UCSB Arts & Lectures offers the first Santa Barbara performance by the hot new vocal octet, Roomful of Teeth at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 26, in Hahn Hall at the Music Academy of the West, 1070 Fairway Road, Santa Barbara.
The group’s vocalists are: Esteli Gomez and Martha Cluver, sopranos; Caroline Shaw and Virginia Warnken, altos; Steven Bradshaw, tenor; Than Scoggin, baritone; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone; and Cameron Beauchamp, bass.
Roomful of Teeth’s program will feature vocalist/composer Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, Partita for 8 Voices. The octet, which created a sensation at last year’s Ojai Festival, also will sing:
William Brittelle’s “High Done No Why To” (2010), Caleb Burhans’s “Beneath” (2010), Toby Twining’s “Dumas’s Riposte” (2016), Rinde Eckert’s “Cesca’s View” (2009), Eric Dudley’s “Suonare/To Sound” (2010), and Brad Wells’s “Otherwise” (2012).
Albeit their name conjures up a kind of vocalizing Geiger id-monster, Roomful of Teeth vocalists are mostly as well-behaved as an Episcopalian choir.
From the performances I’ve seen and heard, notwithstanding the even distribution of gender, they are a matriarchy.
The males are superb singers, every one, but it is the female vocal personalities that are most clearly defined (I’d use the word “dominate,” but that would suggest a sexual aggression that is nowhere apparent, either audibly or visually).
The males generally provide the kind of support that Rudolph Nureyev provided to Margot Fonteyn, however they themselves view their roles.
The overall impression of a pervasive female spirit of the group is strongly reinforced by the presence of composer-violinist-alto Shaw, whose gorgeous “Partita for 8 Voices” takes up the first half of the program.
This modest genius, with a face by Botticelli, draws the eye or camera as a magnet draws the needle of a compass. The eight voices will no doubt justly exclaim, in unison, that they have no leader; nevertheless…
This is a group that could dazzle us with a definitive rendering of a Monteverdi madrigal, who could make us believe a Webern cantata was really music, who could even back up Dolly Parton, yet who’ve chosen to concentrate on a-cappella art music by living composers in our own time.
They are post-modern in that they leave it to others to champion the works of official modernism (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Boulez, etc.), but since the word modern means only of the present day, they always will be as modern as possible. Their approach to their art is anything but theoretical.
Tickets to Roomful of Teeth are $30 for the general public, $9 for all students with valid student ID. Buy tickets at the door, by phone at 893-3535, or on line at www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.