Seated at the Throat [2023-24]

solo baritone voice [25’]

written for Ty Bouque

performance history

6/17/2025 - Ty Bouque. Lecture-Performance. Divergent Studio. Longy School of Music. Cambridge, MA.

3/28/2025 - Ty Bouque. MaerzMusik. Berlin, Germany.

2/19/2025 - Ty Bouque. Lecture-Performance. School of Arts. Ghent, Belgium.

2/6/2025 - Ty Bouque. Lecture-Performance. Composition Forum. Manhattan School of Music. NYC.

6/25/2024 - Ty Bouque. Lecture-Performance. Divergent Studio. Longy School of Music. Cambridge, MA.

3/10/2024 - Ty Bouque. Boston Conservatory. Seully Hall. Boston, MA

2/5/2024 - Ty Bouque. Lecture-Performance. The Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. The Netherlands

1/23/2024 - Ty Bouque. 2640 Space. Baltimore, MD

reactions

“Packed solo vocal recitals by legendary figures Pamela Z and Joan La Barbara at the Festspiele Haus are complemented by younger singers Ty Bouque and Laura Bowler at Silent Green, with Bouque’s whisper-quiet rendition of Timothy McCormack’s Seated at the Throat , which the composer calls a “queer bloodséance”, an eerie, moving standout.” -The Wire

“Perhaps the most compelling of the three works Bouque performs is Timothy McCormack’s Seated at the Throat, a work the composer has called a “queer blood-séance”. Breath, Bouque suggests, is “articulable” but “unpossessable”. Likewise, HIV becomes a second body growing inside one’s own: a body that isn’t yours but is impossible to get rid of, like being haunted by a spirit. If Johnson’s piece seemed to concentrate on sounds produced through exhalation—such as whistling—McCormack’s concentrates on inhalation—the open mouth taking in air to produce sound, a kind of open border between inside and outside. Pitched growls become tender moans, a kind of dulled pain or protective embrace, out of which emerges the word “passage”, vowels extended, consonants trailing along as if an afterthought. The work gets steadily quieter and quieter, at that border of sound and silence where sounds seems to cling for life: an effect eerie and somehow very moving.” -David Grundy, Streams of Expression

program note

A queer blood-seance pivots into a plea for withinness. Dark, hermetic, sensuous; so sunken it’s hallucinogenic; so blurry it’s the sharpest I’ve ever felt…

text

song i

Beyond the mouth,

Swelled & heavy,

Ghosts nest in my passage,

Sprawled upon my nodes

This grave is loud.

Dead sex echoes

In the carrier

song ii

my Stowaway,

our hosts…

i eat and am eaten.

song iii

Unfurl the tongue.

Flare the throat.

My fleshy altar

A seat to offer

You’ll find me,

Sunken,

Hungrier than the ghost