William Brittelle, Caroline Shaw, Eve Beglarian, Peter S. Shin: Rough Magic

Roomful of Teeth’s Rough Magic, released on New Amsterdam Records in 2023, won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, a category more often associated with string quartets and small instrumental groups than with a vocal ensemble built around extended technique rather than a conventional choral sound. The album collects four premiere-recording commissions written specifically for the group: William Brittelle’s two-part Psychedelics, Caroline Shaw’s five-part The Isle (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from which the album’s title is drawn, Prospero’s own phrase for his sorcery), Eve Beglarian’s None More Than You, and Peter S. Shin’s Bits Torn From Words.

Roomful of Teeth was founded in 2009 specifically to train singers across a deliberately wide range of vocal traditions and techniques not normally taught together in Western choral practice, Tuvan throat singing, Georgian polyphony, Persian classical singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, yodelling, Broadway belting, and death-metal growling among them. That range isn’t a novelty attached to otherwise conventional choral writing; composers who write for the group do so specifically because that vocabulary of extended techniques is available to draw on, and Rough Magic’s four commissions each use it differently, from Shaw’s more harmonically grounded Shakespeare setting to material that leans further into the group’s more unusual technical range.

About the composers

Caroline Shaw, who sings with the ensemble herself, is probably its best-known composer-member: her Partita for 8 Voices, written for Roomful of Teeth, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, making her the youngest composer ever to receive it. The Isle, her contribution here, extends that same working relationship with the group, writing directly for singers she performs alongside, rather than composing for an unfamiliar ensemble at arm’s length. William Brittelle, Eve Beglarian, and Peter S. Shin each bring different backgrounds to the disc, Brittelle working across indie classical and electronic-adjacent idioms, Beglarian an established figure in American experimental vocal and instrumental music since the 1980s, and Shin a newer voice among the four.

About the recording

Commissioning four substantial new works specifically for one ensemble’s particular vocal capabilities, rather than assembling a mixed programme of existing repertoire, is a significant undertaking for an independent label, New Amsterdam Records has built its catalogue largely around exactly this kind of purpose-written commission, working with composers and performers who often move between classical, experimental, and popular-music contexts rather than staying inside a single genre.

Why the album is called Rough Magic

The title comes directly from Caroline Shaw’s contribution, The Isle, Shakespeare’s Prospero, in The Tempest’s fifth act, refers to his own sorcery as “this rough magic” in the speech where he vows to break his staff and abandon it for good. Shaw’s five-part setting draws on that same late-play material, and the phrase works as a fitting umbrella for the whole record: all four commissions treat the human voice itself as the source of something closer to conjured effect than conventional song, built from techniques, overtone singing, close dissonant harmony, non-Western vocal placements, that most classical listeners encounter far less often than a string quartet’s equivalent extended techniques. Naming the album after one composer’s Shakespeare setting rather than a more generic title also signals how central Shaw’s piece is to the disc’s identity, even though it shares the running time with three other composers’ work.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic, covering a real, recent recording released years after the original 1991–2018 shop closed, it isn’t part of the site’s recovered archive. We’ve built it from verified facts about the recording, its composers and performers, and the award it won, extending the kind of coverage the original site gave to notable classical releases to what’s actually being recorded and recognised today.