Baleen

hear/say is... 

Carl Alexander
Gabrielle Barkidjija
Dimitri German
Sam Grosby
Jackie Kerns
Kevin Krasinski
Frank Laucerica
Anna Lea Ucik
Kevin Vondrak

hear/say spawned out of the Partita-group from my recital in 2016, this octet reassembled for several more projects in the Winter and Spring of 2017. The group is on hold for now... more to come.

We met Sam in Prof. Hans Thomalla's Writing for the Voice class at Northwestern. He had a cool piece he had just written called Baleen so next thing you know we were singing overtones and speaking into vases in a classroom. We premiered Baleen at a Spring 2017 Composers Concert at Northwestern University.

"Let's consider the multiple senses in which our mouth is a filter. It is the opening of the human digestive filter. It is the opposite end of the human language filter. It is also a harmonic filter, where changing the shape of the mouth increases or minimizes the amplitude of different frequencies. Our bodies constantly perform uncountable, unknowable actions. Baleen invites participants to slow down and consider these actions. 

Baleen can be performed by trained vocalists, but it can also be performed by anyone interested in exploring their own voice. It can be performed for an audience, or it can be performed alone. As a piece of music, Baleen exists as a way for audiences to experience the process of speech in slow motion. As a contemplative tool, it helps performers to focus on the actions of their own body. Ideally, this results in a heightened sense of body awareness and all of the strange acoustical properties that define spoken words." --Sam Scranton

recorded live at Northwestern University by Luis Fernando Amaya