On April 4, another performance from the Performing Arts Series took place on the stage of Memorial Chapel, this time by the two-time Grammy Award-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth, featuring Lawrence’s own Assistant Professor of Music: Voice Estelí Gomez. On Roomful of Teeth’s website, they describe themselves as a “vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice.”
Prior to this performance, I had never heard of Roomful of Teeth, nor listened to their music. While I debated for a long time listening prior to attending, I eventually decided to go into the performance blind, allowing myself to experience the joy of surprise.
While I was expecting an acapella group based on what I had read, I wasn’t expecting the kind of music I heard. Unlike the music found within “Pitch Perfect,” the music of Roomful of Teeth was singularly unique. Haunting and wonderfully dissonant, the way the melodies of the many voices blended together in their opening piece “Vesper Sparrow” was truly breathtaking.
One of the final songs of the evening was entitled “The Isle,” by Caroline Shaw (who herself visited Lawrence University earlier in the school year with the group Sō Percussion), and was commissioned by the Folger’s Shakespeare Library. The song is hard to describe, but I will attempt to do so anyway, borrowing some of the language Professor Gomez used in her introduction of the song.
The song was like a journey through language. In the beginning, on this uninhabited “isle,” there is no real language. There is just sound and phonemes. As each voice continued to join in with these sounds and harmonies, slowly, here and there, words began to form. Bit by bit, the words became sentences and the sentences became monologues—famous Shakespeare monologues. It’s hard for me as an English major not to say that this was my favorite piece of the evening.
Had it been the last piece, as it was intended, it likely would have been.
However, after a standing ovation from the crowd, Roomful of Teeth returned to the stage to perform a final song. This song was likely familiar to enjoyers of “Black Mirror,” as it was featured in the season three finale of the show. If I used the phrase “haunting” to describe their opening number, it is even more appropriate for this final piece.
I have never had the desire to watch “Black Mirror” before that moment, but their piece alone made me want to watch it. At least that episode.
Roomful of Teeth won their first Grammy back in 2014 for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for their self-titled debut album. Their second Grammy was awarded to them in the same category just this past year for their most recent album, “Rough Magic.” Their recordings have also been featured numerous times in television and film, including “Madeline’s Madeline,” “Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” and “Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce.”
To find out more, you can visit their website, www.roomfulofteeth.org, find them on social media under @roomfulofteeth, or watch them on YouTube @roomfulofteethofficial.