Image via Anja Schütz
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
The most telling thing about Roomful of Teeth is their name: it is eye-catching, surreal, and physical at once, casting familiar ideas in wildly unfamiliar terms. It’s a neat analog for their music, which melds umpteen vocal-music traditions, modern-classical idioms, and musical histories with an unmissable grin. Over the past decade, Roomful of Teeth have become a critical fixture on the new-music circuit thanks to this approach. Their work is as electric as it is unpredictable: It’s spoken-word experimentalism; it’s guttural death metal; it’s stained-glass ambience; it’s a blue note stretched out for hours; it’s folk music suspended over a black hole. It’s worth noting that Roomful of Teeth describe themselves as a “vocal band” rather than a choir: their music frequently boasts the kind of watch-this energy you’ll find in a basement punk show, and they prefer bars to churches.
Last year, Roomful of Teeth released their latest solo LP. Their approach is too wide-ranging to be neatly encapsulated, but Rough Magic comes close. A piece by William Brittelle splits the difference between windswept minimalism and wall-of-sound harmonies; Caroline Shaw’s The Isle suite takes Shakespearean texts and whips them into a veritable Tempest, crashing spoken-word interludes into hair-raising vocal solos and brain-bending balladry. Rough Magic is, at once, hair-raising and utterly disorienting, a maze of wails and tight harmonies and trap doors. Choral music has long held a touch of psychedelia, voices intertwining as they stretch towards something greater; in their work, Roomful of Teeth simply underline that possibility, to dizzying effect.
A few months later, the band got back on the road. On STILLPOINT, a remarkable modern-classical rough-up from pianist Awadagin Pratt, they underlined their new-music bona fides, biting into Pratt’s keyboards and A Far Cry’s walls of strings. It is a more austere record than Rough Magic, to be sure, but, in its chase towards quiet delirium, it is not so dissimilar. Each record is high-drama, brain-bending, and wildly inventive, and they show a critical new-music ensemble sprinting headlong towards the unfamiliar.
Last year, we had a chance to chat with Cameron Beauchamp, the lowest voice in Roomful of Teeth and the group’s co-artistic director. Fresh off a tour of the Midwest, he called in from his new digs in Connecticut, going deep and wide. We spoke on Roomful of Teeth’s connections to installation work, the import of pushing against stylistic boxes, their processes in the studio, singing into trash cans, and lots more.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
What’s some of the first art that you remember really connecting with you?
Cameron Beauchamp: When we came together for the first time in 2009, it was at our summer home, [the] Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art—MASS MoCA.
They had this massive, three-level retrospective installation of the artist Sol LeWitt. In his earlier works, which are a little less crazy-vivid-color, smack-you-in-the-face-with color drawings, it’s a lot of pencil drawings. The cool thing about Sol LeWitt is he doesn’t necessarily create the physical art himself. He would send out instructions to galleries or museums and write it out: “The midpoint is located between the 86th line [and the next],” et cetera. He’d basically give you drawing instructions to put it together.
Caroline Shaw, who’s one of our members, and obviously a very successful creator herself, was inspired: Not only by the drawings of Sol LeWitt, and all those instructions – you could hone in on and get super close up to the paintings, or drawings, and see these little instructions. As she was going up and down the retrospective, going from these very basic instructions and pencil drawings, to the top floor, which is just, like, massive wall paintings of the brightest orange. It’s like seeing orange for the first time in your life.
Anyway, she was super inspired by that art to create music. That’s what launched Partita for 8 Voices. That was on our first album; she won the Pulitzer prize for it. The music involves some of those instructions from the wall drawings, and some of the bright sounds that we use were inspired by those oranges, reds, yellows, and blues. She took those instructions, and those sounds, and those textures, and melded it with square dance call instructions and hymn tunes from Appalachia, [which is] where she’s from. That was a good first inspiration from art for Teeth.
