especially given everything that has sort of been going on with social issues in the United States, that you have signed something, you were participating in, something called the New Music Equity Action Pledge, which sounds a little bit about something we've talked about on the show, and we'll talk about more, which is the Black Voices Matter Pledge that was started by some folks who were down in L.A. Can you tell us and tell the folks who are listening a little bit more about the new music equity action pledge and how that plays into, you had some very interesting things to say about on the site, but can you tell us how that plays into your programing as well, like how you're thinking about that?
Jeff [00:13:13] Sure, yeah. That's that's a really important focus that's been honed by this group. So New Music Equity Action is a group without any fixed membership that is open to anybody in the field that's been meeting since June 2020 with the goal of rectifying the legacy of white supremacy and racism in new music. And the pledge is a project that sort of developed organically in the group over several months of thinking about, how do we want to advocate for changes, who needs to make changes, how do they need to be made? How can we make the field better? And originally, the idea was sort of focusing outward in a certain sense, talking to granting organizations or big presenter's things like that. And then we realized that it was, uh, I was I was a participant in a lot of these meetings and planning sessions, but, you know, I don't speak for the whole group. Like I said, it's a sort of anarchist collective of people who come in and out and work on these projects. But we decided that we should clean our own house first and decide what we think is important, and commit to it publicly and then hopefully bring some other people along for the ride. Yeah. So that's how the pledge project came about. We wrote in several different categories of pledges that we're making about our values, pledging solidarity to disenfranchized communities and individuals when they're faced with exclusion or retribution, transparency about our demographic information and programing, commissioning, collaborating, continuing to learn, sharing our resources, and especially putting together a five year cultural equity plan by the end of this season. It's something that a lot of people notice when they look at the pledge and think like, oh my God, this is a lot, like five years, how are we going to plan something like this? Because a lot of the new music groups are smaller organizations, right? A lot of them are: the board of directors is the band and we're just sort of going show the show and putting our things together. The five year plan is a way of us sort of trying to prod everyone to think really deeply about why they're doing what they're doing, and what they're doing. And to decide what their work should be like further down the line. To make long term plans. It's not like I'm going to look at this plan in five years from someone and say, "you didn't follow this exactly. You had all these steps." But the idea is that you're at least dreaming and considering and writing down what for you would be a way to progress to a more just way of being in the world. Right? Our ensembles are part of a social fabric. And I think that needs to be acknowledged and dealt with, especially when it comes to race.
Giacomo [00:16:32] Yeah, it's not just for February anymore, right?
Jeff [00:16:36] No, not at all.
Giacomo [00:16:37] The work has to continue and go on, which I think is great. You mentioned something, or actually the pledge mentioned something which I don't maybe fully understand and maybe you can illuminate for us. You call out the white supremacy and racism. And I think I understand the latter part a little bit more. And I kind of understand the relationship between those two things, like institutional racism, where money goes, where we focus our time and attention, where the existing organizations focus their time and attention. But I don't know so much about the first part, the white supremacy part of that. Is there something that's explicit in the history of new music that made that worthy of calling out? Or do they just sort of part and parcel the same?
Jeff [00:17:17] I think there's certainly overlap. Um. The particular language of the pledge is something that was developed over a very long time with a lot of people's input, so I don't know if I am the best person to speak about a specific word choice. For me, looking at that I would think of white supremacy in this context, referring to the assumptions made about Black artistry or nonwhite artistry in the field. So, often you'll hear fallacious arguments and responses even now to the notion that while you need to program some more Black composers and they say, "well, you know, I program by quality." We're, you know, we're not, just it's not token. You know, I don't program just based on that. It's like, well, OK, now you're making assumptions that there isn't Black music of quality or that if you are choosing Black music, you're not choosing music of quality. When in fact you can assess whether Black music is music of quality the same way that you can assess white music. You look at the score, you listen to recordings, you say, is this good music? Does this fit the esthetic of my ensemble? And there's an incredible project by George Lewis, who is a composer and theoretician and trombonist and general all around incredible person at Columbia University here who has written a piece for my group, loadbang that I'm really, really proud of. He had a wonderful project at Darmstadt a couple of years ago, where he pulled up this incredible research project, found all these pieces by Black composers from over the whole history of the Darmstadt summer courses, over that whole time frame rather, and put them together into this like eight hour audio video presentation. So he said that it was to, like, drive a truck through the notion that there wasn't Black music that would fit there. That there's, in these sort of academic music worlds like Darmstadt or people coming out of Columbia and, you know, Ekmeles is certainly in that part of the musical world, the academy is pretty white and most of the music in that world is pretty white, but there are Black composers writing in all idioms, writing all kinds of music. George has a quote in there that I think is from Muhal Richard Abrams. But I can't remember off the top of my head that there are many kinds of Black life. And because of that, we know that there are many kinds of Black music because music comes from life.
Giacomo [00:20:31] And they all matter.
Jeff [00:20:33] Absolutely.
Giacomo [00:20:33] Yeah.
Zane [00:20:34] So you said Ekmeles has been performing since 2010. So 10 years.
Jeff [00:20:39] Yeah.
Zane [00:20:40] In those 10 years, have you managed to find pieces by Black composers to feel like you've had some adequate representation at the level of composition that you guys perform at?
Jeff [00:20:52] Uh, it's an ongoing project. We're not where we want to be. That's what the five year plan is about.
Zane [00:20:59] Yeah.
