Musicians of every stripe have spent centuries exploring the range of vocal expression from straight speaking to pure singing. The development of recording technology has added a few new possibilities to the mix, and one of them, called speech melody, has become closely associated with the American composer Scott Johnson.
Born in 1952, Johnson grew up and studied in Wisconsin. Like Joni Mitchell, he played guitar, moved to New York in his 20s, and for a time fancied himself more of a visual artist than a musician. Johnson quickly integrated into the Downtown New York music scene, performing with Rhys Chatham and Laurie Anderson (before her pop star days), and exploring the regions where minimalism, jazz, rock, and electronic music all came together.
His breakthrough came in 1982 with the album John Somebody, which inaugurated his speech melody technique. Its workings can be easily discerned from the title track (above). Johnson starts with a snippet of recorded speech, then makes it into a tape loop as Steve Reich had done in his piece Come Out:
Johnson then fashions a guitar melody that aligns with the contour and rhythm of the speech, and plays this melody in sync with the loop. Accompanying chords, extra tracks of looped speech and guitar obbligatos, and an increasingly dense texture soon follow by way of musical development.
Photo by Patricia Nolan.
Johnson compares his speech transcription style to Messiaen’s practice of transcribing bird songs for use in compositions. He also cites the call-and-response patterns common in blues (as in this exchange between Bessie Smith and trombonist Charlie Smith) as an influence alongside Reich and Messiaen (“those three things kind of collided one afternoon”). Other musicians have experimented with speech melody in the years since John Somebody, including Florent Ghys in Petits Artéfacts (2015), Judith Weir in A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987) and Reich himself, borrowing back from Johnson in Different Trains (1988).
Now Johnson is out with a new piece conceived for Alarm Will Sound. In place of the humorous tape loops of John Somebody, this work features the digitally sampled and recombined musings of Daniel Dennett, one of America’s leading philosophers and cognitive scientists, and a noted freethinker whose writings and speeches about the evolution of human consciousness are aptly reflected in the work’s title: Mind Out of Matter.
A good demonstration of Johnson’s updated approach for this composition comes at the start of “Winners,” the third of its eight movements. From the following spoken phrase…
“you can’t get ‘em out of your head”
…Johnson constructs a stuttering four-bar phrase using progressively longer excerpts:
Next, drums and percussion come in to reinforce the rhythm with a hint of mambo groove. Then, four bars later, the piano starts to melodicize the sampled speech…
…whereupon chords and other instruments are added to complete the texture:
You can hear this passage starting at 2:37 of the following rehearsal video:
With a length of 74 minutes, a gestation period of six years, and a broad timbral pallet befitting the instrumentation and virtuosity of Alarm Will Sound (a 21st century chamber orchestra equipped with wind, string, percussion and electric instruments), Mind Out of Matter is Johnson’s most elaborate composition to date. It has been called an “atheist oratorio,” not altogether ironically, since like Handel’s Messiah, it’s an epic, multi-movement voice and instrumental setting of texts about religion (and there’s even a “choral” movement where several of the musicians sing). In its structure, theme, and dimensions it also strikes me as a rationalist counterpart to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
Johnson says he “tried to imbue this music with the sense of awe and wonder that lie at the heart of Dennett’s scientifically informed philosophy, while still emulating his gift for crafting a disarmingly playful presentation.” Mind Out of Matter succeeds by ritualizing the rational, creating a kind of secular age surrogate for religious music that acknowledges our persistent human attraction to sacralized culture.
Derek Bermel’s “Three Rivers” sounds almost more “big band” than “chamber ensemble.” In this piece inspired by a trip he took to Pittsburgh, where he spent several hours mesmerized by the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, he’s crafted over eleven minutes of pure swagger. It’s angular and almost bawdy. If it doesn’t put you in mind of an abstract version of West Side Story then you probably haven’t seen West Side Story. – 
Brahms is not easy. Brahms is not easy to learn, not easy to play, not easy to perform, and certainly not easy to imitate. But composer Bruce Adolphe rose to the challenge when his former Julliard student Orli Shaham commissioned him to write a Brahmsian solo piano piece for her album Brahms Inspired.
If you weren’t paying attention, you might think this cut is just another track of house music that samples some “world music” sounds… But, that would be a shame, because with this track, the beauty is in the details. In Eight and a Half Birds, Suphala fuses danceable beats, nature sounds, piano samples, electronics, and her own tabla mastery into something very special, with the texture evolving and morphing in a deeply fascinating manner that’s also just subtle enough to fly right by the ears of the inattentive. So, just what should we call this? I’m going to choose to call it “post-minimalist post-house,” but labels don’t really matter when the music is this good. This cut is music for squinting slowly into the sun on a bright, hot summer day and loving every second of it.