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Unaccompanied: Stephanie Lamprea’s new album

Due to CMCB’s closure, our staff has been working remote. Becca Connors, CMCB’s marketing coordinator, emailed CMCB Voice faculty and staff member Stephanie Lamprea to chat about her new album, Unaccompanied: Tiny Works for Quarantine, vol 1. Stephanie recorded her album in her room at home.

I haven’t seen you in a month, except online! How are you doing in quarantine?

I’m doing OK in quarantine – these are certainly strange times, but I’ve slowly found a routine that helps me keep calm and retain hope for when schools and businesses open up again and life gets back to normal. This time has also gotten me into the habit of reaching out to friends and family more often, and that has been really good for me.

How did this project begin? I have enjoyed coming across your social posts where you were singing…

The project began as a social media thing, where composers from around the world (via connection on social media) would write me 1-minute works for unaccompanied voice, and I would post a video performance of the work on my InstagramTwitter and Facebook pages (feel free to check out my linked social media pages to check out these video performances). Suddenly, I started to receive a lot of music to premiere, so I decided to audio everything from home, edit, and have a friend of mine master the tracks into an album.

We’ve been stuck inside. How did you record your album in your home?

I recorded in my bedroom with a Zoom mic propped up on my dresser and a blanket on my music stand (to reduce ringing noise from the metal), and I waited for when there were no cars or people near my window to record sections of music with the lowest possible background noise. After getting a few good takes of each song, I then used an audio editing program called Audacity to edit the tracks and find an optimal performance. I did this for each piece, and once I had all the tracks for the album, I sent them to a friend of mine (who has much more experience in audio wizardry) to do sound editing and master the tracks into one, cohesive album!

I’m not sure how many albums there will be, but my hope is that this project and collaboration becomes a living and growing thing. I hope that there are several albums that can be made! I’m already working on Volume 2, and there’s lots of new works that are currently being written for the future of this project.

If a composer has a tiny-work, or wants to write a tiny-work, they can email me (lamprea@cmcb.org) or send me a note on social media (links above).

About Stephanie:
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (composer Jason Eckardt). Her work has been described as “mercurial” by I Care If You Listen, and she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row.” (Halberstadt.de) She has received awards from St. Botolph Club Foundation, John Cage Orgel Stiftung and Puffin Foundation. Stephanie was a featured TEDx Speaker in TEDxWaltham: Going Places. Stephanie devours mammoth works of virtuosity and extended techniques with ease and creative insight, singing with an entire spectrum of vocal colors (including operatic style, straight tone, sputters and throat noises). She has performed as a soloist at Roulette, National Sawdust, Shapeshifter Lab, Miller Theater at Columbia University, the Slipper Room, Park Avenue Armory, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Re:Sound Festival. She has worked with Wavefield Ensemble, Ekmeles, Guerrilla Opera, Boston Art Song Society, Verdant Vibes and the Original Gravity Concert Series. In 2020-21, Stephanie will collaborate with the New Gallery Concert Series (Boston), perform as Artist-In-Residence at University of California – Davis, perform in residency at Mana Contemporary, and present a solo recital at Roulette.

Listen to the album here!

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