Jeff [00:20:59] And what transparency is about; one of the goals of the pledge. So we're working on, uh, putting together our demographic information for all of our commissions and performances over the past five years and then looking forward five years from now. We have had a wonderful collaboration with Courtney Bryan, who wrote a great series of pieces for us as part of a dissertation at Columbia, (she's actually a student of George Lewis's), that will be doing on our concert on May 8th. I'm very proud of those. And we have some other commissions upcoming. But that's that's been a real hole in our programing, honestly. And it's something that, you know, in the past few years, there's been a sort of push in the field about making sure that we're programing music by women.
Zane [00:21:59] Yeah.
Jeff [00:22:00] And we're working on that in the past few years. And now we're continuing that work and making sure that racial equity is a part of our work going forward in a more substantive way. And we're going to be sharing, like I said, sharing all our data about that to hopefully inspire people to look closely at themselves.
Zane [00:22:24] You know, I direct the International Orange Chorale here in San Francisco and we're dedicated to doing new music by up and coming composers and whatnot. But, you know, in our history, we have not been great about making sure that there's always representation for the underrepresented composers. And we did do a program of all women composers. But it's not because we actively chose not to showcase music by Black composers, we just didn't make an effort TO do it. And that's the big, you know, for lack of a better phrase, come to Jesus we're all having right now, which is we need to do something.
Giacomo [00:23:04] Well, that's the work. That's the work.
Zane [00:23:06] Yeah, that's the work. And and it's about doing the work. And that's the thing that I, you know, Giacomo and I as part of this podcast and me as the director of that group, is that now it's time to actively do it and not just simply say, oh, well, it just wasn't available. No, no, no. It's time to make the change.
Jeff [00:23:24] Yeah, the great thing about being in in new music is that we are creating repertoire in a way that like, you know, a symphony orchestra that plays 18th century music all the time is not. So we can we can make the repertoire that we want to have. And that's what we're playing on, that's the kind of work that we're doing going forward with Ekmeles is focusing our commissioning more in that direction. Because, you know, music for... Our main voicing is soprano, mezzo countertenor, tenor, baritone, bass. So music for that specific unaccompanied sextet, you know, it's already narrowing down the number of pieces that there are that we could do without, you know, adapting something. And then to go farther into, like a particular kind of esthetic or something and then say that we want to get a certain kind of representation for composers, you talk about narrowing the pool of things. There's just not a lot of that rep that's out there yet, so we get to make it.
Zane [00:24:28] Yeah, that's exciting. Embracing that, you know, and you are. And that's great.
Jeff [00:24:34] Absolutely. Yeah. And it's you start to question it, like, so I've been doing this group for ten years. I feel like ten years is a good point to ask yourself, what am I doing? You know, and covid is also a very good time to ask what am I doing. And why am I doing it? Because I feel like starting things like this is very easy. You know, it all it takes is that you have the desire to do a thing and then you just get rolling. And especially if you're coming right out of school, it's like, yeah, I love this thing. I mean, I keep doing this. What do you do when you get outta school for a new music thing? You make a new music group. Yeah. And you work with your friends and you do some music that you already know. It's like, well, then we're reproducing whatever structures we have come out of. And unfortunately, those structures are, there aren't a lot of women and there aren't a lot of people of color. So if we just float along oblivious and keep doing the thing that we were doing as we started doing it, we're, actively causing harm. So continuing to work on lessening the harm that we're doing by doing the work that we do, it's really, really important. And I'm very proud of NMEA for being an open forum for people to come in and work on behalf of the scene. And, you know, tell each other when things aren't working out or ask for help and, you know, not perform our antiracist and and equity focused work, but really ensure that we're doing the right thing and keep learning, and when we mess up, you know, figure out how we can fix it. it's a scary thing to be doing. You know, talking about it feels like, you know, it's like in a confessional or something. Like you're having a terrible secret. It's like, well, I want to contribute to my field in lots of different ways. And part of it is to bring more people in.
Zane [00:26:52] Yeah, for sure.
Giacomo [00:26:53] And speaking of the work that you do and the performances, Zane and I sat through your live streaming performance this past Saturday night, which was your very first live performance in over a year or in about a year, which was really spectacular. It was a great show. And I kind of want to set the stage for the folks who hadn't seen it. And we'll put the link in the show notes that folks can go and check it out. I think it's going to be available for for a little while longer. But maybe help set the stage for folks cause the first thing you notice when you log on and you see this YouTube stream is there's a lot of mics and there's a lot of technical setup going on for just, you know, for just four singers on the stage. Can you tell us a little bit about the technical setup and maybe set the stage for folks?
Jeff [00:27:41] Sure. So we're in Our Savior's Atonement Lutheran Church, which is a beautiful sort of simple cube of a room just up the street from my place on Bennett Ave in northern Manhattan. And we're in front of some very simple stained glass windows. And there's four singers. We are six feet apart from each other in an arc all wearing matching KN-94 black masks. And we have a stereo pair of room mics. And then in front of each singer, we have our music stand, and one main recording mic. And then an effects mic that's only used for this Saariaho piece that we had called "Nuits adieux."
[00:28:43] [Music excerpt: "Nuits adieux," by Kaija Saariaho. Music description: A lone voice intones a drone, over which a chorus of amplified voices sings a disjointed melody accompanied by a susurration of whispers and breaths. ]
Jeff [00:30:23] You should actually see what's behind the cameras, the real tech setup where we had our two recording and streaming technicians there with, you know, a rack mount case of amplifiers and gear and I think three laptops and a router and, you know, a place for them to have their score out while they're following us and cueing things in the Saariaho. It was quite an undertaking, but, you know, we got to make it happen that's what it takes right now.
Zane [00:30:57] Yeah. Did you guys have an ear monitors as well?
