Dedicated to the presentation of new and rarely-heard works and gems of the historical avant garde, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble turns its attention to works by UW faculty composers in this program of premieres by William Dougherty, Joël-François Durand, and Huck Hodge, plus a preview of a work by American composer/violist Catherine Lamb.
Program
Huck Hodge (b. 1977): matrix matrī
Joël-François Durand (b. 1954): Messe à six voix
William Dougherty (b. 1988): the weeping and the gnashing
Catherine Lamb (1982): moveable frames (preview)
Program Notes
matrix matrī
For those etymologically inclined, it’s worth noting that a miscellany of words like mother, matter, madrigal and matrical (the adjectival form of matrix) all spring from the same maternal root: *mater. I mention this foray into linguistic archaeology only because of the light it sheds on the poetic substrate of language, the ways in which the ghosts of forgotten meanings shapeshift into seemingly isolated modern concepts, all connected by the thin thread of metaphor. Ordinary language, with apologies to Nietzsche, is nothing but a mobile army of metaphors and metonyms that become literal by overuse, like coins that lose their embossing and come to be seen only as metal, no longer as coins. Meaning is born of metaphor, of the human power to transmute experience into a matrix of symbols. From the associative logic of dream images to the imaginative babble of childhood make-believe, literal language begins in poetry.
Most likely, it also ends there. This past fall my mother passed away. In the last few days, her grip on the literal use of language progressively slipped and she lapsed frequently into a kind of Lautdichtung, where you could infer, for the most part, what she wanted to say by tracing back from a string of phonemes to near homophones. Toward the end, she summoned a spell of lucidity and asked me, “Does my tongue just shake or am I really talking?” When I commented on how poetic this sounded she replied, “Gee, no Shakespeare shaking me today, everyone is leaving because I’ve gone away.”
The lyrics and other vocal sounds in matrix matrī (matrix for mother) are drawn from this passing moment. The piece also begins with, and frequently orbits around, a musical monogram on my mother’s name: A(nne) H-[d]O-D-G-E, producing an assembly of pitches identical to the medieval Hexachordum Durum (G,A,B,C,D,E / Γ: ut re mi fa sol la). The changeable appearances of this sonority (and its complement: C#,D#,F,F#,G#,A#) traverse a maze spanning 1500 years through the domains of Boethius and Zarlino, Pythagorean and Just Intonations, and my own matrix of microtonal hexachordal detours. Winding this warp, the piece materializes a variety of madrigalisms (word-painting) and matricalisms (grids, rhythmic and otherwise), while exploring the sonic substrate of language and meaning.
—Huck Hodge
Messe à six voix (2025)
One starting point for my decision to set in music the text of the mass was my very ambiguous relation with Latin. On the one hand, it was the first “foreign” language to which I was exposed when going to church as a child. The memory of this period seems now warm and pleasant, in its earliest years at any rate—a feeling that didn't last in my teenage years! On the other hand, Latin classes in middle school (a mandatory practice at the time) most certainly did not repeat these early blissful experiences, and I was actually expelled from the class after two years. However, when it came to choosing a text for my piece, Latin became the most natural choice, both because the text of the Latin mass still resonates deeply and because of its roots in an historically distant past. In fact, this connection with the past extended much further back than my youth, because of my interest in some of the earliest works written in that genre, the Messe de Saint Marcel and the Messe de Tournai from the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular through their renderings by French musicologist and singer Marcel Pérès with his ensemble Organum, in the 1980-90s, as well as through their recordings of earlier church music of the Byzantine period.
For the Messe à six voix (“Mass at six voices”) I chose four of the traditional texts of the catholic mass, Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei in their commonly used language, Greek for the first, Latin for the other three. A notable departure from the tradition of this genre is my choice for the Gloria of the text found in the Lesser Doxology, which is shorter and closer to the beginning of the St John Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”) than the longer, more common version, the Gloria in excelsis set in music in most masses since Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (this shorter Gloria text is actually found in the Messe de Saint Marcel mentioned above). I should add that I ask the singers to use the French Latin pronunciation, as another way to activate this bridge to the distant image of the model—an imaginary past flowing into the present. And to stay a little longer with the question of the Gloria, I wove inside this text three lines which are said to have originated from the 15th century Christian alchemist Christian Rosenkreuz: Ex Deo Nascimur, In Christo Morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. They serve to illustrate and further enrich the meaning of the Gloria, and offer moments of reflection in the musical narrative.
On a more musical level, the Messe à six voix continues my ongoing exploration of the musical potential inherent in the acoustic phenomenon of the first-order beats, sonic disturbances that occur when two tones of very close frequencies are heard together. Their proximity creates a confusion in the inner ear and the brain, which then perceive only one tone pulsated by a series of beats whose number per second correspond to the arithmetic difference between the two frequencies (for example, the combinations of frequencies of 220 Hz and 224 Hz create 4 beats per second). In the last few years, I have sought to use this acoustic phenomenon to create fruitful degrees of tension inside the musical discourse. These are heard at various moments in the Messe à six voix to extend the melodic, harmonic and timbral dimensions.
Kyrie
Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison,
Kyrie eleison.
Gloria
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Ex Deo Nascimur
Sicut erat in principio,
In Christo Morimur
et nunc, et semper,
et in sæcula sæculorum.
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus
Amen.
Sanctus – Benedictus
Dominus Deus sabaoth.
