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The Year Behind and the Year to Come

2011 was a truly unforgettable year for Third Coast Percussion.  The Steve Reich Celebration with eighth blackbird drew over 9,000 people to Millennium Park in August.  In September, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, with the premiere of David Skidmore’s “Common Patterns in Uncommon Time,” which was commissioned for the occasion. We also thoroughly enjoyed our collaborations this year with Tim Munro, Nick Photinos, Signal, eighth blackbird and Meehan/Perkins Duo, the premiere of great new works by Anthony Pateras and our own Clay Condon, and dozens of other performances across twelve different states.

TCP will mark John Cage’s centenary in 2012 with a CD/DVD of his early percussion works and numerous concerts, but the coming year will also include the premiere of a newly commissioned percussion quartet by Augusta Read Thomas, a rare performance of Gerard Grisey’s “Le Noir de l’Etoile,” new community engagement initiatives and an ever-growing touring schedule.  In the near future, Third Coast will also release an album of Philippe Manoury’s music, a CD/DVD of ensemble member David Skidmore’s new architecture-inspired work, and another album including works by Louis Andriessen, Arvo Pärt,  Peter Garland, Christopher Deane and TCP members David Skidmore and Clay Condon.

Thanks to all of you who have supported us during the past year by coming to concerts, buying CDs and t-shirts, volunteering your time or making a tax-deductible donation.  We couldn’t do it without you!

Happy Holidays!

-Clay, Rob, Peter and David

Manoury - mvt 2 Video

The second movement of Philippe Manoury’s piece “Le Livre des Claviers” is a marimba duo. Rob and I (this is David writing by the way…) have been performing this particular movement of the piece for almost 2 years on tour across the country. Playing this movement of the piece is what attracted us to the idea of putting the full 6 movement piece together.

We’ve played this movement for audiences ranging from high school band kids to (traditionally) conservative chamber music audiences to our own seasoned new music fans in Chicago. The music really has something for everyone.

Rob does a great job of introducing the piece before we play it…the program note below is a more formalized version of what he might say before we perform the piece:

“The marimba duo consists of approximately 40 short musical fragments, with pauses in between each. These fragments range from a single gesture or chord to a solid minute of running notes. Within this structure exist moments of solidly grounded rhythm as well as passages filled with disorienting, arhythmic gestures. Manoury’s real genius in this work is in the way he creates a coherent narrative by relating these two extremes, transforming one into the other, juxtaposing them, and finding middle ground between them.”

New Videos - Manoury “Le Livre des Claviers”

The premiere of David Little’s new piece for TCP at Chopin Theatre this week was a huge hit. Here is a brief preview mention in the Chicagoist. Haunt of Last Nightfall is a pleasure to play, and the audience really dug it. We had a great talk back session with David immediately after the performance thanks to a grant from Meet the Composer - Creative Connections. We’ll be posting video and photos of the performance and the talk back in the next few weeks.

In other news, we just received the completed videos from our September performance of Philippe Manoury’s Le Livre des Claviers, an incredible and rarely performed piece that TCP will be recording next month for MODE records. In this performance and on the recording we are joined by Greg Beyer and Ross Karre, both all-stars and a pleasure to work with. Read more about our preparations for the Manoury piece in these previous posts, parts 1, 2, and 3. And check out program notes from that concert here.

Videos for each of the six movements of the piece will be going up on YouTube over the next week or so. Part 1 just went live, click here or you can watch right here on the blog.

Program notes from the upcoming David T. Little premiere…

Below are program notes from composer David T. Little for the piece TCP will be premiering this Monday, Haunt of Last Nightfall. Like so much of David’s music, the piece uses the occasion of a musical performance to bring to light some weighty extra-musical ideas. The piece itself spans a wide expressive ground. It certainly intimates  the violence of the event, but moments of the piece have a beautifully elegiac quality as well.

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I think a lot about ghosts. Not so much in the literal sense of sheet-wearing specters, but rather, of things ghostly in function. That is, things that remain behind as the fleeting evidence of what once was. For some reason—perhaps for the same reason as the monk of old’s memento mori—I have always felt the need to surround myself with these kinds of ghosts.

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