Titration is a song cycle for unaccompanied choir by American composer Shara Nova.  On the CD it is performed by The Crossing and their conductor Donald Nally.  It’s an interesting and unusual, indeed quite unconventional, piece but it is oddly compelling and has won a fair bit of recognition including a Gramophone “Critics Choice” award this year.

It’s rooted in Nova’s reaction to her conservative upbringing in the American South and perhaps the key line of the text is “How do I keep on feeling in this mean, mean world?”  The cycle is ung continuously.  There’s no break between “movements”.  It’s what I can best describe as “post-modern polyphony”.  The interweaving vocal lines are essentially tonal but there’s a good deal of use of extended vocal technique; speech, humming, shouting, laughing, grunting, whooping and even growling and spitting.  All this around a text which is as much about textures and patterns as explicit meaning.

The Crossing perform it with great skill and total commitment and it’s extremely well recorded with a clear but resonant acoustic.  It was recorded in St. Peter’s in The Great Valley in Malvern PA and sounds “churchy” but with great clarity.  There’s a handy booklet that explains the composer’s motivations and influences as well as providing the texts.  All in all, quite a challenging piece of music but rewarding and extremely well performed and recorded.

It’s available as a physical CD or digitally as MP3 or FLAC; both CD quality and 24bit/96kHz.  I listened to the hi-res FLAC.

Catalogue number: Navona Records NV 6504