Chicago Concert Season Opener - 2010
Here is some information on our season opener in Chicago…featuring the music of John Cage (who would have celebrated his 98th birthday yesterday) and Philippe Manoury…
Unquestionably one of America’s most influential composers, John Cage wrote some of the first music for percussion ensemble. All three of his Constructions are built on a strict numerical framework, and the fascination with sound that dominated his later, more experimental works can be foreseen in the timbral variety and instrumental resourcefulness of these early works, which Cage wrote while in his late twenties.
First Construction (in Metal) (1939) is for an orchestra of all metal percussion instruments, including brake drums, a variety of different gongs and 5 thunder sheets. Second Construction (1940) makes use of two iconic Cage sounds—a gong dipped in water to modify the pitch, and the prepared piano, which uses objects placed between the strings to produce a variety of unfamiliar and unique sounds. Third Coast Percussion has been bringing performances of Third Construction (1941) to audiences around the country for 5 years. This master piece of Cage’s early output is scored for everything from drums and tin cans to split pieces of bamboo, a conch shell and the “lion’s roar,” a modified drum that uses friction to produce a low groaning sound.
An innovator in the field of electronic music, Philippe Manoury is at the forefront of the post-Boulez generation of French composers. He is now on faculty at the University of California at San Diego. His Le Livre des Claviers (“the Book of Keyboards”) is a virtuosic collection of pieces for mallet percussion instruments, including a mind-boggling vibraphone solo, a playful marimba duet, two movements for 6 players playing marimbas and sonorous Thai gongs, and two movements for “Sixxen,” a microtonal metal instrument manufactured by the musicians for this performance.
This concert kicks off an extensive Manoury project for Third Coast, which will include multiple performances of Le Livre des Claviers, as well as a recording project. This project is generously supported by the French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, a program of FACE, with major support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, SACEM, CulturesFrance and the Florence Gould Foundation.
