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maynestage: Third Coast Percussion presents an evening of...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:09:51 -0500

Third Coast Percussion presents an evening of quirky new musical explorations by today’s most creative composers. Don’t miss them on Thursday!
http://bit.ly/YU8j2X

maynestage: Third Coast Percussion next...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:30:33 -0500

maynestage:

Third Coast Percussion next week!
http://bit.ly/YU8j2X

Third Coast Percussion to join University of Notre Dame as Ensemble-in-Residence

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:00:11 -0500

We are thrilled to announce that Third Coast Percussion has been named ensemble-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center!

As ensemble-in-residence, Third Coast will perform on the university’s Presenting Series, engage in interdisciplinary collaborations across campus, premiere new works, conduct master classes and provide community-building outreach performances for youth in local schools.

We are beyond excited to be partnering with this incredible institution. Our new position at Notre Dame begins this summer and will continue for the next 5 academic years. We will be maintaining an active presence on campus throughout the year, though the ensemble will still be based in Chicago. Click here to read the full press release.

We have some incredible projects in the works already, including collaborations with the university’s College of Engineering and Master of Sacred Music program. We plan to tour many of these projects around the country so stay tuned for more details!

Travel Log: How to Build a Pianotron

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:33:58 -0500

TCP was in Colorado this past month for a week and a half of performances and masterclasses throughout the state. The Rocky Mountain State (aka the land of Green Chili and Subaru’s) provided us with many amazing experiences, topped off in Boulder, CO where we were given a very old and wheezy upright piano to nip/tuck into Pianotron v2.0. The first Pianotron was the brainchild of Clay Condon, and made its debut back in 2009 on a performance of Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union as part of TCP’s Chicago Concert Season. Since then, we’ve made it part of our John Cage repertoire in the third movement his early work Quartet.

Travel Log: South Bend, IN

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:49:00 -0500

TCP spent 6 Days in South Bend, IN as part of the world premiere performance of Augusta Read Thomas’ Resounding Earth. Read more here.

Travel Log: Florida, September 2012

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 14:28:00 -0500

TCP landed in Tampa, FL last week - 5 days in the sunshine state culminating in our performance at New Music New College on Saturday, the 22nd.

First order of business was to refuel and recharge at a local eatery, Skippers Smokehouse, thanks to the solid research of TCP’s culinary adviser, Mr. Robert Dillon.

Yes, that is a tree growing out of the restaurant. Other observations include the reaffirmation that many things taste like chicken, including Alligator.

We stopped by University of South Florida for a Masterclass on the music of John Cage with student percussionists before loading a truck full of gear and heading down to Sarasota.

Read the complete blog entry on our website.

JLA's Inuksuit in Chicago

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 21:01:00 -0500

…you do an outdoor show involving 99 musicians traveling from across the country to Millennium Park, Chicago. It starts to rain…

…a storm is brewing, scheduled to peak right at the downbeat. You decide to wrap your drums in cellophane (doesn’t sound too bad actually – think of it as a double ply drum head)…

…the show is about to start, it’s raining, but not too bad, so you throw on a few more trash bags, put on a poncho, grab some mallets…

…first 20 minutes are just fine. It’s raining, but the audience has showed up with some umbrellas and everything is going fine. You play your first notes on the drums and suddenly the sky opens up and dumps on you. Torrential downpour – it couldn’t possibly be raining any harder. The music keeps going, the water splashes in every direction from your drums as you play. Between phrases you wipe puddles of rainwater from your bass drum…

It’s been about a week since Third Coast participated in one of the most unique concerts of the summer in Chicago. Directed by Doug Perkins and Eighth Blackbird, 99 musicians performed John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit as part of the Loops and Variations concert series on Sunday, August 26^th. None of us really anticipated the massive weather accompaniment and, while they weren’t the most immediately desirable conditions, the result was one of the most memorable performances and musical experiences I’ve ever had. Performers and audience alike knew that they were part of something extremely special that day. Check out the Chicago Sun-Times review of the show.

As I looked across the lawn with all of the carefully wrapped instruments, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Land Art works of Christo and Jeane-Claude, with their wrapping of monuments and landscapes.

I also thought of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) with hundred of metal poles scattered across a remote part of the New Mexico desert.

While there was no lightning last Sunday at Millennium Park, the connection between art and nature couldn’t have been more vivid. I couldn’t help but be consumed by the connection between the music and the storm, and how it couldn’t have been more perfectly combined. While a performance of this piece anywhere would be amazing - this one , for everyone who was there, was something truly special.

-PJM

RENGA:Cage:100 - Complete Composer List

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:27:00 -0500

Below is the complete list of 100 composers who have contributed to this project in honor of John Cage’s centenary. Each composer gave us 5-7 seconds of music which we have strung together into a single continuous piece we are calling RENGA:Cage:100. We will be premiering the piece this Thursday, August 9 at MoMA, with a preview performance Tuesday, August 7 at the Kennedy Center. If you can’t be at either performance, you can watch a live video webcast on the Kennedy Center’s website.

Huge thanks to all of these composers for contributing their creative energy to this project. The piece has turned out even better than we could have hoped. We’re excited to premiere it this week!

RENGA:Cage:100 - a sneak peek

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:08:00 -0500

We have begun our final series of rehearsals on the 100-composer collaborative project that we are curating in honor of John Cage’s centenary. We will premiere RENGA:Cage:100 at the Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, August 9, with a preview performance taking place at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage on Tuesday, August 7.

