Opening concert for the fourth edition festival for other music includes the full live ensemble version of Sarah Hennies experimental documentary/music work ‘Contralto’ and Catherine Lamb & Johnny Chang presenting their Viola Torros project.
Sarah Hennies — Contralto
Sarah Hennies performed a riveting solo as part of the Second Edition Festival for Other Music in 2017 and it's with much excitement that we welcome her back to Stockholm to present 'Contralto' an ambitious work for video, strings, and percussion that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. The piece features a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score performed by a seven piece ensemble.
Henrik Olsson — Percussion
Johnny Axelsson — Percussion
Kristoffer Linder — Percussion
Anna Lindal — Violin
Elsbeth Bergh — Viola
My Hellgren — Cello
Johan Moir — Double Bass
"imaginative, resourceful, witty, defiant...haven't been so deeply moved by a new piece in ages." - Steve Smith, National Sawdust
When a transgender man begins taking testosterone it causes his vocal cords to thicken and his voice deepens and drops into the so-called 'masculine range'. It is not widely known, however, that trans women's voices are unaffected by higher levels of estrogen in the body. Being a woman with a 'male voice' creates a variety of difficult situations for trans women including prolonged and intensified dysphoria and higher risk of harassment and violence due to possibly exposing someone as trans unintentionally.
'Contralto' - defined in musical terms as 'the lowest female singing voice' - uses the sound of trans women's voices to explore transfeminine identity from the inside and examines the intimate and peculiar relationship between gender and sound.
'Contralto' premiered at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY on November 30, 2017.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist currently residing in Ithaca, NY. Her work is primarily concerned with an immersive, psychoacoustic presentation of sound brought about by an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice that Nathan Thomas of Fluid Radio described as "a highly sophisticated and refined performance technique...that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience."
Viola Torros is an ongoing research project by composer-performers Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang, which seeks to realise and arrange the compositions of a pre-medieval composer, Viola Torros.
Viola T. was an anonymous composer who worked outside of the religious and academic establishments of her time. In her own practice, she documented her works in a minimally effective way, just enough to communicate with her fellow collaborators but barely enough to preserve a legacy for later generations of enthusiasts of her music.
The concept of 'research' referred to by the Viola Torros Project involves studies of various relevant musical styles of the pre-medieval period (arabic, byzantine and indian modes), and investigating possible evolution of melodic and harmonic developments as V. T. might have discovered. Choosing one aspect of such a musical style to focus upon, details are discovered and presented in an arrangement for two violas, often with additional augmentations.
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.
