Speechless

Instrumentation: vocal sextet

Year: 2017

Duration: 6 minutes

Program Note:
When I listen to vocal music, my ear is usually drawn first to the sounds of the voice before I listen to the actual words. It’s counterintuitive to the way most people listen to singers. Words are usually the first thing people absorb from vocal music. With Speechless, I wrote a piece without lyrics. I wanted to focus on the sounds of the voice. The singers sing a combination of vowel sounds, consonants and noises to create a rhythmic tapestry of vocal sounds. Speechless was written for Variant 6.