Each of our 100 composers has written 5-7 seconds of music, and we are stringing together all 100 composer contributions to create a single piece of music that our friend Jen Richards from eighth blackbird described here as “the first true musical expression of social media culture.” Not our original intention - but perhaps an appropriate tribute to a composer whose work seems as relevant, innovative, even topical today as it did 20, 30, 40…even 70 years ago (as is the case with his early percussion music).

It has been very interesting to see what composers choose to do with their 5-7 seconds. We asked composers to spend at least 100 seconds on their contributions to the project, but not more than 100 minutes. So hopefully the result is a sort of musical stream of consciousness from 100 very different minds, all of whom are creating music in our world today.

Some contributions look very much like (and in some cases are) an excerpt from a percussion piece with standard notation, such as this beautiful contribution we received from Paul Lansky:

Others have maintained certain temporal parameters of standard notation (time is represented as moving forward from left to right across the page) while abandoning other standard parameters, as in this contribution from Stephen Miles:

On the far end of the spectrum, certain RENGA contributions are a series of instructions written out as text, with little or no relationship to standard musical notation, such as this brilliant and very fun piece from Jay Alan Yim:

Several composers sent audio files to be played back during...

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:08:00 -0500

Several composers sent audio files to be played back during performance for their contribution to the RENGA project. This audio file from Missy Mazzoli puts a cool spin on a very famous John Cage quote.

Millennium Park - July, 2012

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 08:05:00 -0500

On July 12, 2012, Third Coast Percussion gave a performance at one of Chicago’s largest and most well known venues, Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. For this special occasion we enlisted one of the best sound engineers around, Ryan Ingebritsen. Below are some of Ryan’s musings on the venue, the show, and some of our past work with him there.

The J Pritzker Pavilion is a wonderfully designed sound system. Around the system, is a beautiful piece of architectural art whose function is both to house the wonderfully designed sound system and to aesthetically reflect the projection of sonic energy from the stage to the lawn. 128 speakers in total carry sound distributed in various ways so that every seat on the lawn is like sitting in an acoustically perfect concert hall. This is partly due to the capturing of the actual sound of the stage that has an acoustic reverberation similar to a concert hall. But it is also because of some very creative system engineering that delays the sounds being picked up from microphones on stage so the first sound heard by anyone sitting on the lawn is literally the natural sound coming from the stage. The reinforcement comes fractions of a second later giving the brain the impression that the sound is first, very natural, but also directionally coming from the stage and not from the speakers above. This is probably one of the most successful outdoor spaces in the world when it comes to amplifying orchestral music. It also has an extraordinarily flexible and competent staff who keep it running for this and the various other purposes that it has started to be used for including rock style concerts including indie rock, world music, and jazz as well as traditional chamber music shows. In all these cases, the sound is designed to appear to naturally emanate from the stage, either from acoustic instruments or loud amplifiers.

Sorry if this back-story is redundant to some readers as I have written about this topic on eighth blackbird’s 13 ways blog, but I feel it necessary to reiterate here. Several years ago, I had the good fortune to participate in a collaborative sound installation that utilized a seldom heard 5.1 setting that is programmed into the Pritzker’s networked audio routing software. That’s right, a computer controls where the sound comes out those 128 speakers and more importantly HOW it comes out. Welcome to the dystopian future you have heard so much about. There is a separate setting for the Grant Park Symphony, Downtown Sound and Made in Chicago, and Dusk Variations Concerts. Jonathan Laney, who built the system, also created a 5.1 setting (like a traditional home entertainment surround sound system) preparing for the eventuality that one day they might show films on the great lawn. Lou Mallozzi at Experimental Sound Studio had been asked to curate a collaborative sound installation piece that utilized the full capacity of the Pavilion on the subject of trains by the Chicago Humanities Festival. He asked Olivia Block, Shawn Decker, and myself to provide short vignettes out of hours of train recordings he had collected using the resources of ESS as well as field recordings that we each made. The result was a 22-minute piece where train sounds layered one another and were transformed both in their sound but also their locations and a music arc emerged from all the short sections that Lou later mixed into the finished work. The final work was entitled Train Time and was premiered in the fall of 2008 during the Humanities Festival. Through that experience, I got to know quite a bit more about the Pritzker system and started to become excited about other possibilities in the space. I asked Jonathan how difficult it would be to configure the system to be able to mix live music in such a way and he shared my enthusiasm wanting to showcase more interesting uses of the space.

The result was 2011’s Steve Reich 75^th birthday celebration, a collaboration between Third Coast Percussion and eight blackbird along with a handful of other guest artists. You can read more about that here, but to summarize, it was really fun. The highlight for me was the chance to mix Reich’s epic masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians in surround sound. It afforded the opportunity to look at the piece in a different way. When I first started thinking about mixing the group in surround sound, there was a lot of talk about trying to emulate the location of the ensemble on stage using the surround capabilities. The idea was to virtually put the audience in the middle of the ensemble. Though an interesting concept, I felt that Reich’s music deserved perhaps another treatment.

