A Choir Made of Cellos
Karen Kaderavek’s cello transcriptions of Chesnokov’s choral music retain the lines while changing how they speak. The absence of words makes other aspects of the writing newly exposed.
Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy. CC0; via Wikimedia Commons. CC0. Image source.
When a choir sings a chord, its members share both a harmony and a syllable. The vowel helps the sounds belong together; the consonant can make their beginning or ending perceptible. An instrumental transcription has to establish these relationships through other means.
In Voices Without Words, Karen Kaderavek adapts choral music by Pavel Chesnokov through multiple recorded cello parts. The result begins with a clear compositional inheritance: lines conceived for voices within the Russian Orthodox choral tradition. Each of those lines now passes through the articulation and resonance of a bowed string.
The cello offers a wide range in which different choral functions can be distributed. Its lower register can provide weight and continuity, while an upper line remains recognisable as a separate presence. Bow speed, contact and changes of register help differentiate parts whose source lies in a vocal score.
Something nevertheless changes irrevocably. An instrument cannot pronounce the liturgical text. Even where the notes are retained, the relation between a word and its duration is no longer directly available to a listener. The text remains part of the work’s history and can guide understanding, but it is not being sung by the cello.
This absence makes a useful listening experiment possible. Where does a phrase seem to breathe when no singer needs air? How does an arrival become collective when there is no consonant to articulate it? The musical syntax has to remain audible through the shaping of the separate lines.
Multitracking introduces another distinction. One musician records the parts successively rather than sharing a simultaneous performance with a choir. Balance and ensemble therefore emerge through a process particular to recorded music. The identity of the player connects the layers, while their different musical roles keep them apart.
Chesnokov’s choral writing survives this encounter as a source of melody, harmony and direction. Kaderavek’s project invites attention to the act of transfer itself: what can be preserved in a line, and what has to be found again when its means of speech changes.
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