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Online musical performances in the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown in New York City bring to light the sonic and temporal challenges, unique acoustic space, and aesthetic possibilities of performing on Zoom. The social connection gained through these performance events is the key to their efficacy.

In this conversation from 2014, composer Pauline Oliveros, one of the most important figures in American experimental music, provides insight into her relationship with the voice and when in her career it was most pivotal for her compositional development. Oliveros touches on her 1961 choral piece Sound Patterns, her Sonic Meditations, the works she performed for voice and accordion in the 1970s and 1980s, Deep Listening, and the late operas that she made with her partner, vocalist and poet Ione.

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Skylighght is a piece for voice and tenor saxophone created by Gelsey Bell and Erin Rogers, of thingNY. The half-hour piece explores the duet structure in a number of different configurations, offering an intimate and vulnerable practice for finding the meeting ground of the voice and the saxophone, both sonically and physically. This Voicing contains the prose score for the piece with extensive description and methodologies for how to perform the piece. Some sections of the work respond to architectural space, while others use the unique pairing of a vocalist singing into the bell of the saxophone to make novel sounds. The final movement, ‘Building Canyons’, is designed for spotlighting the extraordinary multiphonics and harmonic partials that can be created when a vocalist sings into the instrument while the saxophonist is playing from the other end.