I started to ask myself questions like “why does the music need to sound like it is coming from the ensemble?” or “why must the sound system be relegated to only providing a ‘natural’ experience?” One must admit, even though the system itself reproduces the sound of a concert hall to near perfection, there is something very “un-natural” about having that experience out in the middle of a football field sized lawn in the middle of downtown Chicago with a beautiful metal trellis framing the evening sky as the sun sinks behind the Chicago skyline. This is an experience you could never have in a concert hall, but it is still an amazing one. Why, then, is it so important that we always use this space to create the same experience? Reich’s music, in a normal situation, is a canvas upon which an ensemble, sound engineer, and even the audience, by nature projects different perceptions onto. By this, I mean that no two listenings to any Steve Reich work yield the same perceptive experience. The ensemble changes which parts of the contrapuntal landscape they choose to emphasize, how fast they play the piece, or change the individual cells that make up his music. The sound engineer mixes each performance slightly differently. From the audiences perspective, even from a recording of Music for 18 Musicians a listener will take something different away each time.

I felt that the piece needed to fill the space of the lawn, not to emulate the way musicians are arranged on stage or to reflect the natural directionality of sound, but to interpret the music itself. The various rising and falling swells of sound needed to sweep across the space (using stereo micing of singers and select placing of winds and strings in the 5.1 sound field) and the 4 pianos and various marimba and xylophone pairings needed to occupy various sectors of the space to separate the opposing contrapuntal lines and pulsations. The result was a completely alternative experience of music for the musicians and the audience alike and an experience I will remember as long as I live.

The Reich experience made me want to continue to have the opportunity to work with the space and curious about what could be done with different kinds of music. At the end of last year, we had two more summer celebrations booked, one for John Cage, and one for Philip Glass. However, with the various transitions that occurred over the course of 2011-12 these particular ideas became lost in the shuffle. I guess since this year would have been the celebration for Cage’s centennial year, it is poetically appropriate that things did not work out as expected. But in any case, the transitioning resulted in a new Thursday night series, Loops and Variations for which I have been fortunate enough to work with two different groups, eighth blackbird on June 28^th, and Third Coast Percussion on July 12^th. Both groups did an amazing job selecting pieces that are going to be really fun in the space, and though the June 28^th show occurred on the hottest day in Chicago since 2006 (and I apparently nearly died of heat stroke according to their Production Manager Rachel Damon) it was a huge success. The gods of thunder even approved of our efforts as a freak sun thunderstorm passed through at the beginning of the show causing the group to pause for a moment before the first notes of Music in Similar Motion which resulted in a thunderous round of applause from the brave souls that came out despite the record heat.

For the Third Coast concert on the 12th, the group decided to try and meet the theme of the series (new music mixed with electronica) by choosing composers who had written both concert works and electronic works and pair a written piece by each composer with a pre-recorded electronic work by the same composer. They chose composers who had radically different ways of working with electronics (namely due to the different time periods they worked in). John Cage’s barn burner Third Construction was paired with an early chance piece Radio Music in which 4 performers turn 4 radios on and off tuning them to various bandwidths engaging with the randomness of what is on the air at a certain time and place. Paul Lansky’s Threads is paired with an early tape work of his from the 80’s that explores various convolutions of live and synthetic sound. Clay Condon’s Fractalia is paired with a new electronic dance piece and David Skidmore’s Common Patterns in Uncommon Time is paired with an electronic landscape work that he created for the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hyde Park.

All four of the live pieces were quite drum, mallet, and rhythm heavy. Almost like a Neil Peart or Bill Bruford style drum-set but better (and played by eighth hands instead of two). My idea was to take the audience and put them smack dab in the middle of that drum-set sonically. Not just as a realization of the location of things on stage as they are, but a re-imagining of spatial relationships for similar instruments played by the 4 players. The Skidmore work moves between sections of minimalist mallet rhythms and drum set like sections played by all four members of the group as well as explorations of long flowing almost “synthesizer” sounding sections (including a synth organ) and playback through the separate movements. 4 Kick drums, 4 sets of toms, 2 marimbas and 2 vibraphones as well as an assortment of wind-chimes and metal objects surrounded the audience in various ways putting rhythmic pairings in different quadrants of the space. Rhythms played on a combination of toms and marimba mallets opposed each other in space during Condon’s Fractalia and Lansky’s Threads featured a swirling of metallic and wooden sounds around the audience’s ears. On the flip side, Cage’s Radio Music bombarded the audience from all sides as it is a realization of radio waves coming at them from all directions - a kind of overwhelming experience really and quite different from the experience that audiences might have had back in the 1950’s listening to 4 small radios on stage. Then again, radio itself has become a bit more overwhelming since then, hasn’t it? Perhaps to meet the spirit of change over time, someone needs to do a 24-hour news program version of the piece?? Though that may give significantly less variety of sound quality.

REVOLUTION:The Cage Century - Compete Program Notes

Fri, 25 May 2012 21:25:11 -0500

For our John Cage CD release concert on May 25 in Chicago, we created several versions of the program book, each containing different information about the works performed. Decisions about what information was contained in each book was made using chance operations similar to those Cage used in composing much of his music.

We have included the complete program notes below for those who would like to read them in their entirety. Enjoy!

-TCP

________________________________________________

“Percussion music really is the art of noise and that’s what it should be called.”
-John Cage

John Cage (1912-1992) was one of America’s most significant and influential creative minds. Composer, musician, inventor and philosopher, he created the nation’s first touring percussion ensemble, invented the prepared piano, and brought everyday sounds and actions into the concert hall.
- Cage’s father was an inventor who designed the Peace Keeper, a 75-foot submarine that was an important addition to America’s military just before World War I.
- As a young man, Cage met German-American abstract filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, who imparted in Cage the idea that all objects have a spirit dwelling within them, which can be liberated by drawing forth sound from that object.
- In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Cage was one of the world’s greatest mycologists (mushroom experts). In 1959, he won 5 million Lire on an Italian quiz show with mushrooms as his specialty subject.