Jeff [00:31:01] Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we had a headphone amplifier down in front of us and uh, and earbuds such that we could hear. So Jeff Myers piece, the first piece on the program, has a drone, an electronic drone element, and then Saariaho's piece has these incredible filters and effects on the voices. Neither of those are actually playing in the room. so we just had them in our ears rather than bringing a P.A. into the room and then rerecording the room. There's nobody there live. So we didn't need the sound in the room.
Zane [00:31:34] Right. It's like broadcasting astudio setup, essentially.
Jeff [00:31:39] It is. Yeah. I think that's the way to get the best results out of this, because it's all about the mediation. Right? That's the different thing about doing a show versus doing a streaming show. There's nobody there to hear it live. What it sounds like in the room totally doesn't matter. You know? It's for you, uh, you know, hundreds of miles away.
Zane [00:32:05] Yeah.
Giacomo [00:32:05] Do you do you think about that, too? I mean, we chatted about this a little when we were sitting and watching the show. You know, the quality... Zane's, thankfully, got really great audio quality. He's got the speaker set up. But like, how does that affect the ultimate impact you're trying to create? I mean, do you think about that? If someone's, like in their car or on like on an iPhone? Like, who was the director who was like screeching at people, was it David Lynch, who was like, "you're watching on a fucking iPhone!" You know, like, "it's not meant for that.
Jeff [00:32:34] Exactly.
Giacomo [00:32:34] Do you think about that when you put one of these shows out?
Jeff [00:32:37] No, um, I'm just thinking that I'm going to send out the best thing possible at, like, audio levels that work. And the video has to look pretty good. The video is not like 4K, like, you know, with five videographer's or whatever, because that ends up being like an insane amount of money. And I and I don't particularly care about that. Like, that's not why I would watch or not watch a stream. And that, like I said, is sort of prohibitively expensive for our small group. But getting really good sound out in a way that if you have a nice speaker set up, it sounds like you're listening to a CD or something. That's the main goal for me. Now, it's a little different in our previous shows, we did some synchronous streaming things, and some premade video things. So when we're doing that, the visual presentation is is a different sort of level of concern. But still like, I dunno, a phone ... as long as someone watches it, I don't care.
All [00:33:46] [laugter].
Zane [00:33:46] Well you did an amazing job of capturing the audio because it was...
Jeff [00:33:50] Oh, thank you.
Zane [00:33:50] The quality was...it was just ridiculous how good the quality was. And these crazy high and loud soprano notes and nothing peaked, nothing clipped. It just it sounded so, so good.
Giacomo [00:34:03] Yeah, and Steve Hrycelak's bass just rumbling. It was just amazing
Jeff [00:34:06] Oh yeah. You get to just enjoy that through the speakers. It's something.
Giacomo [00:34:10] Yeah. You actually finally get to feel something, you know, like you get at least sort of an approximation of that live performance. It's pretty awesome. One thing that was in the program notes for, or rather two things that I'm not sure how they're related, but I kind of wanted to ask about them: just-tuning and micro tuning. Tell me a little bit about ... two of the scores mentioned it specifically in the program notes. What is just-tuning and how do you achieve it?
Jeff [00:34:39] Sure. So the the default background radiation of classical music is twelve tone, equal temperament. So every half step is the same size. The way that we find the size of a half step is that's the twelfth root of two, which is, uh, you know, that's not a really fun number. If you think about it, half steps are pretty hard to sing in in tune in this sort of piano, uh, size of them. But we can also find pitches through different ratios. The reason that it's the twelfth root of two is that an octave is twice the frequency of the lower note. So, for example, the A above middle C is 440, octave below that is 220 hertz (cycles a second), octave above that 440 is 880. And you'll note that it's 220 hertz. If you subtract 440 from 220, that's the size of an octave, right? 220. But then it's 440 in the next octave? So that's why we have to have roots because pitch ends up being logarithmic rather than linear. Or rather frequency is logarithmic and our perception of pitch is linear. So we can create different scales and reach different pitches by using ratios other than, uh, with numbers higher than two. So a one just gets you a unison—1:1. 2:1 will get you an octave. You can also go 4:1, 1:2, and get all kinds of different octaves.
Jeff [00:36:21] But we need to start adding other numbers to our ratios to get other pitches. Just-tuning or just-intonation describes a tuning that is comprised entirely of these small-ish whole number ratios. So when we add a 3, we get a 3:1, which would be an octave and a perfect fifth. Or a 3:2 ratio, which is just a perfect fifth. That sounds esoteric, but if you sing in a choir and you sing a fifth in tune, you are singing a three to two ratio. When it rings, that's 3:2. If you sing early music, especially if you sing with instruments, like really, really fine string players, or with keyboards that are tuned in certain temperaments, the thirds that you're going to sing, a major third is a 5:4 ratio. It's that nice, sweet, low major third. So contemporary composers have taken this idea that really comes from the very beginnings of the Western musical tradition, including like the Greek name of our group. Uh, it means ratios that are too complex for musical usage. So it's kind of a joke that we do this music that uses these really these complex ratios.
