The Aurealities Ensemble with improvisations and compositions by Lina Allemano, Christine Duncan, Matthias Mainz, Joe Sorbara and Chris Tonelli to the lyrical work of Paul Dutton

The soundsinger, poet and author Paul Dutton belongs to the founding generation of vocalists of improvised music since the 1970s. Dutton’s work moves between sound performance, improvisation and poetry, the limits of which Dutton always seems to cross from all sides simultaneously in an open ambiguity. Paul Dutton was a member of the influential Canadian quartet The Four Horsemen with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery and bpNichol; he is a member of the non-idiomatic improv ensemble CCMC with Michael Snow, John Oswald and John Kamevaar and of Five Men Singing with Jaap Blonk, Koichi Makigami, Phil Minton and David Moss and has worked with John Butcher, Bob Ostertag, Lee Ranaldo, Christian, among others Marclay, Thomas Charmetant and composers R. Murray Schafer, John Beckwith and Trevor Wishart. On the occasion of Canada’s appointment as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020/21, Canadian percussionist Joe Sorbara and German pianist/composer Matthias Mainz developed a program for September 2021 with world premieres and improvisations around Dutton’s Sound Poems in a Canadian-German octet.

Matthias Mainz first met Paul Dutton and the French cellist Thomas Charmetant in the winter of 2012, when he was able to invite them both to a short improvised set in Cologne after a concert in Paris. The two reunited in Toronto in the summer of 2013 and spent about ten days in a trio with drummer Joe Sorbara performing improv concerts followed by three productive days of recording at Grant Avenue Studios in Hamilton, Ontario. Since Dutton stopped his international touring activities in 2017, Mainz and Sorbara have put together a cast for the project around the two Canadian soundsingers Christine Duncan and Chris Tonelli, who refer to Paul Dutton in their development. Dutton provides Linguistic Poems and Sound Poems that feed into the composers’ work.

Extended Voice/Soundsinging

Extended voice in improvised and composed music has now become firmly established in the repertoire of art music. This is still paradoxical, because the singing techniques and styles are still very closely tied to the artistic personalities who developed them, embody them and place them in context from there. The origins of the extended singing techniques can be traced back to Dadaism, which is now a hundred years old. From the 1960s at the latest, however, the field widened immensely to include all avant-garde niches in high and low cultures, including new music, free jazz, the Fluxus movement and references to non-European folk music. Apparently contradictory aesthetics are mixed in Dutton’s concept of soundsinging. In an interview with Mainz, Dutton talked about his beginnings as a singer of traditional British folk music in Toronto’s coffee houses in the 1960s. The sheer range of dynamics and characteristics of vocal expression in Dutton’s performances ranges from the immediacy and loudness of acoustic folk singing to soft clicks and subtle overtones. What is important to Dutton, however, is the separation of trained voices, which he contrasts with his idea of the natural, untrained voice.

This results in an attractive tension: the highly differentiated, above all completely individualized artistic expressiveness, which refers back to the individual human being, to a social nature, to vocal means of expression and communication originally intended – with a thinking based on individual expressiveness, that relates more to equality than conformity. All sorts of stylistic references to the musical avant-garde can be found in Dutton’s Sound Singing. In the absoluteness of the improvisation and the momentary interaction there is certainly also a good portion of jazz, on the fringes of which all individual freedoms were differentiated again in the 1960s.