I’ve been struggling with how best to describe the New York City–based vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, but I think I’ve got it now. And, better still, band member Caroline Shaw seems to agree.

“ ‘Sacred music for secular people?’ ” the alto, violinist, and composer repeats, after surfacing from a brief fit of laughter. “I think that’s great. I like to think of my own music that way, certainly. Maybe there is something sacred about hearing music just for voices alone, because that’s sort of the context. Hearing music made by humans alone, with no extra instruments—nothing else, just the sound of the human voice—there’s something incredibly spiritual about that for me, at least. Always.”

Although there are strong echoes of European liturgical music on Roomful of Teeth’s recently released Render, other voices play their part. Caleb Burhans’s “Beneath”, for instance, is introduced by some exceptionally otherworldly overtone singing, in a nod to the ensemble’s penchant for welcoming nonwestern vocal styles into its mix.

“Every summer we spend two weeks together, and we generally invite a couple of singers from other traditions who are either master teachers or master practitioners of a certain style,” Shaw explains, in a telephone interview from Manhattan. “And we work with them every day, just attempting to learn more about the way that they sing.

“We have no claim to mastery; it’s more just out of curiosity,” she continues. “So in that first summer we worked with a guy named Ayan-ool Sam, from Tuva; he’s a member of a group called Alash. Another really memorable practitioner that we’ve worked with and that I’ve loved is a woman named Eun Su Kim, who is from Korea but lives in Washington, D.C., now. She’s a real master pansori singer, and also an amazing teacher. She wouldn’t let up: every day we’d walk into the room totally excited, but scared!”

Broadway vocal coaches and Inuit throat singers have also contributed their input, as have vocalists of an entirely different kind. Missy Mazzoli’s “Vesper Sparrow”, which can also be heard on Render, is a loving tribute to the beauty and diversity of avian song—a theme that will also be explored in an upcoming commission by Alaskan composer John Luther Adams.

In her own compositional practice, Shaw takes a similarly eclectic approach. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning Partita for 8 Voices, which Roomful of Teeth will perform during its two PuSh Festival concerts, sounds thoroughly modern, yet draws its inspiration from Baroque music and its subtitles—“Allemande”, “Sarabande”, “Courante”, and “Passacaglia”—from courtly dance forms of the same era.

“In one sense, it sort of grows out of my experience of being a violinist and playing the Bach partitas,” Shaw explains. “But I also spent several years playing for ballet and modern-dance classes in New York, so I’m very connected to that. I love dance: I love the connection between movement and music. I almost write music as a way to be a choreographer. I’m not, but I’m imagining a sense of space and different visual textures and then translating them into sound. That’s where it comes in for me: in my mind, my music has a sense of space and movement and motion and physicality.”

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Music on Main present Roomful of Teeth at the Fox Cabaret on Monday and Tuesday (January 25 and 26).