Jeff [00:37:40] If you look at Guido. Guido teaches in I think it's the Michaloliakos, he teaches you how to build a scale out of ratios and you take your little monochord, your single string instrument, and you measure out spaces on the string, how far. To be able to put a little bridge in and play the right note. And in his time, they were using Pythagorean tuning. Only three is the highest prime number involved in all the ratios. All the whole steps are that big, fifth of a fifth whole step that, again you think of in choral music: if you're singing Re, or scale degree two over five, down to one, that big whole step—nine over eight. It's the only whole step in Pythagorean tuning. And in Guido's time, that is actually a theological concern. Three is the number that we use for our tuning because of the Holy Trinity and we don't use any numbers higher than that. That eventually went away and people start using more and more complex ratios and then we flatten it all out so we could modulate and we decided on equal temperament. Now we're looking at the different sonic possibilities that just-tuning affords. We have all different flavors of thirds rather than just a major third and a minor third. In Jeff Meyers's piece from last night, the first interval that I sing with our bass, Steve Hrycelak, is a seven over six, a septimal minor third. It's a really low minor third. It's about thirty one cents lower than a minor third would be in equal temperament. So we're just expanding the palette of colors that we have with intervals in a way that is also tunable by ear. These are the kind of intervals that you can lock in and you can make them ring and you can eliminate the sound of beats just like you do if you're tuning a string instrument. And you sort of hear those beats slow down as you get closer and closer to a perfect interval. You can do that with any of these just intervals.
Zane [00:39:41] Fascinating. I feel like I could nerd out on that all day.
Giacomo [00:39:47] I need a moment to cast a bit of shade because I remember in high school I was in orchestra and choir and I remember my orchestra teacher was like, oh, you know, singing is just for the kids that just can't hack it. You know, they can't do classical music. And I'm like, I don't know what music you listen to, lady, but like everything you just said, I'm sitting here being like, yeah, I'm going to need a calculator here. It's pretty fascinating. This ain't your momma's singing, right? This is some new stuff.
Jeff [00:40:17] Yeah. And some of it's I mean, some of it's new and some of it's just exploring territory that classical music doesn't, that classical music decided not to care about for a while. Like, these theoretical structures underpin the traditional repertoire, but it's sort of been been cast aside, even if you look at like, uh, I want to say there's a letter from Lully talking about an opera of his where there's an earthquake scene and there's a chord with a G-sharp in it, say, playing in the violins and then there's a rest. And then there's an enharmonic respelling and the violins are playing in A-flat. And he says in a letter like, oh, yeah, you know, [speaking French] they're good enough to know that those are two different notes. But, you know, you wouldn't really get that for most ensembles. So it's the thing that people people thought about and cared about and certainly care about in different musics all around the world. Like the great thing about just-tuning is because it's by ear, and it's perceptible, it's a useful way to describe and communicate between tunings in a lot of different musical cultures around the world.
Zane [00:41:34] So in the first piece that you guys performed about migraines, there was a fundamental being played by an electronic sound source through the first half, and then it changed to a different fundamental at some point through the piece. But there were only two. Is that right?
Jeff [00:41:52] Yep.
Zane [00:41:52] So the idea of just intonation in that piece, was it always in relation to the fundamental, or was it that you were doing just-tuning from singer to singer, or was it a combination of both?
Jeff [00:42:04] The way that piece worked is that the first part is in B and the second part's in A, and we are singing really only overtone tunings. So even though we go as far up as the the twenty third partial, every prime number is a sort of new flavor of interval as you go up the overtone series. So the seven is that nice lowered seven we talked about, the 11 is the natural tritone, that's like about a quarter tone low. Jeff then has us go all the way up to the twenty third, which is a really sharp tritone. But everything is related down to the fundamental and to the drone. So because of that we are relating to one another very precisely as well because we are in relationship to the drone. So we are in relationship to one another. And then he describes it as sort of a big five-one where we just, boom, modulate into a into a new key finally, but still with overtone relationships. Now, Jeff mixes it up a little bit because he doesn't like the 13th partial. So whenever we sing...
Giacomo [00:43:13] Me neither.
All [00:43:16] [laughter].
Jeff [00:43:16] Whenever we sing what would be a 13 in that, which would be a kind of sixth scale degree, he just has us sing a major six. And there's also some other equal temperament solos in the piece, like, you know, when we're singing minor thirds against these overtone chords that only have major thirds in them, unless you have the 19th partial, which he doesn't use, we stick these sort of conflicting tuning systems together.
[00:45:14] [Music excerpt: "Advice to a Migraineure," by Jeff Myers. Music description:A mechanical, electronic drone is established, over which the singers stagger their entrances while singing the text: “Do not allow yourself to become / thirsty / or hungry / or tired”. ]
Giacomo [00:45:58] OK, how as singers, do you achieve that in real time, in a performance? I mean, we noticed as we were watching that you all were pulling out all manner of devices and things. And I think at one point Steve was like showing an iPhone. I don't know if that was part of it, but how do you actually achieve that in the midst of a live performance?
Jeff [00:46:16] Sure, Steve showing an iPhone was a reminder: does everyone have their timer or did you forget it offstage? Because in Nomi Epstein's piece we were all following a stopwatch. We learn these pieces, um, it depends. Every piece has its own needs because a lot of people create their own kinds of systems in a piece. Jeff's piece is an overtone tuning piece and we have done a lot of pieces in that kind of work. So we know what an 11 sounds like or 23. But I will make a computer mock up for the pieces that we do so I will make essentially a synthesized version of the piece in perfect tuning to what it should be, and also bring along a keyboard to rehearsal that I have set up and connected to my computer to be able to playback any of these notes. So just like if you had a hard 12 note piece, if you can't quite get a passage right, you play it back, you try and match it. So we learn things and then you try and make the chords ring. It's only different by degrees from doing a normal piece. We have tuning forks, uh, for pieces where the pitch is a little more ambiguous and we wanna make sure that we stay on. Of the quartet that sang on Saturday, only our bass, Steve Hrycelak has perfect pitch, so the rest of us are just goin note to note.
