Allconsuming is a deeply personal piece to me about my relationship with my father. It sparks discomfort, anger, sadness, abandonment and loneliness. The piece is almost solely written with lyrics, as I wanted to tell my story in an artistic way. It also relies on a lot of repetition in the lyrics, which is a good way to really make your point clear and to make the listener really concentrate on the lyrics.
I utilized my voice in this piece as the lead voice, and explored mostly two ways of handling the other three voices.
I often used a classic "lead voice" vs. three backing voices roster in this piece.
Example 1 clearly shows this way. The three remaining voices come in in a syncopated melody and quickly transform into a slow backing-vocals type chord roster, but still whilst singing the same lyrics as the lead-voice is singing. The slow, long notes in the backing vocals still make it possible to understand the lyrics, even though they rhythmically overlap.
At the beginning of the guitar solo, there is a cluster happening with the brass, the violin, the viola and the voices. The voices first try to blend all the way with the other instruments, then get more airy towards the finish of the sustained cluster, so it sounds like the band as a whole is runnning out of breath (Example 4).
During the guitar solo, there is another bell moment in the backings. I doubled the voices deliberately with more airy, woody sounding woodwinds and kept them in a lower range, so they would blend into the section quite seamlessly (Example 5). The second voice doubles the second trombone (out of frame in this excerpt for clarity).
Ffter the guitar solo ends, the piece morphs into a reprise of the first theme and shows small differences in how the backing voices are handled (Example 6). I purposefully didn't give the vocalists fixed sillables or vowels to sing on, and wanted them to choose them themselves, according what felt best in the respective registers they were singing in. Voice 1 chose to sing on almost a bit "opera"-sounding vowels, like a very open mix of "a" and "o" (ɒ in IPA). Voice 2 chose to stay legato on a very open, but far back placed "a" sound (ɑ in IPA). Voice 3 also stayed on the same open "a"-sound as Voice 2 did, but decided to use more consonants in the beginning of her notes and phrases, which gave the whole woven backing melody another color.
The last example I want to show in this piece is very close to the ending of the piece (Example 7). The four voices come together in a very close voicing, and were instructed to sing with as few emotions as possible. My goal was to make them - blended together with the clarinet and the three saxophones - sound like a vocoder, like a machine that is telling the same story over and over again, another reference to my relationship with my father.
