Composition for SATB choir, auto-tune, and electronics; 18 min, 2019

We, The Chorus is a composition that for a professional choir transformed into an automated, artificial Greek Chorus.

The work uses a text from Valentinas Klimašauskas’s book Oh, My Darling & Other Rants and the story of Rajah Rajasingham, a street musician who has sung the same line of a song in Münster, Germany for over twenty years. This repetitive, mantra-like performance represents the persistent, often overlooked voice of society.

Throughout the piece, the choir’s voices are processed in real-time through an auto-tune system, which constantly corrects their pitch like a word processor’s auto-correct function. This automated choir is layered with two other sounds: a field recording of Rajasingham’s singing, which also captures racist comments from teenagers filming him, and repetitive harmonies from techno music.

By merging the human, the marginalized, and the algorithmic voices, the piece creates a sonic environment where authorship roles are reversed, questioning how are voices heard in the society today.

Commissioned by Vilnius Choir