After a standing-room-only performance last summer, Senso di Voce (Esin Gunduz, voice, and Megan Kyle, oboe and English horn) returns to Silo City to perform a concert of early music intertwined with contemporary improvisations in the unique sonic environment of Silo City.

While last year’s concert focused on Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music from the Western canon, the program this year explores the connections between these early Western musical traditions and those of nearby Mediterranean and Balkan cultures. As a contemporary composer and vocal performer, Gunduz is interested in the relationships among traditional singing styles that are rich in overtones, those that make use of multiphonics, and those that evoke instrumental timbres. Pieces from Turkey, Bulgaria, Sardinia, and Greece trace these connections and allow Kyle to explore the traditional roots of the oboe. As always, the sensibility of Silo City—the feeling of nearly infinite space, the silos like universes in themselves as they stretch to the sky—shapes the pieces chosen for the program. They share a common thread of spiritual rapture and meditation, whether secular or religious. This is music that reaches up.

As an ensemble, Senso di Voce has since its founding been interested in reinterpreting early music, both in terms of reimagining pieces of disparate instrumentations for voice-oboe duo, and in terms of exploring their sonorities and musical ideas through improvisations. In the process of researching Medieval music, Gunduz and Kyle found sonic similarities with Mediterranean and Balkan music of the same era—in the styles of ornamentation, even at times the vocal timbres. They began tugging on that thread, finding more pieces that weave together a cross-section of early music across Europe to the Black Sea. They take inspiration from the Belgian vocal ensemble Graindelavoix, which focuses on the genealogy of vocal repertoire and explores the historical and geographical connections between various early music traditions. Graindelavoix writes of their work: “The past is not a solid reality that we are separated from, instead it is a continuous set of underlays and counter-currents that undulate and live in our bodies: in ever changing times and geographical locations, new eruptions and collisions of time-tectonics occur.” 

This is the second of two Senso di Voce concerts at Silo City this summer, exploring two different acoustic environments at the site. At the July 21 concert at Marine A, seating was limited and audience members stayed in one place while Gunduz and Kyle moved throughout the space during the performance. For the upcoming August 11 performance in Perot, the situation is reversed—there is no cap on audience size, and audience members will be encouraged to move freely among various seating and standing areas in order to experience a range of acoustic environments within the sprawling space.

Silo City
Friday, August 11, 2017 in Perot Elevator
7:00pm
Silo City Row
Buffalo, NY 14203

Reception to follow

Tickets available online at sensodivoce.brownpapertickets.com and at the door
$10 general / $5 students

Program:
Plainchant, Introitus: “Salve sancta parens”
Traditional (Greek Orthodox), “Simeron genvatai ek Parthenou”
Isaac Varon, “Akav Birhateha”
Hildegarde von Bingen, “O virga ac diadema”
Guillaume de Machaut, “Doulz Amis”
Claudio Monteverdi, “Salve Regina II”
John Dowland, “In Darkness Let Me Dwell”
Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”
Traditional (Bulgaria), “Planino Pirin”
Traditional (Barbagia, Sardinia), “Su Passu”