Nick Hallett—singer, composer, and downtown impresario—creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible instrument of sound, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression—at its core.

Nick Hallett begins his residency tonight with a selection of songs from Meredith Monk’s Our Lady of Late, a cycle for solo voice and wineglass drone, written in 1972 and rendered as a concert piece by the composer a year later. The performer begins by singing in unison with the fingered glass, then gradually diverging from the pitch in microtonal increments, which results in the phenomenon of “beats,” rhythmic pulses that are created in the interference patterns of two waveforms. Eventually, vibrato is added into the mix. In this way, Our Lady of Late introduces its audience to “extended vocal technique,” wherein the singer explores a diverse vocabulary of sounds and performative states. Hallett’s interpretation—working within the composer’s clearly defined parameters—incorporates a multimedia table of his design in collaboration with live cinema artist Brock Monroe. Pure light focused onto the glass produces an aqueous, mutable projection. Hallett will be joined by singers Emily Eagen and Peter Sciscioli (members of The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation), who will perform duets from Meredith Monk's Facing North and musician Miguel Frasconi, who will play the percussion solos originated by Collin Walcott in the original performances of Our Lady of Late.

“Ubiquitous downtown music hero, Nick Hallett, delivered a sober set of three songs from Meredith Monk’s 1972 song cycle, Our Lady of Late. Accompanied only by the proto-electronic oscillation of a crystal wine glass, Hallett sang in microtonally plaintive strands, or jabbered out made-up language, or delivered medieval melodies with simplicity and clarity against the circular pitch from the glass.”
—Countercritic.com (review of the Performa07 closing ceremony)