Sticking to that time period: What was the vocal scene like on the coast at the time? Was Roomful of Teeth in conversation with any other groups or aesthetics, or did this feel like something new to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: It felt pretty fresh. Our founder, Brad Wells, who is a composer and choral conductor, and also does a lot of sound-art installations, had been inspired by different vocal sounds from around the world. From a pretty early age, from when he was in grad school. He got these recordings: of Tuvan throat singers, and Bulgarian women’s choirs. He was just blown away by the sounds and the colors that were being made. It was his dream, from then on, to create a group that could expand their vocal palates, expand the sound, the colors, and create a new type of vocal music. To my knowledge, there wasn’t anything like [Teeth] before we came along.
My understanding is that prior to Teeth, you sang, played jazz, and did all sorts of other musical projects.
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s right. Definitely. I went to college for jazz trombone and also classical voice. I was playing in all sorts of bands: big bands, jazz combos, hip-hop, funk, western swing, ska. You name it. I was inspired by everything, and [I] was looking to collaborate and be weird with as many people as possible, in Denton, Texas, where I went to school.
Do you still play?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah, I do. Not as much as I used to. Once I started singing full-time professionally, the trombone had to take a second chair to the singing, but I still do. In the last couple of years, I’ve yanked it out of the closet a few times for some experimental [and] weird projects.
The reason I ask about that, and about where Roomful of Teeth was situated then—It’s that you’re pointing towards all these different aesthetic, historical, and musical traditions that you’re pulling from in Teeth’s music.
Cameron Beauchamp: I wouldn’t say explicitly pulled from, no. Just really inspired by. From the first several years we were together, when we would do our residencies at MASS MoCA, we would bring in singers from different genres of music, different traditions from around the world. Really, what it was about was just trying to figure out what makes them tick: Doing a deep dive into their mechanisms and figuring out: How do you make these colors? It’s about being inspired by little nuggets [and] little gems of sounds; it’s about taking one sound and mixing it with these 15 other things that people in the group can do, or something that a composer would be interested in, and then creating something different.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
They had this massive, three-level retrospective installation of the artist Sol LeWitt. In his earlier works, which are a little less crazy-vivid-color, smack-you-in-the-face-with color drawings, it’s a lot of pencil drawings. The cool thing about Sol LeWitt is he doesn’t necessarily create the physical art himself. He would send out instructions to galleries or museums and write it out: “The midpoint is located between the 86th line [and the next],” et cetera. He’d basically give you drawing instructions to put it together.
Caroline Shaw, who’s one of our members, and obviously a very successful creator herself, was inspired: Not only by the drawings of Sol LeWitt, and all those instructions – you could hone in on and get super close up to the paintings, or drawings, and see these little instructions. As she was going up and down the retrospective, going from these very basic instructions and pencil drawings, to the top floor, which is just, like, massive wall paintings of the brightest orange. It’s like seeing orange for the first time in your life.
Anyway, she was super inspired by that art to create music. That’s what launched Partita for 8 Voices. That was on our first album; she won the Pulitzer prize for it. The music involves some of those instructions from the wall drawings, and some of the bright sounds that we use were inspired by those oranges, reds, yellows, and blues. She took those instructions, and those sounds, and those textures, and melded it with square dance call instructions and hymn tunes from Appalachia, [which is] where she’s from. That was a good first inspiration from art for Teeth.
Sticking to that time period: What was the vocal scene like on the coast at the time? Was Roomful of Teeth in conversation with any other groups or aesthetics, or did this feel like something new to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: It felt pretty fresh. Our founder, Brad Wells, who is a composer and choral conductor, and also does a lot of sound-art installations, had been inspired by different vocal sounds from around the world. From a pretty early age, from when he was in grad school. He got these recordings: of Tuvan throat singers, and Bulgarian women’s choirs. He was just blown away by the sounds and the colors that were being made. It was his dream, from then on, to create a group that could expand their vocal palates, expand the sound, the colors, and create a new type of vocal music. To my knowledge, there wasn’t anything like [Teeth] before we came along.
My understanding is that prior to Teeth, you sang, played jazz, and did all sorts of other musical projects.
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s right. Definitely. I went to college for jazz trombone and also classical voice. I was playing in all sorts of bands: big bands, jazz combos, hip-hop, funk, western swing, ska. You name it. I was inspired by everything, and [I] was looking to collaborate and be weird with as many people as possible, in Denton, Texas, where I went to school.
