NEC Percussion Group: Skidmore, Crumb, Glass, Foss

David Skidmore | Torched and Wrecked

for percussion quartet and optional electronics

Program note

Torched and Wrecked is part of a series of pieces called Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities. The piece was completed in 2015. This athletic quartet packs much power in a short length of time while featuring two marimbas, two vibes and an optional electronic track (which is being heard tonight). Skidmore has employed perpetual motion in the form of repeated fragments of thematic material. Also heard here are constant “cross-rhythms”, giving the music a strong but vague sense of rhythmic power.

George Crumb | Kronos-Kryptos

four tableaux for percussion quintet

Easter Dawning
A Ghostly Barcarolle
Drummers of the Apocalypse
Appalachian Echoes
 

Program note

George Crumb has been one of the most performed American composers in the history of American serious music. His hauntingly beautiful colors and orchestrations provide listeners and performers alike an opportunity for other-worldly musical experiences while exploring the intersection of Nature and sound. He brings his unique compositional qualities to the major work Kronos-Kryptos, a work employing 100 instruments and believed to be his last and final work. The last ghostly movement employs the American folk songs Look Homeward Angel and Poor Wayfaring Stranger played over a constant drone effect, and is written in memoriam for his daughter, Elizabeth Ann. A word from the composer:
        “(In 2019).. it occurred to me that I had about 15 years earlier composed two movements of a work for percussion which remained unfinished. I decided to reduce the work to a percussion quintet and add two additional movements. As I got further into this new work, I experienced that certain exhilaration which never fails to strike me when I am composing for percussion instruments. The range of colors is so incredibly rich and indeed seems almost limited!”

Philip Glass | Japura River from Aguas de Amazonia

Program note

Philip Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble.
        The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.”
        A word from Third Coast Percussion: Glass’s 12 Pieces for Ballet, originally composed for piano, was arranged by Brazilian musical group Uakti for their own gamut of instruments, many of which were custom-made and built by the performers. This new version of the piece was renamed Aguas da Amazonia, after the Amazon river and its tributaries. Drawing on both the Uakti arrangement and the original piano music, Third Coast Percussion arranged four of the twelve pieces, exploiting the vast instrument arsenal and experimenting with color blends across the spectrum from “non-pitched” to “pitched” percussion. Arranging Glass’s music pushed us to reimagine familiar material with a different sound palette and offered a chance to live inside the music of one of the most recognized voices in the contemporary classical music world.

Lukas Foss | Paradigm

Session
Reading
Recital
Lecture
 

Program note

Paradigm is a work for percussionist-conductor, high, medium, and low instruments capable of sustaining a sound, and electric guitar. Composed by Foss in 1968, the work is avant-garde in nature and questions music composition specifically and the process of creating art in general. All five performers have speaking roles, introduced in the first movement by all five shouting and whispering syllables from the sentence “Someone will be held responsible” while performing fragments of music. The second movement, Reading, employs a unique aleatoric system. Each player has a row of word choices that come together to form a poem which is different in each performance. The movement Recital is just that, music only and conducted by the percussionist. The final movement, Lecture, borrows the first movement musical ideas while the text is from a lecture given by the composer. The text is as follows:

“Safeness lurks wherever we turn. Improvisation that works is improvisation made safe. One plays what one can play, that is what one knows, and one observes rules, insurance against disorder, traffic controls. Chance music is safe music if we accept any result as nature having its way. To control the result is also to play safe: freedom, choice handed to the performer because it does not matter what he does. The given entities control the music, neutralizing the performer’s personal additions. Electronic music is safe, escape from the most dangerous element in music: performance. Shock in music is always effective, hence safe: cringe benefits. To take refuge in the past is to play safe; avoidance of truth. To burn the past is to play safe; avoidance of knowledge. Silence is safe, even virtuous. Wherever we turn, safeness lurks. Show me dangerous music!”