Choral Arts: What album, recording, or artist are you listening to most right now?

Katherine Altizer: I’ve been watching and listening to Lulu Wang’s The Farewell on repeat. The acting is amazing, there are many laugh-aloud moments, and I love multigenerational family stories that center women and questions about the nature of home. The story focuses on Billi (Awkwafina), a Chinese-American writer, and her family as they come to terms with the news that their beloved Nai Nai, Billi’s paternal grandmother, has terminal cancer. The movie is filled to bursting with beautiful music, and the score, both the fantastic new compositions by Alex Weston and the perfect borrowed tunes, really leans into film music’s ability to communicate the inner lives of characters. The main themes treat Mykal Kilgore’s voice like a solo instrument, beautiful vocables sung in falsetto, set against strings; the result is that you get all the symbolism associated with the human voice in a film score—a musical manifestation of a character’s voice—combined with the more semiotically open approach of a wordless instrument. I love how each melodic line in “The Lie” ends on a little leap, a yearning ascent that leaves you feeling aspirational and restless, somewhat like Billi. The choirs are also scored with vocables, and in one interview Weston talks about how the choir communicates the idea of community as well as plays on the simultaneous drama and mundanity of family life; whereas a choir is often used to create theatrical moments, the wordlessness of a choir singing “doo doo doo” makes highly dramatic visual and narrative moments seem almost funny.   There’s a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Come Healing” by Elayna Boynton at the end that never fails to bring me to tears.