Do you still play?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah, I do. Not as much as I used to. Once I started singing full-time professionally, the trombone had to take a second chair to the singing, but I still do. In the last couple of years, I’ve yanked it out of the closet a few times for some experimental [and] weird projects.
The reason I ask about that, and about where Roomful of Teeth was situated then—It’s that you’re pointing towards all these different aesthetic, historical, and musical traditions that you’re pulling from in Teeth’s music.
Cameron Beauchamp: I wouldn’t say explicitly pulled from, no. Just really inspired by. From the first several years we were together, when we would do our residencies at MASS MoCA, we would bring in singers from different genres of music, different traditions from around the world. Really, what it was about was just trying to figure out what makes them tick: Doing a deep dive into their mechanisms and figuring out: How do you make these colors? It’s about being inspired by little nuggets [and] little gems of sounds; it’s about taking one sound and mixing it with these 15 other things that people in the group can do, or something that a composer would be interested in, and then creating something different.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
My understanding is that prior to Teeth, you sang, played jazz, and did all sorts of other musical projects.
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s right. Definitely. I went to college for jazz trombone and also classical voice. I was playing in all sorts of bands: big bands, jazz combos, hip-hop, funk, western swing, ska. You name it. I was inspired by everything, and [I] was looking to collaborate and be weird with as many people as possible, in Denton, Texas, where I went to school.
Do you still play?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah, I do. Not as much as I used to. Once I started singing full-time professionally, the trombone had to take a second chair to the singing, but I still do. In the last couple of years, I’ve yanked it out of the closet a few times for some experimental [and] weird projects.
The reason I ask about that, and about where Roomful of Teeth was situated then—It’s that you’re pointing towards all these different aesthetic, historical, and musical traditions that you’re pulling from in Teeth’s music.
Cameron Beauchamp: I wouldn’t say explicitly pulled from, no. Just really inspired by. From the first several years we were together, when we would do our residencies at MASS MoCA, we would bring in singers from different genres of music, different traditions from around the world. Really, what it was about was just trying to figure out what makes them tick: Doing a deep dive into their mechanisms and figuring out: How do you make these colors? It’s about being inspired by little nuggets [and] little gems of sounds; it’s about taking one sound and mixing it with these 15 other things that people in the group can do, or something that a composer would be interested in, and then creating something different.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Do you still play?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah, I do. Not as much as I used to. Once I started singing full-time professionally, the trombone had to take a second chair to the singing, but I still do. In the last couple of years, I’ve yanked it out of the closet a few times for some experimental [and] weird projects.
The reason I ask about that, and about where Roomful of Teeth was situated then—It’s that you’re pointing towards all these different aesthetic, historical, and musical traditions that you’re pulling from in Teeth’s music.
Cameron Beauchamp: I wouldn’t say explicitly pulled from, no. Just really inspired by. From the first several years we were together, when we would do our residencies at MASS MoCA, we would bring in singers from different genres of music, different traditions from around the world. Really, what it was about was just trying to figure out what makes them tick: Doing a deep dive into their mechanisms and figuring out: How do you make these colors? It’s about being inspired by little nuggets [and] little gems of sounds; it’s about taking one sound and mixing it with these 15 other things that people in the group can do, or something that a composer would be interested in, and then creating something different.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
The reason I ask about that, and about where Roomful of Teeth was situated then—It’s that you’re pointing towards all these different aesthetic, historical, and musical traditions that you’re pulling from in Teeth’s music.
Cameron Beauchamp: I wouldn’t say explicitly pulled from, no. Just really inspired by. From the first several years we were together, when we would do our residencies at MASS MoCA, we would bring in singers from different genres of music, different traditions from around the world. Really, what it was about was just trying to figure out what makes them tick: Doing a deep dive into their mechanisms and figuring out: How do you make these colors? It’s about being inspired by little nuggets [and] little gems of sounds; it’s about taking one sound and mixing it with these 15 other things that people in the group can do, or something that a composer would be interested in, and then creating something different.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
To me, it reads as though there’s some level of inter-stylistic conversation going on pretty consistently.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Are there any particular traditions you would tie Roomful of Teeth’s work to?
