From Chamber Music City
Acoustic Landscapes and Architectural Labyrinths: Roomful of Teeth in Review
On April 21, 2026, Chamber Music City presented its final concert of the season with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth (RT) performing in collaboration with composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. The program opened with Kahane performing several older songs solo which briefly seemed to transport the audience from the Belcourt theater (where the concert was held) to the Bluebird Café for an intimate set of Covid era works from the singer-songwriter. Next, the performance paired Kahane’s newly released theatrical cycle Elevator Songs with Caroline Shaw’s The Isle (the performance of these two pieces are the subject of this article). The result was an evening of sonically constructed spaces where the ensemble brought its trademark virtuosity and theatrical precision to both pieces, balancing Kahane’s beautifully elusive theatrical cycle with Shaw’s hauntingly immersive The Isle. The performance was a journey; listeners not only heard the music, but moved through it as if on a tour of each composer’s imagination
Caroline Shaw’s The Isle (2016)
In The Isle, Shaw constructs not a narrative but a seascape and a landscape—one that listeners gradually learn to navigate through shifts in timbre, silence, and harmonic color. More of an expression of the emergence of consciousness than of creation itself, the work unfolded as an extended meditation on sound, text, and atmosphere, drawing its inspiration from the supernatural world of The Tempest. Shaw’s setting of monologues from Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero, framed by an extra-lingual (or perhaps paralingual?) Prologue and Epilogue, transforms Shakespeare’s language into musical terrain—sometimes intelligible, sometimes dissolved into texture—mirroring the shifting identities and illusions of the island itself.
The opening moments emerged almost imperceptibly. A cloud of murmured syllables and sustained tones seemed to hover in midair. This hushed beginning, evocative of Shakespeare’s stage directions calling for dispersed and mysterious sound, established the work’s defining atmosphere of ambiguity and suspension. Rather than presenting melody as a primary force, Shaw and RT allowed the harmony to grow organically from isolated pitches and syllables, building outward into gently colliding intervals and layered pulses. The work began its life as a commission for the ensemble and you could tell; The singers shaped these textures with remarkable control, allowing individual tones to surface and recede like distant signals carried across water…
“Come…..Come…Come..Come….Come unto these yellow sands”
From this utterance “Come” emerged a postmodern madrigal. It was here, in the central movements, that RT demonstrated extraordinary flexibility. Their performance moved fluidly between speech, pitched tone, breath noise, and guttural effects, blurring the boundary between language and pure sound. In passages associated with Caliban, rougher timbres—growls, percussive consonants, and darkened vowels—created a sense of physicality and instability, as though the music itself had taken on the uneven terrain of the island. Yet these moments of raw sonic expression were balanced by luminous harmonic arrivals, in which unexpectedly consonant chords emerged from dense textures, offering fleeting clarity before dissolving again into ambiguity.
One of the most compelling aspects of the performance lay in its pacing. Shaw’s score resists traditional climactic architecture, instead favoring gradual transformation. The exception is the powerful crescendo at the end of “IV. Prospero.” Likewise, in performance, the singers sustained long arcs of tension through subtle shifts in color and articulation, often allowing silence to function as a structural element. The effect was immersive rather than theatrical. The experience of the work encouraged contemplation and avoided narrative resolution.
By the time the final Epilogue arrived, the musical language had distilled and returned into a state of primal utterance. The ensemble resolved into a clear harmonic center, allowing a a sonority to bloom out of previously unsettled terrain—completing the set, as she described in the note, “of all major and minor triads of the Western 12-note system (for fun).” The resolution felt inevitable—a quiet clearing after prolonged uncertainty—achieved through both tonal saturation and compositional control.
Gabriel Kahane’s Elevator Songs
If Shaw’s The Isle unfolded as an open landscape shaped by wind, water, and echo, Gabriel Kahane’s Elevator Songs transported the audience indoors—into a labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and unexpected encounters. Also commissioned for RT, Kahane’s Elevator Songs unfolds as a sequence of character-driven portraits, each room revealing a distinct human scenario while the elevator itself serves as the mechanism that moves the listener from one emotional world to the next.
More than just a collection of songs, Elevator Songs functions as a moving gallery of human portraits, each room revealing a distinct emotional landscape while the elevator itself becomes the mechanism that carries the listener through an ever-expanding panorama of contemporary anxieties, absurdities, and private moments. The device is not wholly new; indeed, it is akin to Robert Schumann’s Carnival, Roger Water’s The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking or even Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. As such, built around Gabriel Kahane’s episodic writing, the work unfolds as a sequence of character-driven tableaux, each suggesting a new vantage point within a shared musical and imaginary architectural space.
From the outset, RT demonstrated its remarkable technical brilliance. Attacks were clean, entrances unanimous, and ensemble coordination remained impressively tight even in passages of intricate rhythmic overlap. Kahane’s writing, in both lead vocal and accompaniment, frequently shifts between speech-like declamation and sustained harmonic textures. The singers navigated these transitions with fluency. Particularly notable was the clarity of diction across the ensemble and across Kahane’s postmodern collage, which ensured that the text remained intelligible without sacrificing tonal focus.
