About:
Voices, language and space… they interested me even in the early
60s when I wrote The Emperor of Ice Cream for the ONCE Festivals
in Ann Arbor. Since each of us knows so much about the behavior of the
voice – intimate endearments, rage at a distance – it is an ideal vehicle
for auditory spatial illusions (all the more when in the service of language
and its powers of invocation). In the early 70s, at the Center for Music
Experiment in La Jolla, I heard daily rehearsals of the Extended Vocal
Techniques Ensemble as they perturbed vocal norms. Evenings, I read my
daughter to sleep trying to capture, for each character in the story,
an individual and consistent vocal behavior. She was a demanding critic,
and stimulated a good deal of nocturnal reflection about vocal identity.
Electronics, at first analogue, later digital systems, offered rather
precise control over auditory space (a particular sound’s size,
location, distance, the character of the host space in which it was heard).
I sought spare but evocative texts and tried to conjure up unfamiliar
yet appropriate vocal behaviors with which to present them. The five works
in the series thus far share a concern with the potential of auditory
spatial imaging: this is a subject still only tentatively broached. They
attempt to create a personal theater through the mind’s ear. Yet
they are distinct. Three of them are presented here.
