UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Brad Wells, choral director and music lecturer at Williams College in Massachusetts, has dedicated his academic and professional career to studying the voice. He teaches courses on the meaning of vocal styles and the voice as art, and he put his theories into practice by forming the eight-voice avant garde a cappella ensemble Roomful of Teeth.
Wells’ Grammy-winning experimental vocal octet will make its Penn State concert debut at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17, in Schwab Auditorium. The performance will include ensemble member Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Partitia for 8 Voices.”
Wells spoke with the Center for the Performing Arts about how he coaxed traditional choir singers to experiment with their prized assets, how he feels about speaking trends, which surprising vocal style he inspired his vocalists to try next and why beatboxing has no place in the band.
Heather Longley: You liken the group more to a band than a choir. Regarding each piece of vocal intonation, is it written in strictly or do the singers have freedom to improvise?
Brad Wells: It all depends on the piece. … Certainly we’re not like a band where everybody’s writing music. Some members of the group do write music for the group, but I think it’s almost more like a jazz band than a rock band. You think of the saxophone section and the trombones — this group definitely does have its “sections,” and, yeah, there are parts where there’s improvisation or some freedom — but the scores are also very clear and finely crafted, for the most part. So the flexibility comes in the group’s pacing overall and responding to each other.
Longley: How might a composer begin to write a piece for Roomful of Teeth?
Wells: What we do is get the composers to get to know the singers as well as they can, what their capabilities are and all these other techniques we studied, what their ranges are, and how their voices sound at different parts of the range. In some ways, it’s similar to what people have to do if they write an orchestral piece. They need to know how the sounds of the clarinet changes as it goes through its range.
Longley: I noticed that many of the group’s singers have backgrounds in “proper” choirs. What was the process in coaxing them to loosen their vocal expectations and traditions? ‘’
Wells: Basically, it was, “I have this idea, want to give it a try?” Everyone who auditioned for the group was game to learn some things. And I think if any singer didn’t want to be coaxed, they just didn’t audition for the group. So there was a self-selection there. At the same time, some of the techniques we study can be a little scary for the voice. They can be wearing, quickly tiring. So we have to go carefully in some cases, and they know that I’m not interested in pushing them places that aren’t vocally healthy.