Songs About the One Who Sings
A concert-performance lecture
Elisabeth Holmertz – voice, lecture
Elizabeth Gaver – medieval fiddle, rebec
It is often suggested that human beings sang before they spoke.
In Songs About the One Who Sings, singer Elisabeth Holmertz and Elizabeth Gaver, on medieval fiddle and rebec, explore the voice as something primordial and inherently human.
In 2021, Elisabeth Holmertz suddenly lost her voice. What she eventually regained was not simply a functioning instrument, but a changed understanding of what it means to use one’s voice – and what it means not to be able to. The experience became a starting point for questions about silence, identity, and what it means to truly take up space with one’s voice.
The work is a concert, a performance and a lecture in one. Music by, among others, Barbara Strozzi, Stefano Landi, Francis Pilkington and Henry Purcell is taken apart and reassembled in anachronistic and deconstructed arrangements. Music written by singers at least 400 years ago meets field recordings of, among other things, a cicada, a blackbird, ten crying babies, and 100 people murmuring, coughing, crying and singing. The resulting sound world is unmistakably contemporary.
Both performers are established within the fields of early and contemporary music, and here they create entirely new soundscapes through improvisation and re-arrangement.
Woven between the songs, the lecture moves from the voice as a bodily, mechanical and neurological phenomenon to the question of what singing actually is. What happens in the body and brain when we sing? When does the voice shift from being a means of communication to becoming an instrument? Is the voice an instrument at all? The voice emerges through mechanical processes – air passing through vibrating vocal folds – yet it is at the same time deeply intertwined with emotions, memories, context and the nervous system.
Today, singers are often valued for their ability to imitate instruments. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, however, the relationship was in many ways reversed: instruments were ideally expected to imitate the human voice. The fiddle and rebec are string instruments that were highly respected in part because of their timbral kinship with the human voice. When Gaver and Holmertz meet, the boundary between instrument and voice is never a given.
And then there are the birds.
They were here before all of us.
Language: Swedish or English
Technical requirements
- Projector
- Screen
- Loudspeakers / PA system
- 1 microphone stand
- Space for two performers and their instruments – preferably a small, intimate space with possibilities for darkness.
