{"id":9403,"date":"2016-11-12T22:18:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-13T03:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elisewitt.com\/web\/?p=9403"},"modified":"2018-02-25T23:34:43","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T04:34:43","slug":"connections-newsletter-music-people-earbone-elise-witt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elisewitt.com\/web\/connections-newsletter-music-people-earbone-elise-witt\/","title":{"rendered":"CoNNeCTioNS The Newsletter Of Music For People features Earbone<\/em> and Improvisation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"connections-1\"In 1993 I had the privilege and delight of accompanying David Darling to one of his performances at an elementary school in Connecticut. Along with the children, I was entranced as David hooked a tuning peg of his beloved cello to his neck and walked among us, playing songs of whales and wind, and spinning tales of the magic and mystery of music.<\/p>\n

At one point, he drew the bow slowly over the strings and let the sound ring through the room. The beautiful sound of the cello got softer and softer until we couldn\u2019t hear it anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you hear that?\u201d David asked the hushed audience. \u201cThat wave of sound is still in the air,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt just went out the door of this room, and out the door of your school. It is winding its way through the trees and the air and finding your house. It is slipping in your window and crawling into your bed. Tonight when you go to sleep you will find it under your pillow, still singing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The image of that sound wave has stuck with me all these years. The idea that sound goes on forever, and that any sound we make is in the universe forever, is something to deeply consider in these controversial times.<\/p>\n

I was born in Switzerland and came to the US at age 4. I was sent to a nursery school where all the children were communicating with each other in strange sounds that I had never heard. They seemed to understand each other and I could tell from their body language and vocal timbres that they were telling stories, making each other laugh, and getting ideas across. I did what many children do, when thrown into foreign settings \u2013 I did not speak at all in school for 6 months. After 6 months, I just started talking English. That discovery of languages \u2013 how each language has its own musicality, and its own expressions that just can\u2019t be translated \u2013 instilled in me a fascination for sound and language, and made me want to learn all the languages in the world! These two memories, focusing on my love of sound and language, made their way into a song called \u201cEarbone,\u201d on my new CD \u201cWe\u2019re All BORN SINGING.\u201d<\/a> The verses of the song, sung over improvised vocal loops are interspersed with sonic glimpses of late night short wave radio \u2013 snippets of songs and voices from around the world \u2013 an Italian guitar, a Cajun accordion, my students from the Global Village Project<\/a> singing in Swahili, and multi-lingual voices saying how much they love to sing in Lingala, Burmese, Chin, Kirundi, French\u2026<\/p>\n

When I perform the song live, in the spirit of Music for People, it is performed over improvised voices. At a recent concert with Terry Garthwaite<\/a> and Becky Reardon<\/a>, they created new vocal loops for each verse, as I journeyed through the song. At the Cucalorus Film Festival<\/a> in Wilmington NC, where I served as emcee, I was performing solo, so I created looping vocal parts for the audience and sang the verses over them, morphing the loops for each new verse.<\/p>\n

EARBONE<\/strong>
\nBy Elise Witt<\/em>
\n \u00a9 Non Si Sa Mai ASCAP * Recorded on \u201cWe\u2019re All BORN SINGING\u201d \u00a9 EMWorld Records<\/em><\/p>\n

* Earbone official music video
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