Roomful of Teeth
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About the project:
Roomful of Teeth is a two-time GRAMMY ® Award-winning genre-defying vocal group that explores and celebrates the potential of the human voice through adventurous music creation, performance, recording and education. The group seeks to uplift and amplify all voices through meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of over 100 new works through deep collaboration with composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Gabriela Ortiz, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.
Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Paris Philharmonie and the Barbican. The group has also performed commissioned works for Roomful of Teeth and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and others, and have also moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus.
Roomful of Teeth discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble’s album Sing Me Home which won the 2016 Grammy for Best World Music Album, and 2 EPs: The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Teeth's recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé.
Their latest album, "Rough Magic" (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for "Rough Magic"; and composer William Brittelle’s work "Psychedelics", which appears on "Rough Magic", was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Programmes (Selection)
Elevator Songs
Women-identifying Composers
Music by Indigenous Composers of the Americas
Elevator Songs
with Gabriel Kahane
Solo songs
- Gabriel Kahane
The Isle -
Caroline Shaw (Text by Shakespeare) -OR- Psychedelics - William Brittelle
Elevator
Songs - Gabriel Kahane
Elevator Songs – a celebration of the individual voices that comprise Roomful of Teeth – is a quasi-theatrical cycle set in an interdimensional hotel. Bookended by two songs sung by composer Gabriel Kahane, the eight intervening tunes, one for each member of the ensemble, take us into the lives of characters who exist in different times and places: here, a woman on her honeymoon in Utah at the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic; there, a man in New York City writing a eulogy for a young AIDS victim in the late 1980s; here, a spiritual podcaster in Texas recording an episode at a Holiday Inn sometime in the near future; there, a woman who, having lost her home to wildfire, makes an account of all that she and her soon-to-be ex-husband left behind. In essence, this is a “Roomful of Teeth Songbook,” an anthology meant to showcase each voice within the context of a larger work, which moves from the sacred (“Newborn Plague”) to the profane (“Put It In My Valise”) and back again (“All That Is Solid”).
Commercial recording to be released in 2026.
Women-identifying Composers
All there
is is now - Nathalie Joachim
Math, the
one which is sweet - Angélica Negrón
Fall into
me - Alev Lenz
Vesper
Sparrow - Missy Mazzoli
On
Stochastic Wave Behavior - Leilehua Lanzilotti
The Isle -
Caroline Shaw
Music by Indigenous Composers of the Americas
Canta La
Piedra - Gabriela Ortiz
On
Stochastic Wave Behavior - Leilehua Lanzilotti
ITTINKANAꞌ
TALOOWAꞌ Friendship Songs - Jerod Impichchaachaaha'Tate