Zane [00:47:46] So for a lot of us in choirs that are not quite at the level that Ekmeles is at, you know, we talk a lot about like, you know, you got a major triad, so you've got your tonic and your fifth. And then when we slot that third in, I've been trained over the years as a director to, you know, usually think of that third as needing to be pushed just a little bit higher so that it rings really well against the fifth. How does that idea of tuning, and of course now obviously we're not talking about the complexities of Ekmeles's style of tuning, but nonetheless, can we relate what you're talking about to something that's a little bit more basic in that regard? Can you can you relate that?
Jeff [00:48:30] Yeah, absolutely. So there are as many ways of thinking about tuning and temperament as there are musicians and groups and, you know, musical traditions. So, I think... It's kind of funny, actually, because this idea of raising the third for this ringing sound, I understand that it's going for a kind of like, that the major triad has a kind of brightness or excitement to it, like it's an active sound, if you can characterize it that way. Whereas a just-tuned overtone major chord, that would be a 4: or 5:6 ratio actually feels pretty settled and it feels very grounded. And the third is quite low. It's actually 16 cents lower than on the piano. So it's just that we're going after different sounds.
Zane [00:49:27] OK.
Jeff [00:49:31] The characteristic sound of the major third in a lot of, or at least in some Indian raga singing, has that the sort of like settled, mellow, grounded feeling of the third? And I think it's just a different kind of music. Uh, there's Lou Harrison, who's a wonderful American composer who also, uh, I believe was one of the first people working in gamelan music in the United States. He was talking about classical music, Western European classical music, and saying that it's so fast because, you know, we play so many notes, we sing so many notes, because it's out of tune. Like, the reason that the harmonic motion is so fast is because the relationships aren't very true. Uh, so as long as it keeps moving, it doesn't bother you too much. But if you slowed it way down and really listen to the tuning like you would in music, uh, that has a drone rather than, uh, you know, moving fundamentals, you'd really hear that it sounds kind of sour. But, you know, it's also different singing in a choir, than singing in a vocal ensemble. So we are usually maximum six solo voices on our own parts.
Zane [00:50:50] Right.
Jeff [00:50:52] Once you have three people singing on part, it's an entirely different world acoustically and you have different concerns about timbre and tuning, which I think are interdependent ideas in vocal music. I'm sure you have said many times, like, "tenors, you're not quite matching that vowel," and then someone changes a vowel and then the chord's in tune.
Zane [00:51:18] Right.
Jeff [00:51:18] You didn't change a note, but vowels are frequencies. Like vowels are emphasized bands of frequencies, so they are as musical and as tonal as the pitches are.
Giacomo [00:51:37] I forget who said it, I think maybe Zane this is something you taught us or just mentioned it, but every vowel is a different instrument. Every shape your embouchure, and your head, and your skull make to produce that vowel is actually just a complete different instrument. I thought that was fascinating.
Zane [00:51:52] I wish I could take credit for that, but I don't think that was me, [laughing] because that's brilliant.
Jeff [00:51:57] I'll give it to you.
Zane [00:51:59] All right.
Giacomo [00:52:00] Jeff, I want to talk also a little bit more about... You mentioned the scores earlier and we took a peek at the score for "Four Voices," and for a few of the others, the ones that we could find. Oh, my God. They are like hyper specific, especially the bits for micro tuning. And the gut reaction I had when I looked at that was, you know, that they were so specific. Right? That my reaction was, oh my gosh, they feel so confining. And, you know, you go to a piece and of course, one of the things we always say is as choral singers is like, you know, I'd rather see something that was sort of performed a little sloppy and a little thing, but has lots of heart and lots of expression in it. Right? Because we want to make an impact. How do you relate to the scores in that way? Like, do you feel like they're limiting in any way? Like where do you find the expression in a score that is so specific in its performance? It's like I even think like one of the other pieces you've done in the past, "Linguaglossa," the score is so specific as to have the video that accompanies it and the narrator's spoken patterns are like super hyper notated. How do you feel when you approach a score like that?
Jeff [00:53:12] It's actually what I like. I like to have constraints in in my art. Even in my work, like my actual day to day, I have to practice and learn a thing, if I don't have a show, I'm not going to learn the piece, you know? Even if it's a hard one that I should, like, take a long time to learn, if I don't have a show booked, it's really hard for me to sit down, do the work. Similarly, if a score doesn't have that much, if it doesn't require that much of me,it's like, what am I putting into it if it's not giving me that much? So I love a score that has a ton of details, a ton of, you know, if there's a dynamic on every note and there's hard notes and there's all these things to do, I think paradoxically the role of the performer becomes even more important and the role of live performance becomes even more important. If we have, I mean, of course, all of these concepts track back neatly onto any music performance if you look at it in a certain frame. But let's say I'm doing a piece that is so hard I will never get it right. Right? But I've worked really hard on it. Let's say I get 98 percent of it. Of all the markings for like quantifying, you know, per note, per dynamic, whatever. Then every performance is going to be different, every performance that I give is going to reflect where I am in that moment, in my voice, in my life, in my performing, in my mind. And there can, in some important ways, never really be a recording that is definitive if a piece has those kinds of difficulties. Now, like I said, you could sort of track that back onto Mozart pretty easily, I think. No one will ever, like, do it perfectly. But there's an idea that you can, right? You can fix a recording and put everything in tune. You can have the best singer do it, who's done it a bunch. There. That is the thing. But I have a piece especially that I think lines up with this beautifully, called "I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips," by Aaron Cassidy, where I actually have an electronic earpiece that's connected to a piece of software that generates a glissando that's different every time within certain random parameters. And in addition to the difficult rhythms and phonemes and vocal techniques that I have to do that are on the page, I have something in my ear that's different every time. So for me, that creates a situation where I, as the performer, am acknowledged as a more important transmitter of the work. And that you being in the room while I do it, experiencing it in that moment is more, uh, precious and special and completely unique in a way that is foregrounded.
