ANAT BEN-DAVID - Conversations

Conversations is an EP featuring four compositions made with Anna Dennis, James Oldham and Sean Ashton. In Conversations 1 and 4, Oldham and Ashton become discursive instruments: Ben-David asks them questions, and their unscripted responses form the basis of the music, engendering its rhythmic pattern. Their voices are heard only intermittently, sometimes echoed by Ben-David’s sung quotations of their meandering thoughts, which address how speech is affected by its various social contexts. In Conversations 2 and 3, soprano Anna Dennis and Ben-David create sonic dialogues using Robert Schumann’s ‘Herzelei’ and Claude Debussy and Pierre Loüys’s ‘La chevelure’. The recording also captures the conversations they have before performing: anecdotes shared about the prurient innuendo of certain male practitioners – conductors, directors, potty-mouthed maestros – encountered in their respective professions of opera singer and artist.