(works with an * appear on Third Coast Percussion’s new CD/DVD)

Second Construction (1940)*
-All three constructions follow a micro/macro structure, where the large scale and small scale follow the same proportions. Second Construction is 16 sections of 16 bars, divided 4-3-4-5.
-This is one of the earliest uses of the prepared piano. By inserting objects in the strings, Cage turned the piano into a miniature percussion orchestra.
-Cage later came to speak ill of this piece, regretting its use of traditional ideas like a fugato and repeated thematic material.

Credo in US (1942)
-Written just 7 months after the strike on Pearl Harbor, Cage’s satirical collage offers an honest portrayal of America, devoid of the idealized patriotism that dominated much American music composed at that time.
-Cage’s first work to incorporate a radio. The presence of the radio automatically brings into the work an element of the time and place the piece is being performed.
- For the radio, the performer is instructed to avoid news programs at times of national emergency. For the phonograph recordings, the performer should “pick some classic. E.g., Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius, Shostakovich”

Radio Music (1956)
- For 1 to 8 performers, each with a radio. Each player’s part consists of a list of radio frequencies to tune to in order, within the allotted time span.
- The radio frequencies in the part were determined via chance operations.
- The resulting combination of radio broadcast speech, music and white noise will be virtually free of the composer or performer’s control.

Quartet (1935)*
-Cage’s first piece for percussion does not specify instruments and uses straightforward eighth-note based rhythms.
-We are performing the first 3 movements tonight. You can create your own version of the 4th with our app for iPhone and iPad (search app store for “Third Coast Percussion”)
-We will be performing the first movement on wooden objects and resonant metals, the second entirely on metals, and the third on the remnants of a de-constructed upright piano

RENGA:Cage:100 (2012)
-A Renga is a form of Japanese poem composed collectively by multiple poets.
-We’ve asked 100 composers to each compose approximately 5-7 seconds of music. The submissions are ordered via chance operations.
-This performance features a preview, including 53 of 100 composers who will eventually contribute to the piece.

Third Construction (1941)*
-The square form for this piece is 24 sections of 24 bars each, but each player’s part divides the 24 differently, creating overlapping, dovetailed musical lines and sections.
-Player 1: [2-8-2-4-5-3] Player 2: [5-3-2-8-2-4] Player 3: [3-2-8-2-4-5] Player 4: [8-2-4-5-3-2]
- Despite the unconventional instrumentation, all of the music is meticulously notated, using traditional staves and complex polyrhythms (quintuplets, septuplets, nontuplets, etc).

Please join us on July 12 in Millennium Park for electronic and acoustic music by Paul Lansky, David Skidmore, Clay Condon, and John Cage.

“Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth-century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.”
-John Cage, Goal: New Music, New Dance, 1939

New John Cage Album on Mode Records!

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:26:17 -0500

We are thrilled to announce the release today of our first full-length album!

John Cage: The Works for Percussion 2 is the 45th volume of the Mode Records CAGE EDITION, which will eventually include Cage’s complete works. Other artists on the series include David Tudor, Ensemble Modern, the Arditti Quartet, Margaret Leng Tan, Percussion Group Cincinnati, and Stephen Drury.

The album is available on CD and full-length video DVD. The videos were shot by the amazing and multi-talented Ross Karre. Ross and another amazing, multi-talented colleague, Greg Beyer, join Third Coast on the recording of First Construction.

Greg also produced the album and wrote the program notes, which we’ve included below to whet your appetite. You can order the album here and it will be available soon from iTunes, Amazon, or (for a lucky few) maybe even a local record store.

We hope you’ll check it out!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<Liner notes from the album.>

Percussion is a shape shifter.

Steven Schick, acclaimed percussionist and author of The Percussionist’s Art, refers to percussion as the “non-instrument.” This ubiquitous family of instruments includes just about any object which can be beaten, shaken or rubbed to make sound and it is this very lack of concrete definition which affords the percussionist a razor sharp tool with which to break new ground, to map uncharted territory, to continually “begin again”.

John Cage knew this intuitively. In the 1930’s he gravitated toward percussion looking for such a tool, one that would allow him to find “more new sounds.” Despite amassing a gorgeous collection of percussion instruments, Cage considered percussion music not as an end in itself but as a bridge to new sonic possibility. In a program note from that time period Cage wrote, “Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to the whole unexplored field of sound. It will be thought of in the future as a transition…to the unlimited freedom of ‘electronic’ music.”

Cage may have considered percussion as transition, but in this 100th year anniversary of his birth, celebrations of his life’s work will abound and percussionists will be at the epicenter of so much rejoicing.

This DVD and CD is one such celebratory offering from the meticulous, disciplined and vibrant Third Coast Percussion (TCP). These six works hail from a narrow yet incredibly fruitful six-year span: 1935 (Quartet) to 1941 (Third Construction). In 1938 Cage began his own percussion ensemble at Seattle’s Cornish School and composed extensively. He wrote letters to other composers, entreating them to contribute to this critical new genre. In so doing, Cage catalyzed a manifold expansion of percussion ensemble repertoire.

