Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/sound artist explores
the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries,
creating works for a wide array of media, developing a unique vocabulary of
experimental and extended vocal techniques (multiphonics, circular singing,
ululation, and glottal clicks that have become her “signature sounds”), which has
garnered awards in the United States and Europe and numerous commissions, recently
from the West Deutscher Rundfunk; Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company; a choral work for the
University of Iowa Center for New Music; and the solo cello work A Trail of
Indeterminate Light. 73 Poems, her collaborative work with text artist Kenneth
Goldsmith, was included in The American Century Part II: SoundWorks at The Whitney
Museum of American Art. La Barbara has collaborated with artists including Lita
Albuquerque, Judy Chicago, Ed Emshwiler, Kenneth Goldsmith, Peter Gordon, Bruce
Nauman, Steina, Woody Vasulka, and Lawrence Weiner. She has premiered landmark
compositions by noted American composers, including Morton Subotnick’s chamber opera
Jacob’s Room, his Hungers, and Intimate Immensity; the title role in Robert Ashley’s
opera Now Eleanor’s Idea, his Balseros, and Dust; Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s
Einstein on the Beach; Morton Feldman’s Three Voices; Steve Reich’s Drumming; and
John Cage’s Solo for Voice 45 from Song Books. In addition to her internationally
acclaimed discs of Feldman and Cage (New Albion), Sound Paintings and the reissue of
La Barbara’s seminal works from the 1970s Voice is the Original Instrument (Lovely
Music) and Shaman-Song (New World Records), she has recorded for A&M Horizon,
Centaur, Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch, Mode, Music & Arts, MusicMasters, Musical
Heritage, Newport Classic, Sony, Virgin, Voyager, and Wergo.
