Contemporary Classics October 20, 2020 The Percussion Ensemble in Contemporary Classical Music

Tonight is a celebration of the percussion ensemble  in contemporary classical music.  Last week we featured contemporary classical music featuring the electric guitar and this week we are featuring percussion ensembles.  I wanted to show the range of music with instruments one may typically associate with rock, blues or jazz and how contemporary composers can use these instruments very creatively.

We are opening with the Canadian percussion ensemble Architek Percussion and drummer Ben Reimer with John Psathas’ 4 Drum Dances.  Drum Dances was originally commissioned by Dame Evelyn Glennie for drum kit and piano, but has been arranged for percussion ensemble.  It features one drum kit soloist with five mallet players on two vibraphones, two marimbas, one xylophone, one glockenspiel, three gongs and crotales.  Each of the four dances is inspired by a certain rhythmic interaction possible between the performers. The work is heavily influenced by jazz and rock music, particularly that of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Psathas was greatly inspired by the drumming of Dave Weckl, the very different piano styles of Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, and the enormous energy in the music of guitarists like Steve Vai.        

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I

Next is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I is for tamtam, 2 microphones, 2 filters, and controllers.  It consists of 33 structural units, or "moments", which can be ordered in a number of different ways, according to a "connection scheme" specifying the relationships between successive moments by a combination of three elements, one from each of the following groups: (1) similar, different, or opposite; (2) supporting, neutral, or destroying; (3) increasing, constant, or decreasing.    In Mikrophonie I two percussionists play a large tam-tam with a variety of implements. Another pair of players use hand-held microphones to amplify subtle details and noises, inflecting the sound through quick (and precisely scored) motions. The last two performers, seated in the audience, apply resonant bandpass filters to the microphone outputs and distribute the resulting sounds to a quadraphonic speaker system.  The work is the result of sound experiments Stockhausen carried out with fellow composer Jaap Spek in August 1964 hitting the tamtam with a variety of implements of a variety of materials, a variety of microphone positions and a variety of audio settings changing audio filters, dynamic levels, etc. 

“Surface Tension” was inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s historic percussion collection. Dennehy explains, “I was inspired by the way various indigenous drums play with the tension of the skin in order to bend the pitch and produce something almost approaching melody, and sought a way of making so-called un-pitched drums ‘sing’ in their own way in this piece.” He continues,” I was particularly interested in creating a kind of mobile pitch-space that shifted in and out of various overtone-based tonalities.”

To accomplish this used a Third Coast Percussion technique developed Glenn Kotche.  They blow air into tubes attached to the side of the drums to stretch the drumheads and increase the harmonic range of the tom-toms.  Naturally, the drums drift out of tune from the continuous tightening and slackening of their heads, so Dennehy innovated the technique of writing “tuning zones” into the composition, where the players gently tune their drums in a rhythmic way using their normal technique of turning the tension rods. This technique allows Dennehy to gradually build pitch centers and explore the space between them, creating a kind of fused harmonic texture amplified by standard-pitched instruments such as the marimba or bowed vibraphone.

Drumkit Quartets actually goes well beyond the drumkit - which is to be expected, given the feverishly creative strengths of the artists behind the recording. Conceived by Wilco drummer and composer Glenn Kotche, the initial approach was to "get back to writing for percussion, because I think the timbral, textural, melodic and rhythmic possibilities haven't been explored nearly enough. I try to do that through my solo performances, but I jumped at the chance to try it with such an incredible and forward-thinking group as So Percussion." "Drumkit Quartet #50" opens with hand-cranked sirens which channels the futurist manifesto of Luigi Russolo's "art of noise," spiced with a little John Cage and Luc Ferrari. A rich foundation of globe-trotting inspirations produces an audio collage which is a free-wheeling exploration of rhythm, sound, texture and timbre.

Nicole Lizée’s White Label Experiment.

White Label Experiment is scored for percussion ensemble, turntables, and the organ-like omnichord. The rhythmic and metric figures are non-repetitive, so the music is rhythmically driven. While melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, and form are important, the factor that comes to the fore is timbre.