24/25 CLASSICAL SERIES
ROOMFUL OF TEETH
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2025 | 7:30 PM
SHANNON HALL AT MEMORIAL UNION
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PROGRAM
Missy Mazzoli
Vesper Sparrow (2012)
Christopher Cerrone
Friday’s Saints (2024)
INTERMISSION
Mingjia Chen
Excerpts from COMIC CON (2025)
Caroline Shaw
The Isle (2016) I. Prologue II. Ariel III. Caliban IV. Prospero V. Epilogue
PROGRAM NOTES
MISSY MAZZOLI
Vesper Sparrow
Vesper Sparrow was written for Roomful of Teeth during their 2012 residency at Mass MoCA. The text comes from Farnoosh Fathi’s poem “Home State,” from her book Great Guns. The piece is an eclectic amalgamation of imaginary birdsong and my own interpretation of Sardinian overtone singing. In this piece I tried to capture the exuberance and energy of these individual singers, as well as a bit of the magic that is created when this group comes together.
—Missy Mazzoli
Libretto
What will come so soon
To my golden door
When asleep from all sides
Asleep in the glass pajamas of man
CHRISTOPHER CERRONE
Friday's Saints
Written for the four lower voices of Roomful of Teeth and electronics, in Friday’s Saints, Cerrone draws from field recordings of Good Friday laments in Sicily and weaves together ancient religious traditions with contemporary electronic techniques. The piece charts both a physical and spiritual journey, incorporating spoken text from Dante’s Divine Comedy alongside transformed recordings of footsteps across various terrains. Cerrone, himself an Italian American, creates a deeply personal meditation on heritage, faith, and the immigrant experience, featuring Roomful of Teeth’s renowned low voices in dialogue with recordings of traditional Sicilian songs.
MINGJIA CHEN
Excerpts from COMIC CON
For the four higher voices doubled on synthesizers and percussion, COMIC CON subverts sacredness by redirecting our gaze towards the profane, the tacky, the negligible, and the perverse: the “low.” In a string of candy-colored vignettes, Chen builds a collage bursting with pop culture references, ranging from B-list celebrity interviews to Japanese game shows to anthropomorphic children’s stories. Wrapped within these circus scenes is an exploration of fantasy and performance as political tools for both hope and nihilism. Ultimately, COMIC CON investigates survival strategies deployed by the sinners and the freaks historically shunned by conventional places of worship. The cathedral becomes the comic convention, or the bedroom, or the Tumblr thread; the holy text is the infinite loop of fetishizing selfreference in modern digital media. Campy, surreal, and tender, COMIC CON is both a critique and a celebration of the messy attempt to create our most deeply desired realities and selves.
CAROLINE SHAW
The Isle
The Isle begins with a cloud of murmuring voices—a musical imagining of something hinted at in Shakespeare’s stage directions in The Tempest. The calls for “a burden, dispersedly” and “solemn music” suggest an off-stage refrain and/or perhaps something even more otherworldly. In Shakespearean Metaphysics, Michael Witmore writes: “Like the island itself, which seems to be the ultimate environment in which the play’s action takes place, music is a medium that flows from, within, and around that imaginary place into the ambient space of performance proper. If some of the courtiers from Naples and Milan are lulled to sleep by the island’s ‘solemn music,’ the audience can hear this music in a way that it cannot feel the hardness of the boards that the sleeping players lie on.” In taking cues from this reading of the play, I’ve constructed my
own musical reading of the island of The Tempest. Three monologues—by Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero—are set in three distinct ways. Ariel’s initial song of welcome appears, for the most part, homophonically, although its break from the quasi-robotic delivery (into the “burden, dispersedly”) points to the character’s vaporous and ethereal nature. Caliban’s famous description of the island as “full of noises” finds its home in a distraught and lonely monodic song, ornamented and driven by extraneous sounds. Prospero’s evocation of the various features and inhabitants of the island (from the final act) breaks apart into spoken voices that eventually dissolve into the wordless voices of the beginning, mirroring his pledge to throw his book of spells into the sea (and possibly to return to the island’s prelingual state). The harmonic material of the beginning and the end of the piece (the murmuring voices) is a 24-chord progression that includes all major and minor triads of the Western 12-note system (for fun). As Prospero says: “But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (Solemn music.)”
—Caroline Shaw
Libretto ARIEL
Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kissed
The wild waves whist, Foot it featly here, and there, and sweet sprites bear the burden.
[Burden dispersedly, within]
Hark, hark, bow wow: the watchdogs bark, bow wow.
[Burden dispersedly, within]
Hark, hark, I hear, the strain of strutting Chanticleer
Cry cock-a-diddle-dow.
Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange:
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
[Burden: ding dong.]
Hark now I hear them, ding dong bell.
CALIBAN
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.
PROSPERO
You elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And you that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, Weak masters though you be, I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.
(Solemn music.)
ARTIST BIO
Estelí Gomez, Mic 1
Mingjia Chen, Mic 2
Eliza Bagg, Mic 3
Tynan Davis, Mic 4
Steven Bradshaw, Mic 5
Thomas McCargar, Mic 6
Thann Scoggin, Mic 7
Cameron Beauchamp, Artistic Director and Mic 8
Randall Squires, Audio Engineer
Haley Freedlund, Tour Manager
Roomful of Teeth is a GRAMMY Award–winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and evergrowing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers, including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Cava Menzies, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate.
Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place, and the Barbican. The group has also performed commissioned works for Roomful of Teeth and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra,
BBC Symphony Orchestra, and others. They have also moved into stage work with visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus
Roomful of Teeth’s discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a GRAMMY Award for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize–winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble’s album Sing Me Home, which won the 2016 GRAMMY for Best World Music Album, and two EPs: The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Teeth’s recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé.
Their latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023), was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic; and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on Rough Magic, was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Roomful of Teeth is devoted to creating beauty and community with passionate curiosity, contagious enthusiasm, and deep gratitude. Visit roomfulofteeth. org to learn more and support the group’s work.
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