Backstage with Matthew: The unique, and ancient, vocal techniques of Innocence

Lucy Shelton and Vilma Jää

Before we get to the interview, let’s hear both artists singing in Innocence. First, an example of Vilma – as you can hear, she inflects her voice with catches that ornament the melodic line, and creates different resonances that throw the voice in haunting, ethereal ways:

And here’s an example of Lucy singing, using a technique called Sprechstimme (speechvoice)—a spoken line noted on pitches that gives an incredible sense of rhetorical impact:

Given the incredible breadth of techniques of both artists, I asked Vilma how she defines herself as an artist. She uses the terms “folk” for the kind of singing she uses in Innocence and “Ethno Pop” for her own work (I encourage you to listen to her most recent album, available here on Spotify, and here on Apple Music). In fact, many of the techniques are found in both as you can hear in this video she made for our social media channels:

The vocal elements in Vilma’s performance that feel so contemporary to us, actually come from deeply ancient sources—both the Viena Karelian yoik (a traditional form of song in Viena Karelian music) and Nordic herding calls, used mainly for cattle. There are three main herding call traditions that Vilma draws on—the Swedish, the Finnish and the Karelian (Karelians are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group who are indigenous to the historical region of Karelia). Vilma studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and studied Swedish herding calls at the Kungliga Musikhögskolan in Stockholm. Up until this point, no one has yet researched the Finnish traditions, but since 2019, Vilma has been researching Finnish and Karelian herding calls and she is planning to publish a graphic notation for Finnish herding calls to ensure that the tradition survives and can be passed forward to future generations. She tells me that herding calls were often used because herds of farm animals would be kept in forests, mixed up across different farmers. Farmers would have their own herding calls, and the animals would respond to the distinctive calls, allowing them to separate out their own animals. She tried her herding calls on cattle in a field—they did move closer to her but, as Vilma notes, that’s different from training cattle to come a specific call.  

Here's another video of Vilma demonstrating her techniques:

Lucy defines herself as a contemporary music singer, and not an opera singer. Lucy’s career has been one of the most important in contemporary music, giving the world premiere of over a hundred works by composers including Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Poul Ruders (composer of our upcoming Handmaid’s Tale), David Del Tredici, and György Kurtag. The majority of her work has been in chamber music, and Innocence actually marked her first opera (if you don’t count the Gilbert & Sullivan she did in college!). She is someone who has embraced curiosity, challenge and technique at every step of the journey. She has been a particular specialist in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912), the work that maybe established the technique of Sprechstimme most clearly.

You can watch Lucy describing a little of Pierrot lunaire here:

And a full performance of Pierrot lunaire with Lucy and the Da Capo Chamber Players here:

Lucy has been instrumental in introducing so many singers to contemporary music and encouraging them not to be afraid of it. Passing along traditions from her own teacher, Jan DeGaetani, as well as developing her own approaches, Lucy learns complex scores by separating the pitch material from its rhythm. She creates pitch charts phrase by phrase, showing octave displacements which reduce large leaps to more manageable relationships. (If you read music, you’ll know that a leap of a 9^th is just an octave plus a second, and it’s much easier to hear and sing the interval of a second!) She then chooses possible tonal centers in order to give a traditional harmonic context with consonance and dissonance, essentially creating her own structure through which she can interpret, learn, and memorize the work. Here’s an example of one of Lucy’s pitch charts:

Just as with Vilma’s herding calls, Lucy’s use of Sprechstimme in Innocence takes us back to a more ancient use of the voice—a way of creating theatrical rhetorical impact, with heightened story-telling, particularly before microphones gave performers more flexibility to the voice. Lucy recommended a video of Alexander Moissi reading Goethe’s Erlkönig with a technique that is essentially Sprechstimme. It’s in German, but you can get the sense of the effect, particularly in his portrayal of multiple characters:

This idea of passing down tradition is very much a part of Lucy and Vilma’s artistry and it’s not surprising as music was central to both singer’s families. Lucy grew up in Claremont, CA with parents who were amateur musicians (she would go and hear San Francisco Opera performances at the Shrine Auditorium in LA where she would love to sit up close and see the sweat on the performers’ faces!). With her parents and siblings they would sing what she calls “slippery Christmas carols” —carols sung in four-part harmony but sliding slowly from note to note (you can hear resonances of that in how she sings in Innocence). Vilma’s mother was a folk dancer and produced folk festivals. Vilma had been struggling to find resonance with the violin that she’d been learning and had put it aside for six months, but when she went to a folk festival and saw people playing the violin so differently from her classical training, she asked her mother if she could learn folk violin, or fiddle. That ultimately led to her first band mammantytöt! (or “Mama’s Girls”) playing wherever they could, often for little to no money.

Lucy and Vilma have been in every iteration of Innocence across the five co-commissioners (Aix-en-Provence, London, Helsinki, Amsterdam and San Francisco). But their connection pre-dates even the world premiere. Kaija Saariaho wrote these parts explicitly for them. The Teacher’s original part invited a lot of interpretation, allowing the singer to pick any octave. The instructions were as follows:

Very expressive, partly spoken, partly sung, with given pitches in any octave, maybe changing octave suddenly, using also extreme registers with screams and murmurs, especially on the notes with fermatas.

But in 2020, when Lucy first showed Kaija her realization of these instructions, it was clear that Kaija actually had something less extreme in mind—she and Lucy went back and forth on ideas, keeping some of the larger intervals between notes that Lucy felt important. Lucy told me how meaningful it was to be entrusted with finding the vocal shape of The Teacher, and how profound it is to be in each rehearsal period, shaping and reshaping the role and how it fits with her colleagues.

An example of Kaija’s Saariaho’s scoring of Sprechstimme with Lucy’s annotated scream.

It was in 2017 that Vilma received a call from her head of department in Helsinki where she was studying. Kaija was looking for Finnish folk singers and had seen some of Vilma’s work on YouTube. Vilma went to the university’s parking garage with its incredible acoustics and made a video that included herding calls and a number of other vocal techniques. Based on that video, Kaija asked her to do the role. (Kaija showed me that video in 2018 and I’ll never forget what it meant to see that and to get a sense of what Markéta would become as a role). As with Lucy, Vilma worked directly with Kaija on shaping the role, working through how the vocal techniques could be used in text. Kaija was so committed to Vilma taking this on that she personally paid for drama lessons for Vilma (this was Vilma’s first theatrical role).

Innocence will linger long in memory for so many reasons, but the deep, ancient artistry that Lucy and Vilma each bring to the piece represent a huge part of the piece’s fundamental universality. Although their techniques are wildly different, they both stem from a use of the human voice for enhanced communication—for conveying either deep rhetoric or, quite literally, for communicating with animals. Both artists are committed to passing along the torch as holders of these traditions, and it is so inspiring to have been a part of that journey as they introduced us, the audiences to some extraordinary examples of what is possible with the human voice.

Here is the Innocence trailer to remind us of the profound impact this piece made earlier this summer. It was a privilege to witness the inspiring artistry that Vilma, Lucy and the entire cast brought to our stage.