Don’t Add To Heartache is a multidisciplinary nature-themed sound album, co-composed by Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea and British composer Tom W. Green. The album incorporates singing, spoken word, acoustic instruments, field recordings, electronics, natural objects; live recorded elements of the album also include a video score and an improvising dancer. The text is structured by Juliana Spahr’s poem, Gentle Now, Don’t Add To Heartache, which traces humanity’s transforming connection to nature; the poem is interspersed with settings of nature poems by Hilda Doolittle, Lindz McLeod, William Bond, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A response to the climate crisis and our current relationship to nature, this album aims to experiment with voice and electronics to re-materialize nature as observed in recent environmental criticism and writings of rewilding and extinction, with poetry and music evoked and imagined through natural soundscapes and the human voice interfaced with electronics.
With this selection of texts and musical responses, we ask: ‘What does it mean to witness and interact with our land?’ 'What is real and what is artificial?' Among the lavish growth of nature, we also witness the harm done by our species, via pollution, construction and deconstruction, which has placed our earth on its last leg. By making contact with nature, are we connecting, or are we destroying?
The centre of this recording is taken from a live performance at the 2023 Hidden Door Festival, the organization who commissioned our work and supported the performances of our artistic team.
released March 1, 2024
ALBUM ARTISTS
Stephanie Lamprea, voice: all tracks
Tom W. Green, live electronics: tracks 2, 4-8, and 10
Richard Craig, flute: tracks 2 and 10
Richard Scholfield, saxophone: tracks 5 and 6
Katherine Wren: tracks 2, 4, 5-6, and 10
Sonia Killmann, prerecorded electronics and foley art:
tracks 2, 5-6, and 10
Penny Chivas, dance artist: tracks 2, 4-8, and 10
Oana Stanciu, video artist: all tracks
COMPOSER BIOS
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator, and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, she uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (Jason Eckardt). She has been praised by Opera News for "her iconoclasm and fearless commitment to new sounds" and for her "impressive display of extended vocal techniques, in the honorable tradition of such forward-looking artists as Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian and Joan La Barbara." Her work has been described as “mercurial'' (I Care If You Listen), “divinely deranged” (The Herald Scotland), and that she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row." (
Halberstadt.de) Stephanie has received awards from the Concert Artist Guild, St. Botolph Club Foundation, the John Cage Orgel Stiftung, the Puffin Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Stephanie has performed as a soloist at Roulette Intermedium, Constellation Chicago, Sound Scotland, National Sawdust, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Casa da Música. She has collaborated with several leading new music ensembles and bands including the Riot Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, City of London Sinfonia, Hebrides Ensemble, Wavefield Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Red Note Ensemble, and Post Coal Prom Queen.
www.stephanielamprea.com
Tom W Green (UK) trained as a composer and electric guitarist at Southampton University, with Masters studies supervised by Michael Finnissy. His background in rock and folk has combined with contemporary classical training to make an unusual perspective on notated music. With a particular interest in collaborating with musicians and artists from varied backgrounds, recent successes have included Absolute Zero with Tryklos Dance and Untold Stories at Leeds Playhouse. The Hinrichsen Foundation recently awarded the Ligeti Quartet a grant to record Tom’s music for electric guitar and string quartet. Concert commissions include works for the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, Ligeti Quartet, Francoise-Green Piano Duo, Gemini, The Ragazze Quartet, Aditi Singers, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Red Note Ensemble and the Mavron Quartet. He has written and directed music for two experimental productions at the National Theatre London, including the widely acclaimed ‘Home’. Sound installation work includes collaborations with Footprint and a large scale reactive-electronic installation at the Hansard Southampton. His 2017 opera The World’s Wife, with a libretto by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, toured to sold-out audiences and won the BASCA award nominations. His most recent opera The Shadow Queen, which depicts a country who turn their queen into a robot, premiered in 2023.