Cage’s own works from this period are now classics. This is especially true of the Constructions. In all three, Cage concerned himself with macro- and micro- details of structure, strictly adhering to pre-determined number sequences to organize the music on multiple levels.

First Construction (in Metal) (1939) is a monochromic monolith. While many vintage percussion ensemble works included a panoply of percussion instruments, Cage restricted himself, aside from piano, to metals. Even the piano strings are manipulated by an assistant, yielding metallic, siren-like sounds. The opening moments are uncompromising. Cage deftly employed multiple thundersheets to create thick waves of white noise against which rhythmic and melodic themes slowly emerge. His studies of world music with Henry Cowell in New York City in the mid-30‘s surely influenced the Balinesian gamelan-esque passages for gongs and tam-tams as cyclic time keepers, clarifying the underlying mathematics.

In Second Construction (1940) Cage began experimenting with mixed percussion. Note the beautiful oxen bells singing the opening theme and the subsequent long tones emanating from the tam-tam. These are followed by a signature rhythmic melody on piano while brushwork on a snare drum delineates a “backbeat”, setting the music alight in contrapuntal motion.

Third Construction (1941) is an undeniable masterpiece. Perhaps no other work for percussion quartet has developed such mystique and “performance practice.” Here Cage’s macro-micro-structural concepts develop great maturity, generating music with unyielding drive. The mathematical rigidity of phrases is loosened and each player overlays phrase upon phrase. Incredible sonic diversity results. Dropping the piano, his percussion instrumentation explodes, calling upon instruments from around the globe (the Peruvian quijada; the Mexican teponaxtle, the Indian cricket callers, etc.). This is joyous celebration - the whole world as percussive timbre knit together with rhythmic sophistication.

Prior to the Constructions and Cage’s time in Seattle, a fateful meeting with German experimental filmmaker, Oskar Fischinger, kindled the spark of percussive inspiration. Fischinger asked Cage to compose incidental music for what became Optical Poem (1937). During their collaboration, Fischinger imparted to Cage his quasi-animist belief that each object in the world has a spirit, and that “all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound.” This idea set Cage “on fire.”

Cage’s first percussion pieces, Quartet (1935) and Trio (1936) were composed soon after this interaction. Trio is a short three-movement work, set as a suite of simple dances (Allegro, March, Waltz) in fixed rhythms. The instrumentation is unchanging: woodblocks, tom-toms, bass drum and bamboo sticks. Cage would later use the Waltz in Amores (1943).

In his first percussion work, Quartet, Cage left instrumentation unspecified, reporting, “I had no idea what it would sound like.” Cage convinced three other musicians to rehearse with him, making several journeys to junkyards and the like to ultimately cull a collection of instruments which included brake drums, metal pipes and similar “found objects.”

Today, these junkyard trips have become percussive rites of passage and these “instruments” a lingua franca for contemporary percussion music. Cage unleashed a powerful palette of noises. Some seventy years later, percussionists and composers have had time to assimilate it and extend its possibilities. The noises have become more sophisticated, more refined. Nowhere is this more evident than TCP’s interpretation of Quartet. The sonic choices are pure poetry, reflecting both knowledge of the past and innovation as homage to Cage’s pioneering spirit.

Percussionists speak of their instruments in families - a triumvirate of wood, metal and skin. In Quartet, TCP has “scored” movements one, two, and four in exactly this manner. In movement one, metallic long tones occasionally interrupt the wooden garden. Metals continue alone in movement two, creating a lush, almost “electronic” environment (note the long, soft scrapes of the finger cymbals and other voices in this burnished metalloscape). In the final movement, TCP chose all drums as did Cage’s original ensemble.

It is the third movement, poetically titled Axial Asymmetry, that is most striking. Shocking, in fact. Their “updated version of a prepared piano”, the disembodied harp of an old upright piano, is fierce, haunting, industrial, transcendental. TCP took Cage’s idea and turned it into something that only a group of percussionists still hot in pursuit for “more new sounds”, could.

To close, TCP offers a playful interpretation of Living Room Music (1940). Recorded inside architect Bruce Goff’s unique Ruth Ford House, the setting for these four quirky movements was perfect. In To Begin, TCP literally “performs” the home, scraping on rope-textured ceilings and banging on steel support beams. In Story, Cage “raps” Gertrude Stein. Cage reported having been moved by the rhythmic aptitude, language and dance that he witnessed in African-American children in his native California. This inspiration, in fact, informed the cellular rhythms that pervade these early percussion works. Melody is ingenuously intoned on slide whistle, accompanied by bowls, spoons and computer. End is played on all manner of glass objects and on DVD is both beautiful sight and sound.

-Gregory Beyer

Cage:Percussion:3 - Fun with percussion lists

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:41:37 -0500

Just a quick post today…below is a list of John Cage’s percussion instrument collection dated July 8, 1940. Something about just holding this list (which is kept at the John Cage Collection - Northwestern University Library) was pretty awesome. As someone who has written quite a few lists of percussion instruments and checked them off by hand while either loading or unloading, it is somehow refreshing to imagine Cage doing the same thing in his late 20s.

…and here is the back of the same piece of paper…”Composers interested in electrical,” including “William Schumann [sic].”

And speaking of lists - below is the list of instruments for our preview performance of RENGA:Cage:100, our 100-composer salute to John Cage which will receive its full premiere at MoMA on August 9. The piece has been a blast to rehearse. We’re looking forward to performing the preview of the piece (with contributions from about 50 composers) on May 25 at the Mayne Stage in Chicago.

