Author: Blogger in Residence, Rory Johnston — **Author:** *Blogger in Residence, Rory Johnston*

Contemporary art music over the last 30 years or so has shifted more and more towards a focus on timbre and texture as the aspects composers now explore in search of a modern sound. The way that a composer imagines the production of sound within the music or the character of the sounds musicians play I believe distinguish a composer’s language just as much as, if not more than, their decisions to write tonally, atonally, or anything in between.

This emphasis on timbre specifically leads composers to utilise what are called ‘extended techniques’. This is where the music will specify a way of playing one’s instrument that is beyond the ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ approach to tone production. For example: a violin - or any stringed instrument for that matter - can play harmonics by lightly touching specific parts of the string while it is being bowed. There are only a certain number of natural ‘nodes’ or places to put the finger on the string to create these harmonics, but if you put your finger on the fingerboard to play a note then you open up a whole extra set of harmonics to play – these are known as ‘artificial harmonics’, as they have been created by altering the natural state of the instrument. This extended technique opens up possibilities to create more sounds with one instrument than were previously imagined, and there are many other types of extended technique for every instrument you can name, from multiphonics on brass and woodwind instruments, to Bartok pizzicato on stringed instrument, or even muting the strings of a piano with your hand as you play.

These techniques serve to broaden the scope of how we imagine the creation of music, and are especially helpful when we are looking to broaden the timbral palette of our music. Composers have taken on these techniques and integrated them into their understanding of the instruments to create a new foundation for ‘standard’ playing. So why, when we write vocal and choral music do we not think about the voice in the same way?

The voice is arguably the most versatile of all the instruments, it can not only produce pitched and unpitched sounds, but those sounds can be varied in terms of their brightness or darkness with ease, and can also be infused with meaning, both literally by using words, but also just purely though the inherent understanding we all have of what are called ‘primal sounds’ – eg. screaming, sighing, that noise you make when you’re really hungry and you’ve just spotted a doughnut from across the room. Here’s a video I showed you a while ago when talking about texture, it’s a piece by Luciano Berio called Sequenza III and shows lots of the possibilities that lie within the voice, including some of those ‘primal sounds’:

Now, the latter of my list above is an extreme (especially the hunger sound… if anyone wants to write a utilising that I’d be interested to hear it!), but more often than not composers ignore the possibilities of vocal timbre and use the voice purely as an method of presenting pitched text. This disappoints me, and is one of the reasons I think a lot of choral composers get stuck in smooshy-chord-land, where all emotive meaning in their piece is derived from how many semi-tone clashes they can fit into one chord sequence… but that’s a conversation for another day. Even the bare minimum use of effects like humming and vowel sounds can change the texture of your piece and create a sense of depth and space that will give your choral music more definition.

A good example of a gentle mix of traditional text setting and some more instrumental-vocal effects comes from one of the finalists from ORA’s composition competition in July. Joel Järventausta’s Reflecting Taverner explodes select words from the piece he was reflecting on, Taverner’s Dum transisset sabbatum, and takes consonants and vowels from these words to paint a surface upon which we are then directed to focussing on different lines which are placed upon the ever-fluctuating surface. Here’s a recording of the piece:

While you are listening to it try to take your ears away from the main lines that you are being led to listen to and focus on what’s happening in the background. At very few points in the piece does Järventausta set the text in an overt way.

I have been thinking a lot recently about this use of the voice as an instrument, and trying to take a step – or even a jump – back from the traditional utilisation of the voice as text conveyor. The idea of a vocal ‘symphony’, or vocal symphonic effect really intrigues me – that you could have a piece of music with no words (a vocalise) but that would have the same type of emotive and musical effect as a symphony played by an orchestra, with an equivalent variance of timbre and colour.

To that end I wrote a piece in the summer that won a competition… yes, yes, all I’m here to do is brag, get over it. I submitted a piece for echo’s composition competition that explored this idea, the brief was to respond to a short extract from an Alice Oswald poem called ‘Dunt’ which went like this:

Very small and damaged and quite dry,

a Roman water nymph made of bone

tries to summon a river out of limestone

My immediate thoughts went to a small fairy-like creature gradually waking up to then perform some kind of raindance-style ritual in order to summon the river. Now I could have set part of this text, or found another text to set to underpin the meaning of the piece, but instead I decided I would use no words and instead create a vocalise that explored a move from unpitched sounds to pitched ones.

The idea was to first depict the dry waternymph and her similarly dried out surrounding with the use of unvoiced consonants and vocal effects. I used a mixture of ‘t’s, ‘k’s, and ‘shhh’s, along with some tongue and cheek clicks to get create this soundworld:

This was then followed by a soloist who represented the water nymph gradually moving from unpitched to pitched material, to signify her awakening from a slumber:

After which the choir, who were metaphorically being ‘summoned’ as the river by the water nymph also shifted from unvoiced consonants to voiced consonants like ‘mm’s, ‘nn’s, and ‘vv’s (the latter being a nice depiction of fluttering wings):

Then finally, the climax of the arrives with the successful summoning of the river by the water nymph and the tutti opening to a bright ‘ah’ vowel painting an image of cascading water flowing freely.

This whole exploration was really eye-opening (or should I say ear-opening?) for me, and has confirmed in my mind that the utilisation of this kind of writing is what we should, as choral writers, be thinking of at all times when composing for our ensembles. The more pieces that include some aspect of vocal timbre writing, the less this seems like a niche, potentially cliché, effect that is only used as the icing to cover a bog-standard Victoria sponge. Our cakes (read: music) should contain all of the ingredients combined in a way that creates a beautiful, tasty whole, and not a bodged last-minute dusting of icing to cover up the fact we can only bake one type of cake…

What I’ve been listening to this week:

String Quartet No.1 ‘Metamorphoses Nocturnes’ – György Ligeti

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen – Jan Sandstöm

The Breaking of Bread – Martin Bussey

Written by Rory Johnston

About Rory...

Rory is a composer and conductor based in the rainy city of Manchester. Having just finished his Masters in Composition, he is gradually forging a path in the professional world of music.

Rory is passionate about encouraging people to engage with contemporary music, opening their ears to new possibilities and sound worlds. He admires the ORA Singers for their commitment to new music and is thoroughly looking forward to working with them.