Pleni sunt cæli et terra gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Agnus Dei
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
—Joël-François Durand
the weeping and the gnashing
the weeping and the gnashing is a reflection on suffering—both intimate and collective. Drawing from the Latin Agnus Dei and Memento Mori texts, the piece sinks under its own weight, unfolding as a lament for a world unraveling. Voices stretch, fracture, and collapse, and at its most fragile moment, a countertenor cries out into the void. It is a piece about precarity—of life, of memory, of our planet. It is also, inescapably, a piece about my newborn son, for whom I grieve and hope in equal measure.
—William Dougherty
sruti vs harmonicity
In North Indian Classical dhrupad music, sruti defines the harmonic space. One vocalist interacts aside the atmospheric agent of the tanpura by means of an elemental, individual vocal timbre meeting the spectral activity of four cyclically resonating strings. The harmonic space is at the same time precise as it is non-definitive. Precision in the sense of exploring the limitations that define the particular integrity/rasa of a raag—which contains a certain level of variability unable to be defined in mathematical language. The activation of harmonic space is felt through the act of sruti, or stretching—which intuitively curves through and initiates psycho-acoustic sensations against the framework of the tanpura's spectrality.
The vocalist produces open and resonant vowel formations or phonemes at the root (or edge) of language, with the intentionality of directing the listening intention explicitly towards the sound experience. The voice is as human synthesis, and completely destroys the concept of “the new.”
My work has been consistently influenced and inspired by the richness of the dhrupadi practice and tradition for the last twenty years, more or less explicitly, depending on the piece. There are, however, two critical components to my working methodology in direct opposition to the dhrupadi experience—both the written score and mathematical harmonicity, thus keeping it far outside the tradition and I must admit, it is a crass comparison. I only wish to acknowledge the influence and areas where there might be insight into my guiding principles or musical desires, whether or not they are felt externally or understood.
Sruti, or, the act of stretching in psycho-acoustic space, is how I began a pathway into a rigorous harmonic practice, and is what led me to seek out phenomenologists. It was through the direct, sensorial experience of elemental tones in interaction, which led me to define the harmonic world via relationships, and thus towards numbers. I use Rational Intonation to understand the potentiality of harmonic space in the ensemble realm, with the knowledge that it is not the end result, but only a pathway in. The listening directive can be a shared experience amongst a musical ensemble, when there is a clear harmonic language given—clear intentionality towards the total sound. So my primary focus has been in the area of harmonicity, which is inherently a collective experience in the hyper-sensorial realm.
Moveable Frames is for six vocalists sounding through nine frames consisting of unfolding, harmonically oriented phrases. The change of a frame alters the orienting core relation—which gives the collection of tones a sense of modality—depending on where the frame lies. This is an ensemble act of keeping the integrity of the frame while at the same time moving within/against it.
—Catherine Lamb
Biographies
Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble
Ekmeles is a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of new and rarely-heard works, and gems of the historical avant garde. They have a special focus on microtonal works, and have been praised for their “extraordinary sense of pitch” by the New York Times. They are the recipients of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s 2023 Ensemble Prize, the first American group to receive the honor.
As part of their work expanding the possibilities of tuning and technique in vocal music, Ekmeles has given world premieres by composers including John Luther Adams, Taylor Brook, Courtney Bryan, Ann Cleare, Zosha Di Castri, Erin Gee, Martin Iddon, Hannah Kendall, George Lewis, Christopher Trapani and James Weeks.
In addition to creating their own repertoire, Ekmeles is dedicated to bringing the best of contemporary vocal music to the United States that would otherwise go unheard. They have given US premieres by composers including Joanna Bailie, Carola Bauckholt, Aaron Cassidy, Beat Furrer, Stefano Gervasoni, Georg Friedrich Haas, Evan Johnson, Bernhard Lang, Liza Lim, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Lucia Ronchetti, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino, Mathias Spahlinger, and Agatha Zubel.
Catherine Lamb
In the music of Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Washington USA), the mathematics of harmony are explored through the physicality of the material world. Lamb gives voice to crystalline structures of the harmonic series through subtleties of friction, pressure, breath, and bow changes that shape how the idealized harmonies speak. The musical forms she constructs connect the sonic with the tactile and the visual, rendering transparent what once was opaque, transmuting flesh to bone, passing from shadow into light. These dualities and metaphors reflect Lamb’s deep interest in the fundamental nature of sound and often find themselves in the titles of her pieces: shade/gradient (2012), point/wave (2015), interius/exterius (2022).
Lamb’s approach to tuning and pacing are informed by her studies with microtonal composer James Tenney and experimental filmmaker and Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul at the California Institute of the Arts. Like her mentors, Lamb has been a champion of the music of others, an ardent collaborator, and a key figure in various vibrant musical communities. While living in Los Angeles, Lamb co-founded singing by numbers, a women’s choir that aimed to create new pedagogical approaches to microtonal singing with vocalists from a wide range of musical backgrounds. The convergence of musical explorations with feminist practices is also found in her collaboration with violinist and violist Johnny Chang, in which they “recover and interpret” the long-forgotten music of a fictitious female musician, Viola Torros. In doing so, they question and blur the origins of early European music and call attention to the exclusion of real female musicians in the historical record.
Lamb is one of the most celebrated and in-demand composers of her generation. Her work has been commissioned by premiere new music ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Dedalus, and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Her writings and recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Sound American, and Sacred Realism. In 2016 to 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2018, she was given a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize. She currently resides in Berlin where she contributes to many new-music initiatives including the experimental music label Sacred Realism and the Harmonic Space Orchestra.