PLAYER 1
Can
2 bows (vibraphone)
6 triangles
custom watch (for Applebaum)
1 pitched pipe
2 vibe mallets
pair of claves
C#4 and G#4 metal sounds (bells or similar)
Cabasa
Alarm bell
One small hardwood mallet
Tenor drum with drum sticks
Low anvil
High brake drum
iPhone
high bell
Sousaphone, euphonium, or tuba filled with marbles
D natural crotale
Styrofoam peanuts (for all 4 players)
2 small (300ml) bottles of water, 50%-75% full
Guiro
Low pitched glass object
High pitched glass object
Low pitched drum
Sand paper blocks
Large tin can tuned like a steel drum to C
3 coffee cups with chopsticks
small thunder tube
high duck call
bottle of cheap beer (with beer in it)
branch with leaves on it
tuning fork
turntable
Tibetan prayer stones

PLAYER 2
Pair of maracas
2 bows (vibraphone)
iPhone (with all audio files)
custom watch (for Applebaum)
pitched pipe
2 vibe mallets
pair of claves
A5 and D6 metal sounds (bells or similar)
High woodblock
One small hardwood mallet
3 metal plates
B almglocken
Smallest triangle available
Medium bell
Timpani (or synth timp sound) – B, F#, G#
2 small (300ml) bottles of water, 50%-75% full
largest triangle available
Low pitched glass object
High pitched glass object
Low pitched drum
Sandpaper blocks
Large tin can tuned like a steel drum to A
Wood block
Large thunder tube
low duck call
bottle of cheap beer (with beer in it)
branch with leaves on it
3 woodblocks
finger cymbals

PLAYER 3
Pair of maracas
2 bows (vibraphone)
metal sound
drum
found object
custom watch (for Applebaum)
pitched pipe
pair of claves
large ratchet (or similar)
small ratchet (or similar)
one small hardwood mallet
G crotale
Triangle
Low tom
Smallest triangle possible
iPhone
low bell
2 small (300ml) bottles of water, 50%-75% full
largest triangle possible
Low pitched glass object
High pitched glass object
Low pitched drum
Sandpaper blocks
Large tin can tuned like a steel drum to G
Wood block
Siren whistle
3 bicycle horns (varying pitches)
bottle of cheap beer (with beer in it)
branch with leaves on it
tambourine
suspended cymbal
small tribal drum

PLAYER 4
Pair of maracas
2 bows (vibes)
conch shell
vibra slap
custom watch (for Applebaum)
pitched pipe
pair of claves
2 dry wooden sounds with strong upper partials
melodica
slapstick
one small hardwood mallet
flexatone
bass drum
chinese cymbal
G crotale
iPhone
2 small (300ml) bottles of water, 50%-75% full
Low pitched glass object
High pitched glass object
Low pitched drum
Sandpaper blocks
Large tin can tuned like a steel drum to E
Snare drum (snare sticks)
Megaphone or bullhorn
bottle of cheap beer (with beer in it)
branch with leaves on it
3 metal cans
vibra slap
rice or lentils

Only two weeks until our CD release concert at Mayne Stage in...

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:10:52 -0500

Only two weeks until our CD release concert at Mayne Stage in Chicago! The concert will feature music from our CD and full-length video DVD of John Cage’s percussion music on Mode Records, plus a preview performance of the 100-composer project we are curating entitled RENGA:Cage:100. Hope to see you there!

The album will be released May 22, and the Chicago concert is May 25.

Cage:Percussion:MoMA

Thu, 03 May 2012 21:22:00 -0500

Just announced…Third Coast Percussion will be presented in concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on August 9th of this year as part of the John Cage Centenary Celebration. The concert will feature music from our soon-to-be-released Cage percussion album on Mode Records, and the world premiere of the collaborative, 100-composer piece that TCP is curating entitled RENGA:Cage:100. MoMA will announce the full details of the concert later this month, so stay tuned for more info. If you’re in New York City, we hope to see you there!

Between 1935 and 1943, John Cage composed at least 17 works for percussion and commissioned and performed dozens more. He organized concerts of percussion music on the West Coast in Seattle, Portland, Walla Walla, Montana, and Idaho; on the Third Coast at the Arts Club of Chicago; and finally on the East Coast at the Museum of Modern Art.

This now legendary concert at MoMA on February 7, 1943 was the culminating event of the first major period of Cage’s creative life. He had recently moved to New York City and could not afford the real estate necessary to hold on to the 300+ percussion instruments he had collected over the past few years. After the MoMA concert Cage gave away his percussion instrument collection and moved on to other creative pursuits.

But the concert at MoMA did bring Cage some fame (if not fortune) thinks to a big feature article in Life Magazine. See last weeks post for a scan of that article, including images of Cage’s ensemble and their instruments. TCP’s own concert at MoMA is in part a tribute to the historic 1943 Cage percussion concert.

Cage:Percussion:2 - Instrument choice

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:38:00 -0500

When a percussionist decides to perform John Cage’s music from the 1930’s and 40’s, he or she might expect to see a list of instruments that looks something like this:

This is the instrument list for First Construction (in metal) from 1939, now a classic of the percussion ensemble repertoire. Aspiring professional percussionists have been tackling it for many years (we saw a brisk and exciting performance by the Arizona State University percussion ensemble last month). Knowledge of and experience with percussion chamber music performance is a standard requirement for the majority of percussion performance programs in higher education today.

