••• COMPOSER'S NOTES •••
Aural Histories is a compilation of pieces for voice and electronics. None have lyrics, but they all have stories. Some are improvisations recorded in one take with live sampling and audio processing in real-time; others are electronic compositions with varying degrees of vocal improvisation; and still others are through-composed electronic works. A Flat Ground, A Summons and Circadian Singing were all single-take improvisations using the voice alone as the sound source. The other works contain pre-recorded and processed sounds of machines and electronic equipment, from coffee machines and microwaves to incubators and antique motors. Several of the works were originally created for dance: Gameplay was created for Katharina Vogel’s Proud to be here; Digital Surveillance was a movement from the score for Carrie Ahern’s RED; and Extreme Weather and Narco Kyrie were two movements from a score commissioned by Pennsylvania Dance Theatre for Jill Sigman’s Fowl Play. In addition, an excerpt from Nightcall comprises the soundtrack for Papoose, an experimental dance video by Jill Sigman.

Some of the pre-recorded sounds in these works were recorded at unusual sites. The radios heard in Nightcall were recorded in Michoacán, Mexico, while on an artist residency at the Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology, and the faint tune in the second half of Narco Kyrie is my rendition of the German Christmas Carol Maria Durch Ein’ Dornwald Ging recorded at the top of an indoor waterfall in a corporate office park in Pennsylvania. Circadian Singing was my tip of the hat to Joan La Barbara. An exercise in vocalizing both on the exhale and on the inhale throughout the entire piece in a kind of circular singing, Circadian Singing explores the differences between the lighter externalized sounds and the darker, more difficult internalized sounds. 13 Inspirations is a new work built on the foundations of a movement from my score for RED, and it is another meditation on breath. (The average adult’s rate of breathing at rest is between 10-18 breaths per minute. Mine is 13. The distressed breathing of the infant in the recording is significantly faster.) These works are explorations of voice and machinery, the human and the industrial, and a small selection of the infinite number of sounds in our world that have captivated me.
-Kristin Norderval


••• A MUSIC THAT LISTENS •••
I had heard about Kristin Norderval, a singer and composer who shared my deep connection to the Norwegian Romsdal fjords, for years before finally meeting her. Fittingly, our first encounter took place in song. I was giving a performance-lecture at the Feminist Theory and Music Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, and, spotting her in the audience, I found myself singing to her as if to bring her into my song – and she joined in! For the next decade and a half I have followed this extraordinary artist’s work.

Her latest output is this music to which you are about to listen. (NB: Laptop speakers won’t do it justice!) From my notes on hearing it for the first time:
When inhaling and exhaling presently, committedly, yet without predetermined objectives, letting go into “deep listening” I find myself immersed in a rich ether containing ten distinct worlds. Here I discover a wide range of material––from minimalistic improvisations (A Flat Ground, A Summons) to sophisticated, futuristic, concrete machinery (Gameplay, Glass and Mirrors). Yet the music is open, and extends an invitation to construct one’s own scenes. Although each aria presents a unique time and place, I find guests traveling from one setting to another––maybe attempting to escape from hungry machines (Narco Kyrie)––and often singing in ways that exhaust their bodies (Circadian Singing). But at times these creatures are super-humans with effortlessly powerful yet delicate voices, multiplying themselves through a natural and fluent improvisation (Nightcall).

One might be tempted to listen to and discuss this music in terms of its awareness of and grounding in European and North American music cultures. Beyond opera, such a discussion would also conjure resonances of Medieval chant, folk music, extended vocal techniques, musique concrète, minimalism, popular music and much more. But to reduce this music to its historical awareness, lineage, and technical mastery would be to muffle it, flattening the listening experience into a drop-the-needle exam. Norderval’s music actively resists such listening. Instead, it seeks to show us that listening cannot be contained by a hands-off, objective mode that follows a predetermined analytical model.

The thematic figure this music draws, then, is listening. While it is a music that invites us to listen, it is also a music that listens. By “music that listens” I mean listening as witnessing: the composer’s ears are open to both joy and suffering in the world. Norderval hears the voices that are often drowned out by the 24-hour news cycle or, as she puts it, “are not newsworthy.” She listens to people and things alike because she knows that they are interconnected and that one’s faith is the other’s destiny. This is a music that offers a resounding answer to Peter Szendy’s question on the role, and the authority, of the work. Norderval’s music answers: there is no Work, no key to unlocking its mystery. There is only you, me, and our encounter with the music – this is its resistance to the dominant narrative. Following Daphne Brooks, this music has its ear to the “subterranean feminist archive.”

Zooming further out, alongside singers and composers including Meredith Monk, Anne LeBaron, Juliana Snapper, and Mendi and Keith Obadike, Norderval’s work fits within and produces what I have come to theorize as a contemporary U.S. feminist opera that seeks to denaturalize singing, listening, and sound. This is work that faces rather than masks sound’s dependency on material transduction. Furthermore, it never forgets that sound always occurs in a three-dimensional setting even when played through speakers or headphones, as will be the case with this CD. As my initial impression of the music sketches above, for Kristin Norderval, each sound’s specific location in space is a significant compositional parameter. Aural Histories is not a linear sound trajectory; instead it is an invitation to step into any of its ten different scenes. The doors are open to you, the listener: please enter.
- Nina Sun Eidsheim