Giacomo [00:56:20] Yeah, it's interesting because the scores may be that specific, and I guess the counterpoint to feeling like maybe there are constraints is that, you know, you get a piece like "Whispers" by Derek Cooper, which is about a pretty heady topic. I mean, it's his attempt to, for those who haven't heard it, to offer voice to a taboo topic, which was sort of his ideation of suicide, that he's sort of gone through. And in his life, some folks had always said, don't speak about that, don't talk about it. And he gets really specific about how he's trying to talk about this topic. Like two of the notations in the score are "breathing through gritted teeth with a fast air stream, creating a raspy air sound," or, "rhythm and pitch do not need to be followed strictly. The general effect should be like a siren." So, I mean, despite the specificity, in what ways is that type of a score insufficient to express the new range of emotions required to express topics that were previously taboo? Do you ever find yourself, or you're like, whoa, this is like a new way of doing stuff, and stuff we've never talked about before colliding.
Jeff [00:57:28] Yeah, I think in some ways the... one of my favorite kinds of markings is just an emotional marking, like if someone writes in the score that this line should be livid, or, you know, golden or, you know, something abstract, or, you know, I said "emotional" and then I said "golden," I don't know if that's an emotion, but, abstract language, emotional language, often gets at vocal colors very directly, I think. So I love to have that in in scores. In terms of like subject matter for pieces, I, as a performer, I'm not sure if I feel like I am, like... Is this the right word... as "responsible" for it, as the composer is. Like when we get something that's about, you know, a heady topic,or a taboo topic, often my thought is, is this being handled well by the composer? Is this something that's going to reflect well on the ensemble if we are doing a thing that is reflecting something taboo or offensive, possibly? Especially if, you know, we do a lot of work with young composers and working at universities, and if you get something that's a little clumsily done, that's about a really heavy topic, that doesn't feel great to go on stage with. And that's not the case with Derek's piece. I think that it is to say in relationship to his that his job is to encapsulate the meaning of this subject into vocal music, and our job is to execute that in the best way that we can, and express it the best way that we can. And it's just a question of whether we are willing to express those things in those moments, depending on the context I guess. That's what's most important to me. I want to believe in what I'm doing on stage.
Giacomo [00:59:52] And speaking of how you as performers, and your responsibility as performers, and exploring the composition, exploring the text, one of the pieces you performed on Saturday was titled "institu," which I guess as I understand it, first it was a dance that then became a piece of text or a poem that then became a composition.
Jeff [01:00:14] Yes.
Giacomo [01:00:14] And you all have certainly done pieces which are interdisciplinary. I mean, there have been pieces of it which are performative, you know, with clipboards and things just on other pieces. And so considering the origins of "institu," did you do any extra musical explorations of this piece as you were kind of developing your minds? I mean, did you ever play and dance with each other or, you know, do anything that sort of was outside of what you might think of as rehearsing a piece like this?
Jeff [01:00:41] No, that piece didn't that piece didn't bring that out. We approached it like, you know, I guess every score is like a found object in a way, like I am approaching a score based first on the score. I'm being handed this thing, this is the means by which this is being communicated to me. I actually haven't seen the dance, so I didn't follow the trail all the way back. That was for Rebecca to do and for her to filter through to us and then for us to take what she has on the page (and a very helpful zoom coaching) to figure out some sort of phrasing things. And then it's ours.
Zane [01:01:27] What did that score look like for "institu"?
Jeff [01:01:30] It's a very lovely, handwritten score, mostly traditional notation. The microtones in that piece are just written with little arrows pointing up or down attached to the accidentals that indicate syntonic comma shift. So the difference between the just 5:4 major third I was talking about in a Pythagorean ditone, which is two big whole steps, so it's about 20 cents. So you heard Steve, especially, singing these sort of ostinato things going "ah" [singing and fluxuating the pitch slightly up and down] in the bass part, that, uh, so the piece exists kind of simultaneously in a mode and then also in like a little "drift" of that same mode.
Zane [01:02:17] So fascinating. I could nerd out on this all day long. I wanted to also ask about, so back to "Four Voices.".
Jeff [01:02:28] Mmmhmm.
Zane [01:02:28] So there were no program notes for that piece I noticed, in the program. And I was wondering if that was an intentional omission or if it was just there aren't program notes for that? And therefore, the impact that us as audience members got from it, we didn't get any context from a program note, whereas everything else we did. So I'm wondering, you know, why no program notes, but also what was the intended impact of that piece? And I know it's been around before. It's been performed before.
Jeff [01:02:59] Yeah. Um, there aren't program notes in the score for that. There's not uh, I feel like the piece is, in the way that it's presented in the score, kind of an anti-programmatic piece. It is very, very abstract in a certain sense. There's no text, there's no fixed pitches, and I kind of love the piece existing as, like an object in a way, that it's not a song. It's like a a construction of something.
Zane [01:03:40] Aaah.
Jeff [01:03:41] Uh, you know, so I also like that the piece is long enough that I think even if you have certain associations with the sounds, which are kind of unavoidable because they're human sounds and we connect them to a meaning immediately because the voice is a meaning machine. By the end of the piece, I think you're probably thinking of "shh," or, "hah," or "ohh," in like the context of what it is in the piece and not, as you know, "be quiet" or "I'm tired" or whatever they might have meant at the beginning.
