Earlier this week, Nina Guo, a soprano, composer and improviser originally from Pasadena, California, performed a piece of hers called “The Rides Are Going Up Again” at the Berlin experimental music venue KM28. The delicate work combined gentle, rhythmic spoken poetry with gauzy recorded vocalizations—a sound, I thought and Guo later confirmed, inspired by Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices.” On Guo’s 2021 album of her own compositions, “blauch räusch,” she performs a piece in which she subjects her vocal chords to extreme pressure for three minutes and 42 seconds, then sings a casual, descending line for the final six seconds. Such is her range.
Guo studied voice at the New England Conservatory and sound studies at the University of Arts in Berlin. On a recent morning, we met over coffee to talk about her introduction to opera, humor in the works of György Kurtág, and “30 Rock.”
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