Joan La Barbara is an influential experimental musician, vocalist, and composer whose virtuosic singing style – honed over decades of dedication to and research into different ways of using the voice – has been featured in works by composers including Philip Glass, John Cage, Robert Ashley, and Steve Reich. Her compositions and performances focus around extended vocal techniques which take circularity and cycles as their driving force. La Barbara’s shape-shifting work foregrounds experimentation and disruption, forever finding new ways of playing the voice-as-instrument in unimaginable ways. Before her performance at Rewire 2025 – her first time back in the Netherlands in 13 years – we caught up with her to discuss animism, the voice as an instrument, and the sonic potentials of the body and its surrounding ecologies.

How would you introduce yourself to someone unfamiliar with your work?

I am a composer and performer specialising in exploring the sonic possibilities of the voice as a multi-faceted instrument capable of many sounds. Having trained as a classical vocalist, I have used my healthy technique to free the voice and let it teach me what it can do. I have created a body of work inspired by visual art and by conceptual art, often guiding the listener on a journey through time and space and emotive reactions. When I began my explorations with the voice, I sometimes found that the audience was unfamiliar with some of the sounds I was making and was deciding whether to consider them as "music." Over the years, as more vocalists have experimented with the vocal instrument, audiences have become more accustomed to unusual sounds and sonic gestures. I also worked with many composers, helping them realise their dreams. This enhanced both their work as well as enriching my understanding of what it could be to be a composer.

Your spontaneous approach to real-time composition shows a deep joy for uncertainty as a key part of your methodology. Can you speak a bit about how uncertainty and clarity co-exist – or clash – in your work? And how has this relationship evolved over your career?

I am intrigued and challenged by working with the sound that emerges from me when I pour energy into a conceptual shape. I start with a gesture in my mind, then take a breath and release it with my body. I discover the sound simultaneously with the audience hearing it. Then I work with it, sometimes trying to repeat it or replicate it with slight variations. It is a game, a performance, an exploration of a process in real-time. When I began this journey of finding out what my voice could do in addition to what I had been taught to do, I was exhilarated with the sounds and the act of discovery. As my voice changes with natural aging I make adjustments to accommodate to what I can or can no longer do.

Your compositions and performances have in them a playful and exploratory character which bursts giddily with life. Can you share some thoughts about the ideas of animism, shape-shifting, and mimicry, and how they factor into what you do?

I do feel that everything has sound, whether it is contained, constrained, or revealed. I talk to my dog and explain things to her. I say hello to a rock that I notice on my walks. I say hello to the stars and moon at night. I say hello to my mother, father, and sister when I look up at the sky because I can no longer speak directly to them. Right now I am working on a piece called On the motion of leaves, inspired by the way the wind animates and generates sound as it moves through the trees differently if it is brushing the tops, the crowns, or gently tickling a single leaf. As the work is for a vocal octet, I am experimenting with my own voice to see how closely I can mimic the sounds I hear of the winds and the trees. I make note in my journals of precisely where I move the air through my mouth, against my hard palate, how my tongue moves, how to use the saliva like rain.

Watch "Joan La Barbara - Twelvesong" by "vox_ritualis" on https://www.youtube.com/

One could say that the voice is an intuitive instrument – afterall, nearly everyone learns to use it as a key part of their lives. Your work has famously focussed around specialised techniques that push the boundaries of the human voice. What is the relationship between technique and intuition in your compositional process?

My compositional process begins with response – to a painting, an event, a scientific principle, an article in a newspaper, something that I need to explore. I use stream-of-consciousness lists, freehand drawings of energy shapes, sometimes imitation of languages that I do not know to learn their trajectory and rhythms.

You perform for the first time in the Netherlands in 13 years at Rewire 2025. What are some of the most important learnings or developments you’ve had in the years since, and what can people expect from your upcoming performance at the festival?

I love performing in the Netherlands. I have been here many times, performing with other composers, other artists, and performing my own music. I feel at home and also a stranger. For those who have heard me perform, they will, of course, note differences in my instrument, a shift in range, perhaps some acquired wisdom. I ask only that people join me on my journey, the journey they will experience in the moment of performance and share the sense of discovery, of wonder, and of possibilities yet to be.

To end with a bit of an open question: at this point in your life and career, what kind of a listener are you?

I love hearing something new, something that surprises me. When a student brings me something they want to share, I let it enter my being and am overjoyed if suddenly I hear something I did not expect. That is the joy of being alive.

Joan La Barbara presents a rare performance on Saturday 5 April at Rewire.