The Organist
Between Speaking and Singing
Will spoken language become obsolete? What if, in the future, a simple conversation between two adults becomes a rarity, like an obscure musical piece that involves months of rehearsing and vocal training to be able to perform?
By Andrew Leland • • 37m ListenThis week we visit the shady glen where language and music make out with each other, in a field surrounded by phonemes, intonation, and the throw-away vocables of human expression. What’s important here isn’t what we say, but how we say it.
We talk with artists working at the boundary between language and music: the composer Kate Soper, the poet Jeremy Sigler, and the drummer Milford Graves.
Produced by Jenny Ament, Myke Dodge Weiskopf, Laura Irving, Ross Simonini, Liam Geraghty.
Image credit: Courtesy of Jake Meginsky / Full Mantis
