The Isle begins with a cloud of murmuring voices — a musical imagining of something hinted at in Shakespeare’s stage directions inThe Tempest. The calls for “a burden, dispersedly” and “solemn music” suggest an off-stage refrain and/or perhaps something even more otherworldly. In Shakespearean Metaphysics, Michael Witmore writes: “Like the island itself, which seems to be the ultimate environment in which the play’s action takes place, music is a medium that flows from, within, and around that imaginary place into the ambient space of performance proper. If some of the courtiers from Naples and Milan are lulled to sleep by the island’s ‘solemn music’, the audience can hear this music in a way that it cannot feel the hardness of the boards that the sleeping players lie on.” In taking cues from this reading of the play, I’ve constructed my own musical reading of the island ofThe Tempest. Three monologues, by Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero, are set in three distinct ways. Ariel’s initial song of welcome appears, for the most part, homophonically, although its break from the quasi-robotic delivery (into the “burden, dispersedly”) points to the character’s vaporous & ethereal nature. Caliban’s famous description of the island as “full of noises” finds its home in a distraught and lonely monodic song, ornamented and driven by extraneous sounds. Prospero’s evocation of the various features and inhabitants of the island (from the final act) breaks apart into spoken voices that eventually dissolve into the wordless voices of the beginning, mirroring his pledge to throw his book of spells into the sea (and possibly to return to the island’s pre-lingual state). The harmonic material of the beginning and the end of the piece (the murmuring voices) is a 24-chord progression that includes all major and minor triads of the Western 12-note system. As Prospero says: “But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (Solemn music)”

“math, the one which is sweet” is the sound of getting lost in new love—of giving in to excitement, savoring anticipation, surrenderingto daydreams. It’s the thrill of getting to know someone new, and the lens of tenderness through which everything about them isperceived. It dismantles and plays with the false dichotomies of love: logic & emotion, order & abandon, repression & disinhibition.It’s an invitation to these dualities, like two people falling in love, to coexist in the dazed delight of newfound connection. This piecespeaks to the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in giving, receiving, and letting go of love.

TEXT

math, the one which is sweet
Raquel Salas Rivera
sand of each beach
where i forgot i was a body
sea of grape and dry algae packing material for last names
coding for the time machine that
between futures eclipses an
underground
the rain’s dirt
which approximates the cave’s air
the reef’s opening
where i enter and leave my town
like we do
in a bottom where fins glow
i suddenly cease
we don’t need lungs
the mouths that kiss the air the olas
math
the one which is sweet
completely
a language for when we are a hybrid
of plane and gull
your voice
its convex exactitude
the chunk of satellite that collapsed
towards the water’s celestial cemetery
like that

Wayfinding, observing nature, and respecting the ocean have been present since my childhood growing up in Hawaiʻi. So when Rónadh and Brad asked me to be part of the National Science Foundation-funded“A few waves do most of the work”project, I felt very connected to the ideas of integrating knowledge and research about the ocean into classrooms.Reclaiming language and supporting indigenous language revitalization have been essential to my artistic work in the past year. Connecting to language, meeting with my family every weekend to support safe learning environments, all of these actions were content-based towards a new way of approaching my compositional practice.A language that is changing, that is evolving, that is new is alive. Similarly, haku mele(compositional)practices that engage new sounds through an indigenouslens embrace ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi as an active part of the creative process.Indigenous communities often struggle to remain “authentic,” pushing up against archaic stereotypes and a genuine desire to preserve culture. InParadoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty,J. Kehaulani Kauanui writes:In the U.S. context, as Kevin Bruyneel argues, one of the defining elements of American colonial rule is the fastening of Indigenous Peoples to the concept of “colonial time” by locating them “out of time,” where they are not allowed modernity. This “shackling indigenous identity to an archaic form” upholds the concept of authentic IndigenousPeoples always being already primitive/static (positioned to continuously struggle for recognition of their humanity), while the colonizer is always characterized as civilized/advanced, thereby rationalizing domination of Indigenous Peoples as a formof “progress.” It is this enduring notion of the “savage” that continues to be used by states in their attempt to justify political subordination, such as the “domestic dependent nation” status subject to U.S. plenary power in the case of federally recognized tribal nations. Kauanui,J. Kehaulani.“Chapter One: Contested Indigeneity.” InParadoxes ofHawaiian Sovereignty,53–54. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.There is much more to read about the indigenous language revitalization, but I like the idea that Prof.Cox’s research extends to include metaphors for that movement: a few waves can make a difference, have made our work as Kanaka Maoli artists relevant to today’s dynamic landscape where science and indigenous knowledge celebrate the power of nature.Through radical indigenous contemporaneity, this work hopes to make those connections both in the classroom and in the community.

“Fall Into Me” was written by Grammy-nominated German-Turkish composer Alev Lenz, arranged by Teeth member Dashon Burton. ‘Fall into Me’ is a song born out of resonance,” says Lenz. “It represents a deep longing to understand, explain, or grasp the unknown darkness in each of our souls, the deep pain that can live in a person. If it finds a way out, which way will it go?” After appearing on Black Mirror, “Fall Into Me” resonated with ears across the globe. Now, Teeth’s rendition will allow the song to reverberate once more.

Vesper Sparrow was commissioned and premiered by Grammy award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth in 2012. The work was inspired by Sardinian “cantu e tenore” vocal techniques, and includes an imitation of the call of the vesper sparrow. Farnoosh Fathi’s poem “Home State” weaves in and out of the texture. The work was recorded for Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy-nominated album Render.

The Orchard is a song taken from Sarah Kirkland Snider's hour-long work, Unremembered. Unremembered is an hour-long, thirteen-part song cycle for seven voices, chamber orchestra, and electronics by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, inspired by poems and illustrations by writer and visual artist Nathaniel Bellows (W.W. Norton, HarperCollins). A meditation on memory, innocence, and the haunted grandeur of the natural world, Unremembered recalls strange and beautiful happenings experienced during a childhood in rural Massachusetts: a houseguest takes sudden leave in the middle of the night; a boy makes a shocking discovery on a riverbank; a girl disappears in woods behind a ranging farm; ghosts appear with messages for the living. Through Bellows’s moving words and images and Snider’s vivid, fraught, astonishing score, the cycle explores the ways in which beguiling events in early life can resonate in — and prepare us for — the subtler horrors that lie beyond the realm of childhood.

earths to come is a brand new work composed for Roomful of Teeth by inti figgis-vizueta inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson:

TEXT:

I have no Life but this—
To lead it here—
Nor any Death—but lest
Dispelled from there—

Nor tie to Earths to come—
Nor Action new—
Except through this extent—
The Realm of you—

- Emily Dickinson