Roomful of Teeth return to Australia with a ‘festival of vocal colour’
Six years after making their Adelaide debut on the cusp of the pandemic, Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth make their return next month following a period of evolution and experimentation.
In March 2020, Roomful of Teeth played their first Adelaide concert at UKARIA. Appearing as part of the Adelaide Festival, the American group performed passages from Partita for 8 Voices – the suite that won founding member Caroline Shaw a Pulitzer in 2013 – and a collaboration with Australian composer Wally Gunn.
“It was wonderful,” Roomful of Teeth’s artistic director and bass Cameron Beauchamp tells InReview from his home in Connecticut. “It was our first time as a group over there, and we immediately fell in love with the places we went.
“The shows were great, audiences were great – they showed up and yelled and hooped and hollered.”
South Australia’s Covid case numbers were still in single digits, but there was an air of apprehension after the composer Brett Dean was forced to withdraw from the festival after testing positive to the virus.
“Of course we were all following the news very closely,” Beauchamp recalls. “And you know, we were a little nervous, but trying not to freak out.”
Looking back, that Adelaide concert was the calm before the storm – and the last time Roomful of Teeth would perform live for the next year and a half.
Beauchamp and the group had decamped to Portland, Oregon after the Adelaide show to begin a week-long residency with the Oregon Symphony. It was promptly cut short as the global pandemic shut venues, rehearsal rooms, and borders around the world.
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“We got about two rehearsals in and then they sent everyone home,” he recalls. “They shut it down.”
The forced downtime contributed to a shift in perspective for the ensemble. Founded in 2009, Beauchamp says Roomful of Teeth’s original mission was to gather eight classically trained singers with a shared sense of curiosity and exploration, to create a new repertoire of vocal chamber music.
“We brought in experts, practitioners from all different types of singing styles, and we would work with them and figure out what made them tick as singers, and they would teach us some incredible things,” he explains. “And then we commissioned composers to write for our individual voices, to incorporate these new sounds in new vocal music.”
This goal, Beauchamp says, endured for a decade, as the group drew acclaim – and occasional critique – learning and combining singing techniques and vocal traditions from around the world.
“As we became more of a cohesive family of singers, we got to know each other and each other’s instruments so intimately that it started to become more about what we could do individually as members of Roomful of Teeth [and] a little less about what sort of new sounds can we learn from the outside world.
“It was more, ‘how can we push each other individually to create newness within our voices?’”
That included adopting more technology and instrumentation; during the pandemic, the group’s members were given home access to a range of beta software from the company that developed autotune.
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“They just kind of said, ‘Here’s the whole catalogue of things, go play’,” Beauchamp says.
The results were immediately apparent on Rough Magic, the group’s 2023 album which opens with the synth-and-autotune-centric Psychedelics by William Brittelle.
Adelaide audiences can hear it for themselves in February, when the group returns to Australia and UKARIA for the first time since that fateful 2020 show.
Beauchamp says Brittelle’s three-part Psychedelics suite will form one of two “tent-pole” pieces for the program, alongside another Caroline Shaw composition, the five-part The Isle which also appeared on Rough Magic.
Since Partita for 8 Voices, the singer, composer and violinist has contributed to high-profile music and film projects from the Cate Blanchett-starring Tár to tracks by Kanye West (“Before the really strange days,” Beauchamp says). Recently, Shaw contributed arrangements to Lux, the critically acclaimed album by Spanish pop auteur Rosalía.
“She’s still very much member of the family, and is extraordinarily busy because she’s a superstar,” Beachamp says of his Shaw, who won’t be joining the group on the Australian tour.
“People that know Caroline or work with her, you know, once, once you meet her for the first time, you just, you want her around.”
Commissioned by Washington DC’s Folger Shakespeare Library and inspired by The Tempest, Shaw’s The Isle includes snatches of quotations from the Bard that, set adrift in one of Shaw’s signature vocal maelstroms, also seems to capture Roomful of Teeth’s latter era: ‘a sea change, rich and strange.’
“It’s gonna be really fun set,” Beauchamp says of their return to Australia. “One of our singers will be playing the synth with all sorts of fun patches, kind of 80s inspired synth patches, and it’s just a festival of vocal colour. It’s been too long, we’re thrilled to be coming back.”
Roomful of Teeth perform at UKARIA on Sunday February 15 at 2.30pm and 6.30pm
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