Contained in this album - Variant 6’s first full-length record - is a rich history. We began recording this project in November 2019, intending to finish and release the completed album in 2020. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, our final sessions were delayed again and again, until we could finally reconvene in the summer of 2021. We’ve been bursting to share this record for over two years.
The music we offer here celebrates the virtuosic potential of voices singing together. It represents a collection of some of our favorite repertoire from our first half-decade as an ensemble. The music is harmonically rich, deeply expressive, adventurous, and poignant. We are grateful to the composers for their fearless imaginations and for their trust in us. Their music answers the question posed by Denise Levertov in The Sea’s Wash in the Hollow of the Heart: “What alchemy shines from under that shut door, spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?”
This album would not have been possible without our extended Variant 6 family, which, during the slow genesis of this record, grew by (a very special) one. On the final night of our first recording session in 2019, our soprano, Jessica Beebe, announced to us that she was expecting her first child with her husband, Mark. On the night we wrapped in 2021, Jess shared with us that their son, Henry, had taken his first steps that morning. New Suns, a new son; a reason to sing.
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Originally written for Singing City, a choir of over 100 singers, Benjamin transcribed Supplice in 2019 specifically to suit Variant 6. The piece is a sweeping setting of Paul Éluard's poem of the same name. Benjamin’s musical writing is always so lush and so lyrical; we’re allowed to vocally soar, using the full expressive range available to us as an ensemble. The poetry is rich with images: burning fires, frozen limbs, a desolate roadside ditch filled with flowers, a blanket unfolding. Benjamin’s setting captures them all with vibrant musical colors.
This is Gabriel Jackson at his most brilliant; a twelve-minute tour-de-force for the three women of Variant 6. Gabriel’s imagination knows no limits in this work. The text is a poem by Doris Karev- translated from a collection of first lines for other, imagined poems. Gabriel’s setting creates a fantastic world in which Kareva’s lines, proceeding one after another, take on an increased poignancy.
Bruno Bettinelli’s madrigals are brief and enigmatic. The harmony is dense. Intense outbursts interrupt otherwise fragile textures. Chromatic vocal lines twist and yearn for resolution, increasing in complexity, such that moments of harmonic sweetness - like the end of Sia calmo il mio respiro - become incredibly special.
Jeremy’s work, written for us in 2017, sets phrases from Blaise Pascal’s aphoristic Pensées, a defense of Christianity through a collection of logical 'proofs.' Even though Jeremy is an atheist, he doesn't seek to undermine Pascal's faith; rather, he aims to find common ground. The musical language of the piece is woven entirely from a symmetrical pitch construction: that is, two scales - one that goes up, and one that goes down - that meet on middle C-sharp. Jeremy writes that constructing the piece this way was “an interesting compositional challenge for me,” but also that “it corresponds to Pascal’s general reasoning in the Pensées: essentially, I allowed myself complete freedom of thought and invention within a highly—and, it must be acknowledged, arbitrarily—restricted world.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem celebrates that perfect moment in spring when everything is innocent, alive, and buzzing. Gabriel’s setting is as dizzying and electrifying as the text itself. Long melismas unfurl like “weeds, in wheels, shoot[ing] long and lovely and lush.” Soon the music comes to a quiet place, in which we look up at “the glassy peartree leaves and blooms...brush[ing] the descending blue.”
Variant 6 has a long history of performing Joanne’s vocal music, including her Il nome del bel fior (1998) and her Music for the Star of the Sea (1994) which she wrote for the vocal groups Singer Pur and the Hilliard Ensemble. Joanne’s music has always captured our imagination because of the way it looks to the past - with an obvious influence of medieval music - while feeling wholly contemporary. Variant 6 commissioned Joanne in 2020 to set The Sea’s Wash in the Hollow of the Heart, a wonderful poem by Denise Levertov. Joanne’s setting is bright and shimmering. The voices weave in and out of each other, “spinning out gold,” until finally we land together in a glorious musical moment that inspires the name of this record: “Let in new suns that beat and echo in the mind like sounds.”