Nick Hallett

In May 2009, I was invited by Travis Chamberlain to be the first artist-in-residence at the New Museum of Contemporary Art's theater.  In collaboration with Brock Monroe, I created four evenings of music and art focusing on the voice as material, via a quartet of multimedia rituals.  Week one saw a solo interpretation of Meredith Monk's Our Lady of Late, for singer and wineglass drone.  Harnessing ideas of cymatics, my voice and the ring of the wineglass were used to activate reflective surfaces, visualizing Monk's audio work.  Week two, the group Magic Names performed Karl Stockhausen's treatise on overtone singing, Stimmung, staged around an orb that glowed with colored light in response to modulations in the harmonic spectrum.  Week three involved an original composition, Whispering Exercises, a work-in-process concert of the music that would eventually become the score to my first opera.    The finale, Auroville, was a ritual for singers, performers, light artists, sonified EEG, oscillographics, percussion, and glass armonica, featuring a number of collaborators, including Ana Matronic, Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, Ray Sweeten, Jeff Cook, Renee Soucy, Juan Carlos Castro, and Caitlin Kirby.