Join AEON artist, Joanna Mieleszko, and Rhythm is Image cofounder and composer, Hannah Barnes at this year’s SHE: Festival of Women in Music at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

This interstate collaboration has culminated in a lecture-recital entitled: Sounding out Feminism, wherein Mieleszko will premiere Barnes’ work, In the Garden alongside Rebecca Saunders’ O for solo voice.

Both works toy with timbre, microtonality, vocal restraint, and depend on the treble–specified as soprano–voice to realize an archetypal modernist text that ultimately will not be understood by listeners. When words aren’t split apart into shape-shifting phonemes in “O,” Saunders has the performer speak longer passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses on a whispered breath, which in conjunction with inhales, gasps, exaggerated plosives and sibilants ultimately obscure the listener’s ability to latch onto clear text. In “The Garden,” sounds stretched out across mercurial dynamic markings suggest Hilda Doolittle’s poetry rather than obviously set the poem.