Elevator Songs

PROGRAM NOTE

Elevator Songs is a celebration of the individual voices that comprise Roomful of Teeth. While the ensemble is widely known for its incredible stylistic flexibility and use of extended vocal techniques, I learned over the course of several workshop sessions with the group at MASS MoCA in 2022 that they are all, unsurprisingly, wonderful singers of tunes. Given my background as a singer-songwriter, it felt natural to use this project as an opportunity to create, in essence, a “Roomful of Teeth Songbook,” an anthology to showcase each voice within the context of a larger work. What you will hear grew out of the first movement, written as a sketch during that aforementioned visit to MASS MoCA last summer. Elevator Songs is dedicated, with love and admiration, to Roomful of Teeth.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2023

PURCHASE