>  recent work  >  Reader's Chorus (2014)

The Reader's Chorus


In 2014, poet Jordan Biren and I founded the Reader’s Chorus, an open ensemble of readers with varied backgrounds: musicians, composers, visual artists, film makers, poets - people interested in reading aloud and experimenting with the possibilities of the speaking voice.  The group meets weekly at our rehearsal space in Chinatown. My job is to work with the chorus members to develop and arrange material from a wide variety of textual sources - we’ve recently worked with arcane hermetic texts, artists’ manifestos, a collection of old recipes clipped from women’s magazines. There are aspects of music, poetry, chant, and theater in this, but altogether it’s a form that plays in the space between the meaning and sound of the text, and between the individual and group voice.


The Reader’s Chorus has performed at the Wulf, the Velaslavasay Panorama, Automata, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Poetic Research Bureau, The Walt Disney Concert Hall. At MOCA Geffen we premiered a piece by James Tenney.

My most recent personal projects are a collaboration with the poet Joshua Beckman: Readings, an installation and recording (being put out as vinyl by the label Spoken Records) and with Haruko Tanaka: The Reader’s Chorus Reader, a compendium of the sources and scores developed and used by The Reader’s Chorus.


More about the Reader’s Chorus at our website:

https://www.readerschorus.com/