A live performance by Jamie Hamilton and the Phaedra Ensemble, exploring the territory between spoken language and musical sound, through the stammered voice.
Join us at The Historic Dockyard Chatham for A Mouth In Search Of A Voice, a new performance by composer Jamie Hamilton and Phaedra Ensemble, made with the voices of people who stammer.
Over the past year Jamie has worked with stammerers across the UK, recording their speech as compositional material, which is then collaged, layered, and woven into a score for live ensemble, electronics, and video.
These voices move between recognisable speech and something stranger, stretched into texture and rhythm, recounting storms that twisted trees from the earth and the paths speech takes through the brain, told as flat, bewildered testimony.
Live strings, bass clarinet, keyboard and electronics play through and around these recordings, accompanied by a two-screen video diptych. Jamie’s electronics draw on physical modelling of the human vocal tract – recreating the voice at different stages in its evolution – and repurpose medical speech analysis software as a musical instrument.
Drawing from Daniel Defoe’s The Storm, which covers the events of the ‘Great storm of 1703’ which struck southern England and Wales, the work expands upon what Defoe called ‘Great Particulars’ – small but spectacular and unbelievable details about the catastrophe.
Jamie, who stammers, has long worked with phonemes and sub-syllabic sound, in a practice shaped by his own dysfluent speech. He produced Meredith Monk and Phaedra Ensemble’s forthcoming album Realms, and co-directs the ensemble.
A Mouth In Search Of A Voice has been commissioned by Cement Fields and Phaedra Ensemble, supported by Arnolfini and STAMMA. It is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. This event has been kindly supported by The Historic Dockyard Chatham.
