The Structure of breathe · intone · inspire

How was breathe · intone · inspire different?

Our performance of breathe · intone · inspire was inspired by several key ideas.

The whole program was designed to flow from beginning to end, with every physical movement, poetic recitation, musical performance, linked to a common theme and atmosphere.
The program avoided the use of stories, “standard” poetic imagery, and musical “hooks,” to create a flow of more-or-less pure sound.
The texts of the choral poems and musical movements were a mashup of syllables with no literal meaning, as well as instructions to the audience on where to place their attention at a given moment. The following two lines of choral poetry are part of larger choral poem that precede and provide a mental preparation for a musical performance featuring humming:

This leads into the following musical passage:

Other musical sections are built from syllables detached from any semantic meaning.

The ideas of pure sound is to focus on the power of vibration, without the distraction of a story or poetic emotional sentiments. This was stated very clearly by the 20th-century ear specialist Alfred Tomatis, who wrote,

If your voice has good timbre, is rich in overtones, you are charging yourself each time you use it, and of course you are providing a benefit to whomever hears you!

One audience member described it in this way:

Your ensemble intones everything from silence to spirited vocal expression, portrays stationary body positions to energtic flowing movement. You combine vowel sounds readily recognized, with sounds strange and new like Sanskrit. You challenge your audience to bathe in pure, healing sound–sound for the sake of sound, without word form or contextual meaning–sound to amplify breathing and inner calm and peace and joy.

After a certain structural point the sequence of movements reverses. The whole program ends much as it begins. Another audience member noted:

Reflecting on how essential the reprise was, it’s like the lynch pin that brings you to the right perspective from which everything that preceded it should be viewed…the display dissolving back into itself, the source…The eternal play of that…

Listening

Two of the music selections, Clarity and Healing Seed Syllables can be heard on one of the Music pages, elsewhere on this site.

How was breathe · intone · inspire different?

Listening

Further Reading