Roomful of Teeth and Holly Herndon at (le) Poisson Rouge
by Robert Leeper
For those of you that left before the end of the three-hour concert at (le) Poisson Rouge Monday night, yes, the New York premiere of Caroline Shaw's Partita did end up being played—it just took a while. Well worth the wait, the work combined dense harmonies with spoken narration and vocalization patterns such as whispers, gasps, and grunts to create a gorgeous, playful, and brilliant piece of music.
Partita, written for and performed on Monday by the vocal group Roomful of Teeth (of which Shaw is a member), won Shaw a Pulitzer Prize for Music in April, making her the youngest winner of the venerated prize since it was founded in 1943. Her collage of styles is instantly engaging, yet completely fresh, with the four-movement piece drawing inspiration from just about everywhere: Baroque dance forms like the allemande, sarabande, courante, and passacaglia; as well as a host of vocal effects, including Tuvan throat-singing and Appalachian yodeling.
Roomful of Teeth navigated the unorthodox styles deftly, but the chances of another group having the very unique skill set needed to perform this piece are rare, and Shaw's pieces ultimately benefits from the synergy of writing for a group she performs with.
While Roomful of Teeth and Partita were truly magnificent, it came at the end of a long evening of works that, while capturing their own charms at times, had great similarities to each other and did not seize the attention of the room—many of whom had cleared the room well before the performance of Partita. That roster of pieces, all of which were commissions by some of the biggest composers out there (Caleb Burhans and Rinde Eckert, to name a few), would have been enjoyable had it not been for the 40-minute set by Holly Herndon that began the evening.
Ms. Herdon had several moments of true depth and interest, but for the most part the pulsing beats from the laptop and unsucceful attempts to create new interesting sounds seemed as though they belonged to a DJ set rather than a preamble to the array of music to be performed by Roomful of Teeth. That time would have been better spent on Shaw's piece, keeping the experience of Partita free from simultaneous thoughts of how long it would take to get home on the subway, or what trains would even be running that late at night.