David Skidmore (b. 1982), one of the founders of Third Coast Percussion (and of the Lucerne Festival Percussion Group), wrote his Ritual Music in 2005, for the Chicago dance company Raizel Performances. The work is subtitled “variations on the numbers 2 and 4,” and the composer has provided the following program note:“I used the numbers two and four to bring order to the primeval timbres and violent counterpoint of the piece. The pitches in the marimba, the rhythmic motifs, and the structure of the phrases were all determined numerically. As such, a friction is created between the mechanical simplicity of the structural elements and the abandon with which the instruments shout, shriek, groan, and wail. The ritual is tightly controlled with respect to its numeric functions, yet it is also an incantation of things far more frantic and powerful. Thus the piece can act as a sort of ‘overture’ for percussion.”
Skidmore is an avid supporter of new music, and has been responsible for the commission and world première performances of over a dozen new percussion pieces in the last year alone. He is an active freelance musician who has performed nationally and internationally, and has collaborated with quite a number of the finest conductors on the musical scene today.
Steve Reich (b.1936) has been called America’s “greatest living composer” by publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker. His 70th birthday celebrations last year were worldwide.
Nagoya Marimbas, a work for two marimbas, was written in 1994. Nagoya is a city in central Japan, and while this brief piece suggests Japanese musical thought, it is still pure Reich.
Reich graduated (with honors) in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957, but over the next six years studied composition, largely at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He worked with composers Vincent Persichetti, Luciano Berio, and Darius Milhaud among others, receiving a Masters degree in music in 1963. Important elements of his subsequent musical development were the study of drumming (in Accra, Ghana), Balinese gamelan (in Seattle and Berkeley), and chanting of the Hebrew scriptures (in New York and Jerusalem). In 1966 he founded his own ensemble of three musicians – which quickly grew to eighteen or more members – and since 1971, Steve Reich and Musicians have toured the world.
Reich’s compositions cover a wide range of endeavor, including electronic manipulation of both vocal and instrumental sounds, with theater, video, and dance works among them. He was one of the earliest composers employing “minimalism” - a concept which he and others have expanded in many ways in the years since the mid-1960’s and 70’s. (The term “minimalism” originated with the concept of an extreme reduction of musical elements, with repeated rhythmic patterns over slowly changing musical thematic material, giving a feeling of – almost - stagnation over rhythmic pulse.)
Tobias Broström (b. 1978) had four years of percussion studies in Malmö, Sweden before he turned to an interest in writing his own music, working first with the Swedish composer Rolf Martinsson, then with the Italian Luca Francesconi. He himself began teaching arrangement and composition in 2003, and his own works – while mainly in percussion pieces - extend to electro-acoustic, chamber, and orchestral music.
In Twilight, composed in 2001 for four marimbas or for two, the composer tells us he “attempts the impossible task of making long sustained notes on the marimba. The most important thing when performing this piece is to make all the chords blend. One thing that contributed to writing Twilight was that I felt a need to write something more quiet, not just ‘beaty stuff’.” As we listen, he suggests we keep in mind that the word “twilight” is defined as “the light from the sky between sunset and full night, or between full night and sunrise,” and that another definition is “an intermediate state that is not clearly defined.”
“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it.”
“I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.’”
“Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”
Those three quotes are from one of the most extraordinary men in the history of American musical thought and composition, John Cage (1912-1992). His works do not fit into traditional categories or genres. His stated aim was to create a “musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and tradition of the art.”
That resulted in works as diverse as one for any ensemble of 86 instruments, or instructions for producing a tape from fragments of any 42 records, or pieces for “prepared piano” (with diverse objects placed between the strings of a piano, producing a kind of percussion orchestra controlled by two hands), as well as one titled 4’33”, rendered the exact length of that span of time in what we would consider total silence, but what he wanted one to experience from the environment in which that time span elapsed. There was no flippancy in such designations; Cage straightforwardly and honestly found music in all sounds and in all combinations of them, whether created by “traditional” instruments, or vocalization, or electronic devices, or mixtures of any sonic elements.
A few brief paragraphs can only begin to touch on the immense diversity of Cage’s thought, his writings of and on music, the many kinds of artistic endeavors in which he worked, and his curiosity and creation in regard to so many aspects of personal, as well as artistic, life. Allow us to recommend that you go to the internet, look up John Cage, and investigate and (we anticipate) get caught up in the many thought-provoking articles on the man and his work you will find there.
Cage’s Third Construction, written in 1941, is for percussion quartet. Its rhythmic structure is 24 times 24. In each part the phrase “structure” follows different proportion series, each of them being a rotation of the other. Player 4: (8,2,4,5,3,2). Player 1: (2,8,2,4,5,3). Player 3; (3,2,8,2,4,5). Player 2: (5,3,2,8,2,4). The instruments utilized are rattles, drums, tin cans, claves (a pair of small wooden cylinders, one held in the palm of the hand, the other striking it), cowbells, lion’s roar, cymbal, ratchet, teponaxtle (a hollowed out small log, cut into by a H-shaped slit, struck with mallets), quijades (jaw bones), cricket caller, and conch shell.
Third Coast Percussion Quartet’s describes its mission as seeking “to embody the energy, excitement and beauty of the percussive arts through a wide range of musical styles, from electronics and pop to the avant-garde. [We are] committed to breaking down the barriers between popular and classical styles, working with composers to create new music that facilitates performances in a wide variety of venues, from concert halls to theaters to dance clubs. The group seeks to bring musical communities together with a multi-faceted style that only be created through the medium of percussion.”
…back to program notes.