But as with all of Cage’s early percussion (composed primarily between 1935 and 1942), First Construction was not performed by trained percussionists until decades after it was composed. John Cage gathered a motley crew of dancers, composers, students, and even his young wife at the time, Xenia, to form the first de facto professional percussion ensemble.

There is no record of Cage having any contact with professional percussionists when he was leading touring performances of percussion music in the 30’s and 40’s, and even if he had, it is uncertain whether the orchestral percussionists or jazz drum set players in that day would have been willing to put in the time necessary to master the quintuplets, septuplets, and other complicated rhythms ending in “-uplet” that were characteristic of Cage’s music at the time.

A professional classical percussionist in the 1930’s and 40’s would certainly have been asked to play quick and dexterous music on a xylophone for a performance of Gershwin Porgy and Bess or Strauss Salome. Many an orchestral percussionist was likely chastised for playing the snare drum too loud in Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade, thus instigating a now decades-long tradition amongst student percussionists of paranoia and near-hysterical fear of performing these relatively lighthearted works.

But if Cage had asked a trained percussionist in 1939 to assemble a suspended thunder sheet, a suspended string of small sleigh bells, and 12 graduated oxen bells (or 12 graduated Balinese button gongs suspended horizontally), there is a good chance said percussionist would have looked at him askance and gone back to practicing their quiet snare drum roll. These were not standard instruments by any stretch of the imagination; these were the instruments that Cage happened upon as he amassed his collection in his delighted search for new and interesting sounds. Some of the instruments Cage calls for in these pieces, such as the water gong or the Chinese cymbal, have become relatively common, at least in the working vocabulary of the modern percussionist.

But other instruments, for instance the oxen bells, can still puzzle even a professional percussionist. Oxen bells are not a standard instrument that can be purchased from any of the go-to percussion instrument retailers. A quick google search pulls up this link, but in our research at the John Cage Collection at the Northwestern University Library we happened across an article from Life Magazine (at the top of this blog post) about Cage’s percussion concert at MoMA in February 1943. The middle picture, bottom row, shows the instruments Cage referred to as “oxen bells.” The caption above the photo even reads “graduated oxen bells produce high and dampened tones,” giving us an aural snapshot of the instruments.

But does this now mean that our anointed task as the diligent percussionist is to scour the face of the earth for a row of tiny black bells with “high and dampened tones”? Will failure to procure said bells result in a lackluster performance? Clearly TCP did not feel that way. We recorded the piece in question (First Construction in Metal) this past June having already done this research and chose 12 graduated almglocken to stand in for Cage’s oxen bells. The almglocken (Swedish cowbells) are graduated in pitch from low to high, and are arranged on a padded table, which partially mutes their sound. This preserves both the low to high contour in the music and the boisterous rhythmic interplay between these instruments and the array of other metallic clanks, bangs, pings, and pows spread throughout the ensemble.

And speaking of onomatopoeia, it is worth considering that the sounds of our percussion objects may be far more important than their historical accuracy if our end goal is to create engaging musical performance. That is not to say that historical study is without merit - Third Coast in fact drove hundreds of miles to procure a set of great sounding Chinese tom toms for our recordings of Third Construction, Second Construction, Trio, and Quartet. The typical tom tom one finds on drum sets and in concert halls today has a sharper attack and longer decay than the Chinese instruments Cage and his ensemble would have used, and we felt strongly that the Chinese toms would blend better in these pieces than the modern instruments. But while this was a decision born out of a knowledge of historical performance practice, it was still ultimately a musical decision based on the sound of the instruments, not a decision based upon historical accuracy for accuracy’s sake.

So the answer for us has been thorough historical research coupled with an acute sensitivity to the sounds of the instruments, and how those sounds come together to bring Cage’s music to life. It was sound, not historical accuracy, that excited Cage when he was creating music. Why should it be any different today?

Cage:Percussion:1

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:19:47 -0500

John Cage was many things in his lifetime: a composer, an author, a philosopher, an inventor, a poet, a pianist, an orator, a fundraiser (both for his own projects and for Merce Cunningham), a leading mycologist. Among his many inventions and innovations, he is credited with writing the first piece of electro-acoustic music (Imaginary Landscape No. 1), inventing the prepared piano, incorporating concepts of Zen Buddhism in music vis-à-vis chance operations and indeterminacy. He was uncompromising – spending the first 30 years of his career with almost no money, pursuing the artistic challenges and inspirations that were vital to his own visions of the future of music and art. It was thanks to this bull-headed refusal to conform or compromise that Cage was so innovative, and has left such a lasting influence on the creative world.

One of Cage’s earliest inventions, and perhaps (in our opinion!) his greatest, was the professional percussion ensemble. Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation was premiered in 1933, two years before Cage’s first percussion piece, but it was Cage who first assembled an ensemble of percussionists to tour and perform notated percussion music - Cage’s own works, the few works yet written, and new works that Cage solicited from composers both nationally and internationally.

In May 2012, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, Third Coast Percussion will release an album of Cage’s percussion music on the record label dedicated to recording Cage’s complete works, Mode Records. In preparation for that album, which was recorded in June 2011, TCP was fortunate enough to gain access to Cage’s original manuscripts at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, and Cage’s personal correspondence at our alma mater – the Northwestern University Music Library, John Cage Collection.

