A Mouth In Search Of A Voice is a music and multimedia work exploring stammering and dysfluency. Part 1: To Do This We Find A Shadow is the first movement of a larger evening-length work.

The work is built from recordings of people who stammer. Each instrumentalist carries their own playback device containing stammered voices: a kind of shadowed self, echoing theories within stammering of a divided or bifurcated identity. The ensemble listens and navigates, their musical material shaped by what they hear. Dysfluency is transplanted into the ensemble; the musicians become readers of a map that keeps redrawing itself.

The texts are drawn from recordings of multiple stammerers reading the same passages. Each voice filters the material differently: mumbling, muting, pausing, stuttering – creating iterations that never quite align. The friction of these voices evokes an unstable, unreliable narrative voice.

Jamie Hamilton 2026