Emotionally, Kahane’s work functions as a suite—a collection of disparate movements that create an emotional balance from happy to horrifying and much of the spectrum between. There is a dramatic and theatrical cohesion across an extraordinary diversity of style that points to humanity’s long, slow, progress into a dystopian future. Indeed, the end of days are predicted, somewhat arbitrarily, in the final song as “the 23rd century, [or] the 27th century.”
There are many aspects of the album that demonstrate Kahane’s remarkable ability to depict that diversity in style including timbre, expression, and the employment of conventional formal arguments. The first song, for example, features his exquisitely longing voice and is built of three verses that are divided by “instrumental breaks” (RT vocalizations). The first break builds a sense of nostalgia in warm, bright harmonies, while the second break contains a Beethovenian durchbruch –a sonic explosion that forcefully clears the aural palate.
Kahane’s lyrical genius is his ability to carefully construct what Houston Baker called a “multiplex enabling script,” or matrix.[1] The words seem chosen for their sound, in the symbolist tradition, but they are often triggering and partnered with an emotionally laden musical context that grounds them in a feeling if not a specific circumstance. For example, “Room 304: Newborn Plague” features the chorus:
Three hours on a two lane road
Nowhere to turn, nothing but snow
And the sky, the sky, the sky, the sky, the sky…
Immediately, anyone who has had a long winter road trip in the Midwest can relate, and RT member Virginia Kelsey’s beautiful alto emblazons “the sky” with anger, splendor, frustration, apprehension and acceptance respectively. Other references in the song are dismaying yet frustratingly ambiguous (the screaming shower, the “Hazmat-suited man,” the husband’s prayer, the dead flowers, or even the title’s “Newborn Plague,” is “newborn” an adjective or noun?) RT’s internet page for the album isn’t much help; there they describe the song as “…a newlywed undone by the sublime topography of the American Southwest.” And just like that, media res, the song ends…
As the elevator continues its ascent, new portraits emerge—each sharply etched yet emotionally distinct. “Room 803: St. Vincent’s Hospital,” opens with a nostalgic sound reminiscent of the Band of Horses but shatters with a break that sounds like a ‘70s rock musical (Hair? Jesus Christ, Superstar?). Featured singer Steven Bradshaw’s delicate tenor here expressed regret and a large measure of determination yet lyrically there is nothing to indicate that the song is about “…a man in midtown Manhattan writing a eulogy for a young AIDS victim in the late 1980s.” Obviously, and wonderfully, this ambiguity leaves space for the listener to step into the composition and make the expression reflect an experience of their own.
The number of stylistic expressions that Kahane is able to achieve on this composition, and that RT was able to perform, was simply astounding. Further, throughout the performance the ensemble and Kahane handled the extended vocal techniques quite well. Effects that might have easily become gimmicks were instead integrated into the musical language with restraint. Percussive consonants, breath/throat sounds, and timbral shifts functioned as expressive tools rather than theatrical decoration. The performers’ confidence in these techniques allowed the music’s structural coherence to remain clear even during its most experimental passages.
Also, not all elevator stops are tragic; some lean deliberately into satire and absurdity. At “Room 1832: Valise” the elevator doors open to a Zappa-level expression of musical humor featuring a hilarious Jodie Landau as a “fashion influencer slash spiritual guru recording a podcast episode in a militarized, near-future Texas.” Similarly, “Fitness Center Hot Tub” features Thann Scoggin’s straight guy confronted by Esteli Gomez’ conspiracy theory interactions and offers “to party.” Often, on Tuesday night, people in the audience laughed out loud.
In the end, like The Isle, Elevator Songs proved remarkably well suited to the ensemble’s strengths. The performance highlighted not only the singers’ remarkable versatility, but also their ability to sustain the audience’s focus within a work that demands equal parts precision, imagination, dramatic interpretation and restraint.
By the end of the evening, Roomful of Teeth had guided listeners through two radically different yet equally immersive environments. Shaw’s The Isle invited quiet exploration of an open sonic landscape, while Kahane’s Elevator Music offered a densely populated architectural world of sharply drawn human encounters. In both works, the ensemble acted not merely as performers but as navigators, shaping each space with precision and imagination. The result was an evening that felt less like a sequence of pieces and more like an exquisite journey. Chamber Music City has performed a great service to Nashville in producing this concert, and we were all quite excited to hear about their plans for next season which, Director Ji Hye Jung announced at the beginning of the evening, already includes three concerts!
[1] https://blackfireuva.com/2012/03/24/houston-baker-blues-poems-black-memoir/#:~:text=Baker’s%20corpus%20is%20a%20microcosm,previously%20encouraged%20him%20to%20dismiss.
[2] https://www.roomfulofteeth.org/elevator-songs
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That sounds like a really interesting combination of music. I’ve been fascinated by how artists blend different genres lately.