NL premiere

Meara O'Reilly is a composer and artist whose work focuses on perception and new musical interfaces. Lauded by Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo as music that "sends you, moves you, destroys you with beauty," O'Reilly's Hockets For Two Voices utilises a thirteenth-century style of singing called hocketing. It involves taking a melody and splitting it across multiple voices. Although dating back to the vocal music of medieval Europe, the technique is also found in indigenous folk practices globally. The competing and syncopated voices play off one another with a jovial and convivial sense of pleasure. As if synthesised, the two voices sing notes of varying sustain, sometimes in brief xylophonic bursts while other notes ring out and bleed into one another, gifting snippets of harmonious overlap. The piece will be performed at Rewire by singer and composer Mingjia Chen – who is a member of Roomful of Teeth – and musician Linnea Sablosky.