8/25 – 10th SEASON FINALE: Percussion Panache

Fanfare for a New Audience received its world premiere in May 2009 at the Third Annual Rush Hour Tasting, hosted by the Fanfare group and held at Third Coast Percussion’s rehearsal loft space. Composer and Third Coast member David Skidmore explains how the piece came to fruition:

“Deborah Sobol approached me last winter about writing a piece to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral. The piece is a gift to Rush Hour’s Fanfare group, a truly innovative group of people who are helping to bring a love of classical music to an entirely new generation of audience members.

“Rush Hour and Fanfare are passionate about creating a concert experience for the 21st century audience, so I wanted to write a fanfare that belongs in the 21st century. Like so much percussion music, it involves instruments both old (chimes, reminiscent of church bell) and new (drum sets); instruments that are both finely crafted (concert drums) and found in a junkyard (brake drums, wooden planks). It is a piece that celebrates both the diversity of percussion and the diversity of musical languages that are available to today’s avid listener.

“I believe that concert music is more about thoughtfulness than vintage, and by the same token I also believe that the audience that is drawn to concert music is curious, creative, and inspired, regardless of age or background. This piece is for that audience.”

Christopher Deane is associate professor of percussion at the University of North Texas and is the composer of many noteworthy works for percussion.  Vespertine Formations was inspired by the maneuvers of a massive flock of birds that Deane observed in the sky over the UNT campus one night.  Lines of rapid sixteenth notes follow each other across 4 marimbas, creating an aural equivalent for the shapes formed by the hundreds of fluttering wings following each other across the sky.

Dennis DeSantis is a composer, sound designer, and percussionist based in New York City. DeSantis has worked with groups such as eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound and So Percussion as a composer of both acoustic and electronic music. He offers his thoughts on today’s piece, Shifty: “Shifty is all about messing around with the listener’s perceptions of meter and tempo. Patterns stick around for long enough to suggest that they might imply the tempo of the piece, but then are suddenly (or gradually) replaced (or displaced) by patterns that disrupt that mode of listening and assert themselves instead. The idea is to blur the lines between material that’s metrically strong and material that is syncopated.”

While the instrumentation of the piece (four quasi-drum sets) suggests the influence of electronic and popular music, the form of the piece is essentially a traditional theme and variations on the repetitive figure heard solo in the first percussionist’s part at the beginning of the piece. Throughout the piece this pattern is variously sped up and slowed down. Sometimes the pattern is smoothly interwoven among the players, while other times it is layered in thick stacks of rhythmic chaos. The blurred lines between steady groove and slippery syncopation will certainly keep listeners on their toes.

Influenced by both minimalism and electronica, Third Coast member Owen Clayton Condon composed a marimba duet titled Double Helix in 2005, later revising it into the quartet Quadruple Helix.  The added drum parts make up the current version scored for six drums and two marimbas.

The marimba lines are often played in displaced unison, where one part is played one eighth note later than the other.  This creates a phase similar to those found in the music of Steve Reich.  As the two melodies spin around each other, the effect lends itself to the double helix shape of a DNA strand.