Giacomo [01:04:19] Yeah, it's interesting. We were actually watching the show also with my husband, who is a comic artist. And so he was just kind of listening and looking along the side and just casually sketching, like really not paying full attention. And the conversation we had afterwards was fascinating because while Zane and I were sitting there with our, you know, very sharp pencils and we're like, "we're going to talk with Jeff about... we're going to take notes..." You know, like sitting there attending to it, you know, and we were kind of like, well, what's going on? We were sort of trying to figure this out. And his reaction to it, as he just sits there, he was like, "yeah, that was awesome." You know, like, it was just this thing and it was over there and it was just cool. And it made us sort of think a little bit about the role of, you know, what's the role as an audience member? Like sometimes do you just let stuff wash over you? Sometimes do you lean forward? I mean, do you intend that when you think about the impact of your pieces?
Jeff [01:05:10] Yeah, I think about I think about that all the time. About the way that a certain piece encourages a kind of audience, uh, not participation because, Lord.
All [01:05:26] [laughing].
Jeff [01:05:26] But, you know, engagement. Uh, we have a lot of pieces that are very... I think there's a dichotomy of like outward versus inward pieces. And, uh, "Four Voices" is an inward piece, right? Uh, and I would say that the Saariaho is maybe a mix, and Carolyn Chen's piece is a lot of outward. Um, but we have some pieces by Evan Johnson that we do that I think exemplify a kind of inward music, where his music is often extremely quiet and very sparse and the performative space of it is sometimes explicitly not to the audience. Like the piece he wrote for loadbang, we are turned towards each other. The bass clarinet actually has his back to the audience sort of at an angle. And you might not hear some of the sounds in the piece. But the idea is, that as an audience member, a thing that he loves is a focusing of many people's attention on one thing in a kind of, uh, heightened, intensified, group attention. That's the thing that happens at any music, and he wants to focus on that feeling and create it. So the pieces become extremely quiet and delicate and inward. So I have to say to the audience before, when you do these live, "put your program down. Don't set it on your lap. If you're going to fidget, you know, cough, make any noise that you need to make now, because for the next 10 minutes, you're going to feel really bad if you move because it's going to be louder than the piece."
Zane [01:07:09] Oh, yeah.
Jeff [01:07:11] So, you know, we think about how to balance a piece like that with something that is bombastic and huge and, you know, emotionally expressive in a traditional way.
Giacomo [01:07:22] Jeff, looking forward, we have two questions I want to ask you about sort of looking forward. We're going to hopefully get out of this pandemic sometime relatively soon. You know, we're now at a year, gosh. What are you excited about for when we're done?
Jeff [01:07:39] I mean, everything. [laughs]. I'm excited about traveling.
Zane [01:07:44] Yes.
Jeff [01:07:44] Like being a musician, part of being a working musician for me has always been being able to go places and meet people. And I miss that very much, like I was sometimes gone about like 130 days a year. So it's been a big change to not do that. Ekmeles does some touring around, so I'm I'm excited for that to come back. And just to, I dunno, just be with people. That's a dumb and obvious answer, but, you know, that's what it is.
Giacomo [01:08:17] It's not at all. I mean, it's interesting, a lot of these conversations that we've been having is the second request, and the second question I'm going to ask is related to this, but one of the things we've been hearing as a theme is that when you look at compositions of work after periods of, you know, trauma or war or whatever, I mean, what you wind up discovering is that there's this need for joy. That there's this need for people to kind of reconnect and kind of find each other. And so one of the projects that we've been working on the side is this little thing called the Playlist of Joy, because we kind of want to just be ready and we want to share that that feeling with people. And so I wanted to ask you what music is giving you that feeling right now? What what music makes you feel joy when you need to access that feeling, if you can access that feeling right now and if that's a thing you value.
Jeff [01:09:07] Yeah. Stevie Wonder, Songs in The Key of Life.
Zane [01:09:11] Yes.
Giacomo [01:09:12] Yes, that is going straight on.
Jeff [01:09:13] I have. I have that double LP plus a seven inch actually that's on my record player right now.
Zane [01:09:20] Awesome.
Jeff [01:09:20] So anything from, uh, anything from that, you know, it's perfect.
Giacomo [01:09:27] I love it. That's going straight onto the playlist.
Zane [01:09:31] I have one nerdy conductor question. So obviously I noticed through the many performances that I've watched of Ekmeles performing is that here you are singing some of the most ridiculously difficult music that I've ever heard in my life. And there you are standing off to the side, not only singing it, but waving your arms in the air and keeping everybody together. Did it take a long time for you to get good at balancing those two things, or is it just something that you're like, "no this is me."?
Jeff [01:10:03] I always had that connection, I think, mostly because of my my education at Westminster Choir College. I had a wonderful theory teacher named Stefan Young who tortured us with various Nadia Boulanger type implements, because he studied with her, so, we spent a lot of time with the Hindemith Elementary Training for Musicians. So I spent many hours conducting while tapping rhythms and singing, solfege and things. So I was I was made ready.
Zane [01:10:37] Awesome.
Jeff [01:10:38] Yes.
Zane [01:10:40] So you can rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time.
Jeff [01:10:44] Absolutely. If I rehearse and one's in 5/8 and one's in 3/4.
Zane [01:10:50] Fantastic.
Giacomo [01:10:53] Jeff. Maybe a few plugs for Ekmeles. Where can folks find you online?
