Tongue Tactics: Voice, Power, Performance
The voice as a political and poetic force
In this concert, the composition students of Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium, under the guidance of composer, performer, and composition teacher Marcela Lucatelli, explore the voice as a site of defiance, transformation and imagination. Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s For More than One Voice and Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, the students delve into the expressive potential of the mouth—not only as a tool for sound production, but as a political and poetic force.
Each composition emerges as a unique negotiation between body and language, noise and articulation, vulnerability and assertion. The voice is not treated as a neutral carrier of content, but as an unruly, expressive terrain—tactile, emotional, and charged with cultural histories. From whispered frictions to eruptive sonic gestures, the works foreground the raw tactility of vocal expression, exposing tensions between speech and sound, identity and opacity, presence and disappearance.
Tongue Tactics invites the audience into an acoustic world where meaning is felt as much as it is heard. The students confront inherited notions of voice, genre, and expression, revealing how vocal practice can be a radical site for negotiating power, intimacy, and multiplicity. The concert becomes a collective mouth: devouring, stuttering, laughing, defying—speaking not for clarity, but for connection, sensation, and transformation. The audience is invited to experience the voice not only as a musical instrument, but as an embodied politics—a living archive of gestures, breaths, and histories waiting to be reimagined.
Marcela Lucatelli
Marcela Lucatelli is an internationally acclaimed composer and vocalist. She received the Carl Nielsen Talent Prize in Composition (2019) and the Pelle Prize (2021) for her groundbreaking approach. Her recent album Necromancy won the Danish Music Awards’ 2023 Vocal Jazz Release of the Year, showcasing the diverse spectrum of vocal jazz. Known for her research into alternative, decolonial compositional methods, Lucatelli teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus and has lectured at prestigious institutions across Denmark and Europe.
The concert is free, and you can just show up without a ticket. Please come early.