Cameron Beauchamp: That’s a great question. We’ve never felt comfortable in any one sector. It’s not classical; it’s not choral; it’s not acapella. It’s not alternative. I don’t know what to tell you. But, I mean, we relate with many, many, many, many types of music. And we feel comfortable jamming with anybody. I think that’s the cool thing.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Talk to me about songbooks. I was listening to an interview with Gabriel Kahane, and the idea of a “songbook” kept coming up. That brings to mind the Great American Songbook; it brings to mind capital-t Tunes. What is a songbook for Roomful of Teeth?
Cameron Beauchamp: It’s different for every songwriter or composer that we collaborate with. With Gabriel specifically, he comes from such an interesting tradition. His father is a very well-known pianist and conductor. So he grew up around super heavy classical people, but [he] also grew up in the folk tradition. And jazz: He was a jazz pianist, he studied jazz. I think he was mentored by Fred Hersch for quite a while. So he speaks a lot of musical languages.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
In his songwriting, you hear all of that. You hear complex harmonies and progressions that are informed by both jazz and classical. You hear the melodic ease of a brilliant folk singer. So you take that and throw it in the Teeth world, which is wild colors and crazy sounds. But to the core of every one of us in Teeth, when he asked us, “What do you like to sing? What do you want to sing?” Almost all of us said, “I just want to sing a melody. I love singing songs.”
This last summer, at Mass MoCA, we spent a day with Gabriel. Rather than bringing in sketches or music, he said, “I just want to hang out and tell stories with y’all all day.” He came with this list of prompts to ask us all. We dug into childhood stories, and just stories from life, and anecdotes. That inspired him to write this songbook, called “Elevator Songs.” Some of the songs are taken directly from the stories we told, and some were inspired by the personalities of individual members of the group after he got to know us more.
The [song] cycle all takes place in a hotel. There are these little vignettes, from different parts of the hotel, be it the guest rooms, or the gym, or the hot tub, or the bar, or the lobby. It’s really sweet. We’ve gotten to perform it a couple [of] times now. He, I think—better than most—was able to distill the personality of each of us into our own dedicated songs within the book.
That’s beautiful.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
How has performing those pieces changed your understanding of them?
Cameron Beauchamp: The work is never done on any given music that we perform that’s written for us. It’s always evolving. So the more we perform these songs, the meanings of the text become more and more revealed. We continue to change the textual language within the songs. We’re always, like, “What would be great to add to this texture to bring the story out more?” Or, “What colors can we use here?” “How can we utilize so-and-so’s voice to make this even more authentic?” It’s ever evolving.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Can you give me a window into that process? What does the workshopping look like after a show?
Cameron Beauchamp: Our sound engineer records all of our performances. So we’re able to go back and listen and see what works, see what doesn’t, and see how we can build upon things. Then Gabriel and I will have a debrief together, or the band will.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
In general, most of this happens in soundcheck, or in a rehearsal before a show. People will be thinking about certain parts, or we’ll get to a section and [delete] maybe someone in the group will say, “Hang on a second. What if the three of us did this kind of crazy thing leading into this chord and then clear it out, and then this melody comes through? Can we try that?” So we try that, and maybe it’s cool. So: “What if I come in,” and— It bounces off of each other’s ideas until it feels right.
You mentioned something earlier, and I want to pull on that thread a bit. You mentioned that pretty much everyone in the band said they’re interested in singing melodies. Is this novel in some way?
Cameron Beauchamp: A lot of composers write for us like we’re an instrumental ensemble: They use our voices as instruments, and some of us get to interact with melody a lot more than others. [laughs] Being the lowest voice in the group, I don’t get to mess with melody that much. I’m generally the bedrock for the tonal center, or a droner, or laying a rhythm down, or something like that. [laughs] We’ve all fallen into these roles, and it’s nice to break away from that.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Do you ever say to composers, “We really want you to flip the table on this one?”
