Score on special sale, preparatory audio material available from the Hire Library

When James Weeks asked me to write a piece for EXAUDI, I knew right away that Iwould attempt to write a piece about “the feeling of freedom one gets from singing”.EXAUDI can make anything at all sound like freedom, it’strue–but I wanted to writesomething specifically to amplify this feeling, a piece about EXAUDI.My first task then was to find which sound exactly exemplifies this singing-freedom.Eventually I remembered a hymn sung in “lined-out” style, that I listened to as a kid onone of my mother’s folk music albums: “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” as recordedby Maria Muldaur in 1968. The song is Muldaur’s imitation of a recording she had heardof an anonymous singer from Kentucky–a melody full of swoops overa large tessiturathat, more than anything, sounds like it feels good to sing.From there, I asked the singers of EXAUDI to first memorize the Muldaur recording, asif following an aural tradition. I then gave them a quasi-neumatic score with furtherinstructions such as starting pitch, tempo, and repetitions.The particular way in which the repetitions function (between three groups somewhatindependent of each other) is inspired directly by Bryn Harrison’s “Eight Voices” writtenfor EXAUDI in 2012. Thefirst time I heard EXAUDI in person, they were in rehearsalsight-reading an early version of “Eight Voices”–it was a seminal moment, and hasgreatly influenced the course of my musical imagination

Cassandra Miller