Search - Joan La Barbara :: La Barbara: ShamanSong / La Barbara

Joan La Barbara, the premiere new-music vocalist, combines her unparalleled extended techniques with electronic sound sources, Middle Eastern instrumentation, cello, and found natural sounds. In the title piece, La Barbara conjures up a sense of shamanic ritual. Recording in a high-desert terrain, she happened upon such "found sounds" as the cry of a raven. Her mastery of computerized and electronic components is such that their sounds, too, seem "found." She incorporates them seamlessly into a mysterious sonic fabric. The chant-infused "Rothko," for voice and bowed piano, suggests the materiality of paint on canvas and the trancelike stillness of the artist's paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston. "Calligraphy," conceived originally for dance, uses Chinese instrumentation and voice to suggest the fracture and flow of brush work in Chinese writing. --Peter Monaghan