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. Sometimes they accommodate that request, and other times, they have their own vision for something, which is perfectly wonderful.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I’m curious about how your process differs when you’re working on pieces where you’re at forefront. I’m thinking of your work with Gabriel; I’m thinking of your latest record. There’s that side of it, and then the other side of the equation might be records like STILLPOINT, where you’re part of a broader ensemble. Do you conceptualize those parts of your work differently? Does the band approach them differently, or is it all part of a continuum?
Cameron Beauchamp: The conversation is different when music is being created, rehearsed, or performed when it’s just us. We have our own dynamics, and our way of working together so set [in place]. We’ve spent thousands of days together.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
You mentioned STILLPOINT, where we’re working with A Far Cry, a chamber orchestra, and Awadagin Pratt, on piano. It’s really Awadagin’s show. He’s just a force of nature on that keyboard. He’s amazing. That being said, we’ve worked with A Far Cry several times now. They’re wonderfully collaborative, and they have their own way of working within their unit. It’s kind of based on the Orpheus model, whereas we’re a little freer; we don’t have as many rules of how we voice ideas and the like.
What is the Orpheus model?
Cameron Beauchamp: I can’t go super into it, because I’ve never experienced it myself, but basically, there’s a lead person assigned to each piece of music, and there’s a second and third person, I believe. Or maybe there’s one person in each section [who acts as] the speaker of ideas. But, basically, there’s one lead, and the democracy falls underneath that.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
With Teeth, I’m the artistic director of the group, so when it comes to bigger nuts and bolts, I can make decisions. But when we’re a group, it’s full democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. I might, at times, say, “Okay, let’s move on” in the interest of time. But everyone is welcome to contribute all the time.
So, when we’re working with a group like Far Cry, we want to remain Teeth and keep our dynamic. But we also greatly respect the way that they work, so we might be a little more subdued; we might sit back a little bit. It comes down to ownership. I always felt like Awadajin has the largest stake in this project, so I would always defer to him and then feel the vibe out after that. He’s wonderful. He’s one of the coolest collaborators we’ve worked with.
That record has some really phenomenal composers on it. Did you work with each of them individually, or were pieces handed to you?
Cameron Beauchamp: Some of the composers, like Judd Greenstein, we’ve worked with since our very first year together. He’s one of our closest friends, supporters, and colleagues. So he knows us. We didn’t need to spend much time with Judd. We’ve worked with Paola Prestini before, on a film soundtrack called The Colorado.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
As for Jonathan Bailey Holland and Tyshawn Sorey, we’d never worked with either of them. So several of us spent some time with them on Zoom to talk about the way we like to make sounds, the way we like to work, specifics about each of our voices, et cetera. We had some back and forths with sketches of scores until everyone felt good.
You mentioned the idea of thinking about the specifics of your voices. I think about Teeth’s music as very technically driven. I don’t mean that to say it’s mechanical or anything like that, but sometimes it feels as though you are chasing specific vocal techniques as far as they can go.
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. [laughs]
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
You’re saying, “What happens if we really crank on this dial?” Does that track?
Cameron Beauchamp: That tracks.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
How do you conceptualize that? Do you come to the studio and say, “What else can I do with my voice today?”
Cameron Beauchamp: Sometimes. Really, the music tells us. Sometimes, we need to push much less. Sometimes, the music speaks so beautifully on its own that us bringing more simplicity, vocally, to the music serves it. Sometimes, the music asks for utter abandon.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
If you’re willing to pull the curtain back on Rough Magic, what were your mindsets like at the start of the recording process? How did it start to form?
Cameron Beauchamp: It was a long time in the making. Caroline’s piece, The Isle, was composed in 2016 for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bill Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was written over several years. The one we perform now is, I believe, version 64 of the piece. [laughs]
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Eve Beglarian’s piece [None More Than You] started like this. She brought each of us individually into a studio and gave us a series of prompts: Improvise on this text or this type of sound; here are the notes you’re allowed to use; go. Peter [S.] Shin was commissioned by the American Composers Forum a few years ago; I think he premiered his piece in 2019. So it all came together throughout many years of development. We had to decide: Which music in our repertoire would speak to each other in a beautiful way or an exciting way?
