Pick of the Issue this week is Burkhard Bilger’s brilliant “Extreme Range,” a profile of the experimental choral group Roomful of Teeth. Using exotic vocal techniques like alpine yodelling, Bulgarian belting, Persian Tahrir, and Inuit and Tuvan throat singing, the eight-singer group “produces music that’s both primal and sophisticated, ancient and startlingly modern.” Bilger sits in on a rehearsal (“The chants and howls and panting rhythms alternate with moments of sudden beauty – luminous plains swept by shimmering chords”). He visits the group’s founder and conductor, Brad Wells (“Wells has a deep, oaky baritone that roughens to a grumble in its lower register”). He talks to a young composer, Harry Stafylakis, who is teaching the group to sing death metal (“Death-metal singers sound as if they’re broiling their vocal cords with a blowtorch, but the technique causes no harm when done right”). He meets with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, who is one of Roomful of Teeth's two mezzo-sopranos (“Thin-boned and petite, with sharp eyes behind oversized glasses, she had the high-strung yet unruffled quality of a bird on a wire”). And most memorably, he visits a silo in a restored Shaker Village in Hancock, Massachusetts, to hear a recording that Wells made of an old Shaker hymn called “Solemn Song No. 1”:
The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame.
“Extreme Range” brims with wonderful vocal descriptions. I enjoyed it immensely.
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