For fans of John Cage, such as ourselves, this research was a complete and utter joy. Revelations ran from the anecdotally splendid (a list of the 13 Essential Rudiments published by the National Association of Rudimental Drummers had a note in John Cage’s hand: “See if you can teach these to that garbage collector; I couldn’t.” [emphasis is Cage’s]) to the profound. The quote below comes from an unmarked letter written in 1941, regarding Cage’s 1935 piece, Quartet:

I organized the composition on a rhythmic basis, indicating no instruments. Friends helped me perform it on kitchen utensils, pieces of wood, tire rims, brake drums, etc. I was unaware at the time that I was doing what many negro street musicians in New Orleans had done. I was sharing points of view of Schoenberg and hot jazz combined. I gave private performances of the results and everyone encouraged going ahead.

We wanted to share some of this information with a broader audience, which has led to this, the first in a series of blog entries dedicated to John Cage’s percussion music, and to his life and writings during this time period – roughly 1935 to 1943. Some of this may be of more interest to percussionists than it is to the general public (raise your hand if you think you might get giddy at the sight of the instrument check list Cage took on tour to Portland …I know I did). But fans of Cage’s music will hopefully find interest in a closer glimpse at some of Cage’s earliest work, both as a creator and as an advocate for new thoughts and new music.

Stay tuned: we’re planning to post these blog entries on a weekly basis. Next week’s post is dedicated to instrument selection in Cage’s percussion music - historical accuracy vs. contemporary innovation, including some very cool rarely-seen photos of Cage’s own percussion instruments.

RENGA:Cage:100

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:37:00 -0500

2012 marks the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, and the year has already seen some extremely exciting performances, festivals, exhibitions, lectures, and more. Here’s a full listing of events provided by the John Cage Trust.

Third Coast Percussion has been celebrating so far with concerts, master classes, a soon-to-be-released DVD and CD on Mode Records, a John Cage iPhone app, and more. Beginning next week we will also be launching a series of blog posts dedicated to John Cage, specifically Cage’s percussion music written between 1935 and 1943.

Celebrating this momentous year is a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. So for the next phase of the Centenary Celebration we thought we’d ask 100 of our closest composer friends to help out.

The idea for RENGA:Cage:100 came from Cage’s own works Renga and Apartment House 1776, which can be performed simultaneously. Renga is a form of Japanese collaborative poetry involving 2 or more poets taking turns writing lines of the same poem. Our RENGA will be one piece of music composed by 100 different composers, each contributing a sound, a musical idea, or some other prescribed performance or activity. We will use chance operations to determine the order in which we perform the contributions of each composer.

We began reaching out to composers late last week, and we’re extremely excited to have 63 composers already on board. Here’s a complete list of those who have signed on so far… Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Aaron Jay Kernis, Aaron Siegel, Aaron Travers, Alejandro Vinao, Alexandre Lunsqui, Amy Beth Kirsten, Amy Williams, Andrew Norman, Andrew Tham, Andy Akiho, Anna Clyne, Annie Gosfield, Augusta Read Thomas, Ben Leeds Carson, Brad Lubman, Christopher Adler, Chris Cerrone, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, Christian Wolff, Corey Dargel, Dai Fujikura, Daniel Dehaan, David Paha, David Smooke, David T. Little, Dominick DiOrio, Eric Beach, Hans Thomalla, Jacob Cooper, Jacob TV, Jason Treuting, Joan La Barbara, John Supko, Josh Quillen, Joseph Schwantner, Judah Adashi, Louise Fritensky, Marc Mellits, Marcos Balter, Mark Berger, Martin Bresnick, Mathew Rosenblum, Matthew Barnson, Michael Burritt, Nick Norton, Oscar Bettison, Paola Prestini, Paul Lansky, Rob Honstein, Robert Pound, Roger Zahab, Ross Karre, Ryan Ingebritsen, Sam Scranton, Samuel Adams, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sean Shepherd, Shani Aviram, Stacy Garrop, Steve Mackey, Ted Hearne, and Timo Andres.

We are planning to give a preview performance on May 25 at our CD release concert at the Mayne Stage in Chicago. The full premiere will take place in New York City on August 9th at a soon-to-be-announced very exciting concert.

Here is a glimpse at the instructions we’ve asked our composers to follow in creating their portion of the RENGA:

• To create your portion of the RENGA:
o Compose 5-7 seconds of music, or
o Compose 1 measure of music, or
o Choose 5-7 seconds of music you have already written, or
o Choose 1 measure of music you have already written, or
o Create a recorded sound to be included in performance, or
o Create an image, text, or other artwork to be interpreted in performance, or
o Prescribe a disciplined action for the performers.
• Spend at least 100 seconds on your contribution.
• Do not spend more than 100 minutes on your contribution.
• All of the instruments you write for must weigh less than 100 ounces (6.25 lb.), or
• We will find a way to accommodate your instrumentation to the best of our abilities. Remember we are an ensemble of 4 percussionists

Below is one of our first submissions, from the fantastically creative Corey Dargel:

And here’s another submission, this one from the brilliant mind of Christopher Adler:

We’ll plan to post more of the composers’ contributions as we receive them. And stay tuned for the first post in our Cage:Percussion blog series, coming soon.

We just received this recording of Clay’s new piece...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:33:46 -0600

We just received this recording of Clay’s new piece “Fractalia.” Recorded live at a Third Coast Percussion concert at Furman University on November 1, 2011. Enjoy!