The theme, here, was a play on text: Text used as a creative vessel, or in its own technique. They’re not just words to create a narrative, or a sentence, or a story. It’s the sounds of text. It’s the experimentation you can use with words and text. We found these four pieces explore words, and text, in very interesting ways. We know what happened in 2020. 18 months later, we were finally able to come back together to MASS MoCA, in August of 2021. We did a fully bubbled residency: no one in, no one out.
We recorded the album at MASS MoCA in this huge black-box room. Our sound engineer, Randall Squires, set us up in a circle on the floor, 20 feet apart from each other, all at our own microphone station. He activated the room as if we were performing live: We each had a floor monitor wedge, and he got a PA system, where these four PA speakers faced towards the corners of the room to activate the room. In the center of the room, we had a 360-degree mic, and another array just above that. He was able to capture us in really interesting ways: He could capture the sound of the room from all around, from the center, or from a close mic.
We were able to record as if we were performing live, but also mess around with the sound of the room, and use different spaces. There’s a spot where Thann [Scoggin, one of the group’s vocalists] sings some death-metal inspired sounds. We put a microphone in a metal trash can and he sang into that. [laughs] That gave our mixing engineer tons of material to work with.
Going along with the “rough magic” bionic-sound idea, our mixing engineer, Zach Hanson, was able to explore the space and how things were panned and balanced in a unique way: In a way that a classical album or a vocal album has never been produced before, I think. There are a lot of points on the album where you might hear a sound and say, “Was that a human or a computer making that sound?” You might believe either, but you might not be sure. That’s what we were going for.
How do you consider the kind of space you perform in? In your live performances, do you look for a certain kind of venue?
Cameron Beauchamp: Not really. We mainly perform in performing arts centers: recital halls, concert halls. We’re always amplified. We’re always individually mic’d; we always have floor monitors, and we always have a house PA system or a rented PA system. As a result, our sound engineer is able to create sound that we want basically anywhere. We try to avoid super-duper reverberant spaces; we don’t like to sing in churches, like a choir would. With our amplification, it’s just too much. But we also love performing outside.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I’ve noticed, in the language that your official press uses, there’s this continued use of the term “vocal band.” Can you tell me what distinction you make between that and a choir?
Cameron Beauchamp: We consider ourselves a band because the individual voice of each person is equally important. We’re not trying to blend and create a unified sound. We’re trying to highlight the intricacies of everyone’s voice. We only perform music that was written for or by us, which is very much a band thing. The sound that we want to create for the audience – it’s almost a rock-show vibe. It’s in-your-face and loud, but still intimate.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I suppose with a choir, you might have liturgical implications.
Cameron Beauchamp: For sure. We’re much more casual than a choir; there’s no conductor in our group. We don’t dress the same. We’ll often come in very casually. We move around however we want. We want people to come to the show, look at us, and feel really comfortable and feel like they can say anything or make any sort of noise during the show.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I think about the world of modern “experimental” music, or modern classical, or even the histories of Western classical music, where someone might try to situate your music. Those spaces can have a sort of formalism: You know how you’re supposed to perform being an audience member. When I’ve seen Teeth perform, I’ve felt like the group was trying to cut in the opposite direction.
Cameron Beauchamp: Oh, for sure. It’s intentional. Just like you said, the only thing we’re trying to get across is joy. The music we perform is often extremely difficult and complex, and we’re using our brains and our voices at a crazy intense level, but we don’t want to put that vibe across. We want everyone else to be able to sit back, relax their body, and take it in instead feeling like they need to assume a certain posture, or like it’s the end of the world if their phone goes off or if they drop their keys. [laughs]
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
That being said, we do plenty of shows where we’re performing the New York Philharmonic or something like that. There, we do have to adjust our vibe a little bit. We still try to be casual with the way we perform, but you have to meet them where they are. And we love that tradition; most of us come from those traditions.
Would you say you do?
Cameron Beauchamp: Just like everyone in the group, I come from many traditions, but Western classical is one of them.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I’m curious about how you would situate Teeth in the broader contemporary classical and experimental world. What is your work conversant with?
