Abstract
Sound Icon, in collaboration with the Rose Art Museum, presents an afternoon of intriguing works by Alvin Singleton and Erin Gee. Alvin Singleton's music is notable for its rare union of influences, "from Mahler to Monk, Bird to Bernstein, James Baldwin to Bach, Santana to Prince," (Philadelphia Inquirer) as well as for its signature moments of theatricality and surprise. Sound Icon presents Singleton’s early masterpiece, Be Natural, for any 3 stringed instruments. The form of the work is play – performers improvise following a set of rules mapped out in graphic score form, ensuring that the general structure remains intact, while the details of every performance will never be replicated. Erin Gee’s sound world is intricate, delicate, challenging, and beautiful. Sound Icon presents four pieces from Gee’s series of innovative works called Mouthpieces, featuring the composer as vocalist.
PROGRAM
Be Natural (1974)
Alvin Singleton (b. 1940)
Gabriela Diaz, violin
Mark Berger, viola
Kate Foss, bass
Be Natural is an improvisational work for any three bowed stringed instruments. The score calls for a game involving musical elements, none of which are in traditional notation. An early work by Singleton, it reflects an experimental trust in the musicality of the performing artists, much as choreographers when they set up situations that allow their dancers to come up with movements consistent with the spirit of their pieces.
Mouthpiece I (2000)
Yamaguchi Mouthpieces (2005)
Akiguchi Mouthpiece (2005)
Erin Gee (b. 1974)
Erin Gee, voice
Mouthpiece 29 (2016)
Erin Gee
Erin Gee, voice
Gabriela Diaz, violin
Mark Berger, viola
Kate Foss, bass
In the Mouthpieces, the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity. Linguistic meaning is not the voice’s goal. The Mouthpieces presuppose a state of listening, engaging physiology rather than psychology. In the works for voice and ensemble, the possibilities of the mouth are imitated with instruments, mirroring and expanding the vocal sounds to form a kind of "super-mouth." Voice merges with both the instruments and with breath, and repeatedly returns to formlessness.