A Festival Finds Harmony in Different Voices

NEW YORK — While the 800-pound gorillas of New York’s classical scene, the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, prepare for their season-opening galas, a pluckier, scrappier operation took center stage this week. Over three evenings at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn, the Resonant Bodies Festival presented 45-minute sets by nine different vocalists, three per night. Not a single performance was dull. And at least one set per performance was astonishing.

Now in its sixth year, Resonant Bodies is beginning to spin off satellite presentations elsewhere (in Chicago and Melbourne, so far). But its strength in New York is still in the way it can draw together musical scenes in the city that aren’t always connected.

For example, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu’s profile is more prominent in jazz circles than in the contemporary classical world. But her music — informed by a truly cosmopolitan range of global traditions — existed easily Wednesday with a set by the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw. (They shared billing with young composer-performer Nathalie Joachim.) All it takes is someone to program a new-music festival that way: in this case, its founder and director, Lucy Dhegrae.

In semistaged excerpts from “Nine Doors,” Shyu wove together a dizzying variety of moods. The piece contains music of mourning, dedicated to friends of the composer who were killed in a car accident. There are comic storytelling jaunts that incorporate elements of folklore. Shyu’s vocal solidity — whether tender and contemplative, or more overtly theatrical — is what made the set cohere. Her sensitive instrumental work (on percussion, piano and Taiwanese moon lute) was a generous bonus.

Her take at Resonant Bodies ran half as long as the 90-minute version I saw last year at the Stone. This necessary compression robbed the work of some of its mystical, meditative dimensions. But there was a new element: a booming, prerecorded percussion part that helped drive the narrative forward in the final stretch. That layering of live and canned elements drew Shyu’s work into closer connection with Shaw’s set, in which she used found-sound fragments of testimony from elderly quilters as part of a solo rendition of her “Really Craft When You” (which was recently recorded, in a different arrangement, by the Bang On A Can All-Stars).

Folk influences were also in Tuesday’s program, particularly when the singer-composer Helga Davis’ group stirred together R&B melismas, bel canto flourishes, and swing and hip-hop rhythms. Davis invited the audience to sing an abstracted “Star-Spangled Banner” — a reflection on the 17th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that day — before closing with a rousing arrangement of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a tune she has arranged before.

That evening, Paul Pinto performed a recent dramatic piece, “15 Photos,” which involved drones, dramatically lit passages of shadowboxing, growling vocalizations that alternated with more angelic writing, and some furiously compressed renditions of medieval epics. By the time Dhegrae took the stage, alongside the Talea Ensemble, to perform Christopher Trapani’s “Waterlines,” it was possible to feel exhausted by the sheer variety of styles being presented.

But aesthetic overload can also be the sign of a festival suffused with purpose and ambition. The closing concert Thursday gave a sense of how wide the world of vocal music really is. A set by the German soprano Sarah Maria Sun, supported by musicians drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble, touched on a broad array of experimental practices (and even some Dadaist theatrical elements).

Her performance of “The Flame,” a playful piece by Thierry Tidrow, made space for both the sass of Weimar cabaret and the tightly wound vocal acrobatics characteristic of late Stockhausen. Next up was Gelsey Bell, with a performance that included tunes built on extended rolled-consonant sounds — sung hard into a wall, producing strange acoustical beats — and also some protest songs written for a gleaming new vocal trio. (This week, Bell released an EP of those protest songs on Bandcamp.)

But perhaps the most impressive set of the entire festival came last, when the electronic musician Pamela Z took the stage. Placed between interactive electronics and a pair of laptops, this visionary singer and composer produced a rushing stream of looped and layered vocals, often falling into consonant harmonies. These lines were often supported by clattering soundscapes of digitally fractured percussion.

She also included visual art elements: filmed material, as well as live video of her performance. She didn’t need to introduce or explain the concepts behind these pieces; they made a case for themselves. Even a slight technical glitch toward the end, during her arrangement of Meredith Monk’s “Scared Song,” couldn’t stop her momentum.

It’s been too long since we’ve had a new album from this veteran of the experimental scene. Oversights like this are precisely why small festivals like Resonant Bodies are essential.

——

Event Notes:

Resonant Bodies Festival

Performed on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Roulette, Brooklyn.