Cameron Beauchamp: Definitely. We don’t necessarily try to situate ourselves anywhere, but we run in the same circles as groups like Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Attacca Quartet, The Knights, [and] yMusic: that amazing community of new-music ensembles. We very much consider ourselves a part of that community. But even some of those groups don’t like to put themselves in a certain category. It’s like, “Let people put us wherever they feel comfortable; we’re just gonna keep doing our thing and not call it anything.”
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
There is always that temptation to categorize, just for ease of access, but I understand that part of the appeal is pushing against that and making something you don’t know the name of. This stuck me when I was looking at STILLPOINT, because having Sorey on there—I thought, “Of course. This is such a clear connection that I’d never thought of.”
Cameron Beauchamp: Tyshawn is so interesting as a performer and composer. If you watch him play, he’s this extraordinarily ecstatic, brilliant, and wild performer. His compositional style, I feel, is a stark juxtaposition to that. It’s minimal, in a way; it plays with silence in such a beautiful way. It’s so deliberate. I find it fascinating that he leads this kind of dual life.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
A while back, you mentioned that the idea behind Rough Magic was looking towards songs that really engaged with text. Did that feel new to you? Did you feel as though you weren’t finding a lot of that in your work previously?
Cameron Beauchamp: It kind of goes back to a lot of composers writing for us as instrumentalists. With many of the composers that we’ve worked with in the past, we were often the first voices they’d written for. They felt much more comfortable writing for instruments rather than telling a story through text. The more we’ve worked with composers, we’ve also sought out composers who are also seasoned vocal writers, or like Gabriel—someone who really knows how to tell a story through text. So I think it’s just evolved a bit.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Is there a distinction in the way where a Gabriel might write for you as compared to someone who predominantly does instrumental music, in terms of engaging with the full possibility of the human voice as a tool?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yes and no. The yes side of that is: When you’re not confined by a very specific story [that’s] driven by text, you can go crazy with color and texture. There’s really no limit. When you’re working with a very specific text or story, you have to designate the colors to make sense with that text.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
I’d love to see your scores. I’m not thinking of experimental scores here—I’m thinking, how do you tell a vocalist to make a certain kind of sound other than text?
Cameron Beauchamp: We prefer textual notation. We like descriptors that come right from their brain onto the page. We have one score where the composer wrote, “Sound like a sexy chimp.” Which—Okay. The cool thing about the way the music comes together is we spend so much time with each composer, spending intimate time with them to help craft scores and language, and to know exactly which voice does what. It’s all built in. The scores don’t look that complicated; there’s just a whole lot that happens behind the scenes. If I showed you a page, you’d be like, “That’s it? That looks so simple.” But there’s this whole backstory of, this is what they want at this moment; these are the sounds I like to do when so-and-so is making this sound. It’s like a million inside jokes happening.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
How has your recent work surprised you? What did it teach you?
Cameron Beauchamp: With the new album, I think we felt a freedom in the studio. There’s a new sense of freedom to create something that doesn’t need to sound like the live performance; to create a separate art piece that lives on its own. We felt a freedom to go further in the studio, and I’m looking forward to going even further on future albums with that. With Gabriel, he pulled tenderness and intimacy out of each of us that we were able to share and hold for each other in a new way that’s really beautiful.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
With the stories and prompts?
Cameron Beauchamp: Yeah. We’ve known each other for long now, and we treat each other like family. We love each other so much, and when you hear new stories—it’s such a gift to learn new things about someone who you care so deeply about.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
We should all be so lucky. What’s next?
Cameron Beauchamp: Teeth come together at the end of January in California for a really beautiful tour. We’re doing two nights at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco with Gabriel and with the Attacca Quartet.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.
Then we’re doing a show with this really cool dance company called BANDALOOP. They hang from buildings and do all this crazy aerial dance. They’ll be collaborating with us on that show. Then we’re heading down to LA and Santa Barbera to do some stuff. Then we’re going to the GRAMMYs. We said, “What the hell, let’s go.” Keep your fingers crossed that Rough Magic has a good turnout. It’s always a wild time.