Voix humaine (Vox humana) for mixed choir, 12 brass instruments, 2 pianos, 4 gongs, 4 tam-tams (1971)

Tomasz Sikorski described the piece in the Warsaw Autumn programme booklet in the following manner:

Voix humaine  for mixed choir, 12 brass instruments, 2 pianos, 4 gongs, 4 tam-tams, composed in 1971, is a work without any words. The human voice is treated here in a purely instrumental fashion. I have used two methods of producing sound in the choir: bocca aperta and bocca chiusa. The rhythmic-sonic structure of the piece is determined by the principle of independent playing, which is applied consistently throughout the work. However, the problem which is the focus of my attention in Voix humaine is the spatiality of sound phenomena (quasi-resonant effects in the choir, overlapping, ‘emergence’ of tones etc.). The static form of the piece is only a result of a juxtaposition of a number of sound ‘objects’ of varying density, colour, dynamics and duration. Duration of the whole composition: ca 10’.

Voix humaine is related to one of the first of Sikorski’s works – Prologues, written in 1964. At that time the composer saw the choir as an instrument whose colour and sound producing capabilities considerably expanded the means available in a traditional instrumental ensemble. The choir constituted a clearly distinct quality and the sound blocks it produced were juxtaposed with other sounds. In Voix humaine the composer’s objective is different, because he tries to find shared ‘places’ or ‘moments’ in which the choir begins to resonate with the sound of traditional instruments, to complement them, modify (retune) and become submerge in them. He proposes various combinations and asks the listener for an opinion. This can be seen at the beginning of the composition (no. 4), where an undulating alto module ‘flows’ naturally from an undulating French horn module played increasingly quietly until pianissimo.

Voix humaine as well as Prologues, a work preceding it, clearly demonstrate the artistic transformations of the composer’s musical language. In the 1960s Sikorski, like many other artists, was fascinated with the possibilities offered by non-traditional uses of musical instruments. The direction he embarked on at the time was not – to use a tree metaphor – about going up, towards the crown, i.e. expanding the available palette of colours, creating a vast catalogue of sounds, but about going down, towards the roots in order to get to know the nature of sound, to reach its deepest, primordial structures.