EXAUDI: Pocket Universe
NMC Recordings

Commenting on Guide, the piece she wrote for EXAUDI, Canadian-British composer Cassandra Miller stated that she aspired to create material that would capture “the feeling of freedom one gets from singing.” The performances by the vocal ensemble of works created between 2013 and 2019 by Miller, Andrew Hamilton, Leo Chadburn, and Geoff Hannan not only convey that sense of liberation but in equal measure joy. As conductor James Weeks guides his charges through the four pieces, a palpable sense of excitement emerges as the singers tackle commissioned works of remarkable imagination and originality.

Some vocal ensembles hew to a song-based presentation, one such as EXAUDI a more experimental realm where boundaries are reset, risks taken, and audacity reins. Composer and performer enter creative territories heretofore unexplored and do so with the greatest fervour. Look no further for proof than the four settings on Pocket Universe, each of which sounds like nothing encountered before. The nearly seventy-minute release features astonishing feats of vocal dexterity matched by material that's often staggering in complexity. It would be fascinating to review the scores to see what Weeks and the singers worked with to deliver the performances. Formed in 2002 and comprising soprano, mezzo, countertenor, tenor, baritone, and bass singers, the UK-based ensemble has collaborated with hundreds of composers, and the results are typically mind-bending.

Alex Ross wrote of one Miller work, “Music this uncalculatedly beautiful leaves you almost desperate with gratitude,” words that might seem hyperbolic until you hear her music. Grounded in a compositional approach involving “meditation-based uncontrolled singing,” Guide (2013) grew out of exposure to the hymn “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” that she first heard on a 1968 Maria Muldaur album of her mother's. In her rendering, Muldaur drew upon a recording she'd heard of an anonymous singer from Kentucky, marked by “a melody full of swoops over a large tessitura,” in Miller's words. In turn, the composer had EXAUDI first memorize Muldaur's take and then gave the singers a “quasi-neumatic score” with instructions about starting pitch, tempo, and repetition for three vocal sub-groups to execute, Guide the result. Voices catapult ecstatically through the stereo field, their parts entwining gloriously for fifteen unbroken minutes like the rapturous voices of a gospel choir.

The setting by Irish composer Hamilton is as riveting. While the “Proclamation of the Republic” is a work that looms large in the lives of Irish people, it wasn't until 2015 when Hamilton spent a week living next to Dublin's Arbour Hill Cemetery that its words, displayed on one of the cemetery's walls, took on greater resonance, so much so he determined they'd be the text for this EXAUDI commission. Its unusual musical presentation grew out of Hamilton's discovery that when Patrick Pearse read it on April 24, 1916 outside the General Post Office sections had to be repeated as people passing by couldn't hear what was said and some degree of confusion resulted. Such aspects were deliberately incorporated into the work to capture that sense of confusion and repetition, making for a staggering vocal delivery that's dizzyingly disorienting. While it begins gently enough with murmured fragments softly repeating, it swells over seventeen minutes into a feverish cathedral of declamatory force.

After the bravura displays of the opening pieces, Chadburn's more restful Affix Stamp Here comes as something of a relief. It's no less striking in the originality of its concept, however, which is rooted in deltiology, the collecting and study of picture postcards. The composer here uses postcard messages written by mid-twentieth century British travelers as a ground, with each of the thirty texts brought to life by a vocal member and coupled with a soft electronic drone. Mundane details about activities, the weather, and food (sample text: “Newquay, 1969. I was last here in 1925. What a shock I got this time. It was such a quiet place, but now you can't move for the crowds.”) accrue into an expression that's powerfully moving in its portrait of real folk. Of course irony's part of the mix, but the work registers as a poignant document of memories by vacationers, many perhaps now dead. The treatment dovetails with the general character of Chadburn's work, which often explores the inherent musicality of singing and speaking voices.

Last but certainly not least, the album ends with the gripping titular work by Hannan, whose music often begins with a clearly defined set-up that's thereafter stretched, subverted, fractured, and destabilized. Utilizing texts by Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton, Pocket Universe explores, in Hannan's words, “the friction and vitality embedded in the language of scientific revolution.” In his “at times zany work,” meanings are not so much explicated but rather treated as vessels of soaring energy. Infectious sing-song melodies are layered, splintered, and echoed in a manner that's playful; consistent with that, he says the piece “resembles a wardrobe assembled from IKEA but without the instructions,” and that the jubilant “vocal cosmos” generated teeters between rational and irrational, precise and ecstatic. Shuddering, claps-accented voices ascend ecstatically until the work reaches a less frenzied resolution.

September 2026