Jeff [01:10:58] Yeah, just go to ekmeles.com. There you can find links to our blog with some some thoughts about vocal music and some some interviews with composers who write just-intonation music. You can also find links to our YouTube page there, which is where all of our shows are going as long as we are not able to do shows in person. Our show of February 27th will be online through Saturday, March 6th. If this is coming out after that or if you have missed it, we're doing another one on May 8th. And I'm really excited, we're sort of tiptoeing back into doing what we do. In October we did a show where we were all apart. Now we're doing a quartet show live in February, and then we're going to do a sextet in May. And that's going to be, uh, Courtney Bryan, a composer, I mentioned earlier her, uh, set of sacred music called "A Time for Everything." And then Wolfgang Rihm, his "Sieben Passions-Texte," which is an incredible passion setting of his, also for six voices. And then we'll round it out with a little piece by an incredible composer who's having a bit of a revival right now, Julius Eastman's "Our Father," which is one of his late pieces from the 1980s.
Zane [01:12:28] Fantastic. And that's going to be streamed on YouTube again, just like the one on February 27th was?
Jeff [01:12:33] Exactly. Yeah. And if you check out ekmeles.com, you can get the links to YouTube, subscribe there and then pop on over to the website if you're watching the show, because we'll have a link up to the program and a link for you to send us some dollars, because we are doing all of our online shows for free and not getting any ticket income this year. So every little bit helps.
Zane [01:12:54] Yeah, now is the time to support the arts, that's for sure. So do you think, you know, following covid times when we CAN do live performances and, obviously you do performances with electronics a lot, but do you see some kind of hybridization of of the technologies that we're exploring now during covid, combining with live performance in the future.
Jeff [01:13:15] Yeah, there's some interesting work that had already been, you know, it had been in process and this has really pushed it along. Right? Everyone has to know how to Zoom. Most people know how to, like, stream a concert or something now, uh, whereas it used to be more specialist knowledge. There's a group called Switch Ensemble. It's a new music group that I've sung with before, that have been working on telematic performances. So, uh, performances that are made to be remote and online. So all the people are in different places and the music is written for that. And it's made to be assembled in that way, which I think is really important—that the work that we do is not a simulacrum. That the work that we do is work of our time in place. Like, I want to do that all the time anyways with the singing that we do in normal concerts. But if our time and place is, we can't be together and we have to be in different places, we shouldn't pretend that that's not the case and just be, uh, you know, singing heads in boxes forever. Like, we need to do something else.
Zane [01:14:27] Jeffrey, this has been a fantastically interesting conversation, and I feel like we could talk all day about so many of the intricacies of the new music that you're creating with Ekmeles and with loadbang. It's just so fantastic. And we thank you for being so generous with your time, for chatting with us, and for continuing to create such new music that is worthy of talking about it for over an hour.
Jeff [01:14:53] Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure to talk to you both.
Zane [01:14:56] Yeah, absolutely. Well, enjoy your 42 degree day in New York and...
Jeff [01:15:01] I will. Rest assured I will.
Zane [01:15:02] And we'll be sure to tuning in on May 8th for the next live performance.
Giacomo [01:15:08] Pun intended! [laughs]
Jeff [01:15:09] [laughs] Micro tuning in.
Giacomo [01:15:10] Yes.
Zane [01:15:12] Micro tuning in!
Jeff [01:15:13] Actually, that makes it sound like you're only watching a second of it. Macro tune in!
Zane [01:15:16] Macro tuning in! Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Well, you have a great day, Jeff, and we will talk to you soon.
Jeff [01:15:22] OK, bye bye.
Zane [01:15:23] All right, ciao.
Zane [01:15:25] And now for some more of the good stuff. Here are excerpts from the other three pieces performed live at the Ekmeles concert. First up is the world premiere of "institu," by Rebecca Bruton.
[01:15:36] [Music excerpt: "institu," by Rebecca Bruton. Music description: Vocalists speak single words, with different intonations so that the same words can sound neutral or as a question depending on the vocalist. These single words segue into a duet of two male singers accompanied by fragmentary treble voices. ]
Zane [01:17:47] The next excerpt is from "Four Voices" by Nomi Epstein.
[01:18:11] [Music excerpt: "Four Voices," by Nomi Epstein. Music description:A quartet of voices sing chords, then articulate different consonant sounds, whispers, sighs, audible breaths and vocal slides from one note to another to create a sparse texture of sound. ]
Zane [01:20:34] And finally, here is "fly blue between light," by Carolyn Chen.
[01:23:08] [Music excerpt: "fly blue between light," by Carolyn Chen. Music description: Two sopranos sing an intertwining duet that shift from dissonance to consonance - with poetry and text by Emily Dickinson].
Zane [01:23:08] More information, including links to the composers' pages and additional episode references, can be found in our episode guide at inunisonpodcast.com/episodes.
Outro [01:23:20] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the In Unison podcast. If you've got ideas for our podcast, please send us a message at ideas@inunisonpodcast.com. And who knows, maybe Chorus Dolores will ask us to talk about it during announcements. In Unison is sustained, nourished, and fostered by you, our loyal and loving listeners. And don't forget to subscribe to In Unison on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @inunisonpod. And hey, if you like what you heard, tell a friend or a section mate. Thanks again for tuning in. See you soon.
Chorus Dolores [01:23:59] Choir robes designed, ordered and dry cleaned by chorus Dolores, who was not watching you eat while you're wearing your robe, right?
Credits [01:24:09] In Unison is produced and recorded by Mission: Orange Studios. Our theme music is Mr. Puffy, written by Avi Bortnick, arranged by Paul Kim, and performed by the Danish vocal jazz ensemble Dynamic on their debut album, This Is Dynamic. Special thanks to Paul Kim for permission. Be sure to check them out at dynamicjazz.dk.