Madness, Royalty and the Music of Screams

“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is toward the older end of the repertoire that Michener usually tackles. Last Sunday he performed in London. With American poet Moore Mother In a series of native pairings. In March, Michener held an event. Works by Jason Yarde, Mattana Roberts, Tansy Davis and others, all written in the past three years, at the MaerzMusik contemporary music festival in Berlin.

“I consider myself an actor who composes — in that order, really,” she said. “But to me,” he added, “the responsibility of any actor is to really liberate the score from what you see.”

Machiner was born in London in 1970 to Jamaican parents. Early exposure to ska, dub, gospel and Rastafarian music at home was later nurtured in a local Adventist church. “If you go to predominantly black churches, and people find out that you have a talent for music, or for delivering lyrics, it really encourages that from a young age,” Michener said. ” said Michener.

His path to contemporary music was complicated. As a student at Trinity College of Music in London, she was exposed to some modern works – including “Eight Songs for a Mad King” – although most of her training involved classical singing. In her last year there, her singing teacher died, and a new tutor regraded her voice from low contralto to high mezzo-soprano. “I had to start over,” Michner said.

After graduating, Michner took an eight-year hiatus from performing but continued to take voice lessons while working in theater advertising and music publishing. In 2008, he found a teacher who was “insensitive to contemporary music,” he said: opera singer Jacqueline Straubinger Bremer, with whom he has continued lessons for the past 15 years. “Some people never find the right teacher for their voice, because of where they are musically, or where they are in their life,” Michner said. “I was lucky to find him.”