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Back to the present day:

Third Coast had the honor of presenting a clinic at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago. We discussed the value of un-conducted chamber music for percussion at the middle school and high school level, sharing our ideas about this music with music educators from around the country. Greater ensemble skills, sense of individual and section responsibility, and ability to see how one's own part fits into the big picture-- all of which are developed by this sort of percussion chamber music-- are vital to the way percussionists function in a larger ensemble setting as well. It all focused on non-transcription works; that is, music written originally for percussion. We performed four pieces to use as examples:

Steve Reich-- Music for Pieces of Wood
Tobias Brostrom-- Twilight
Lou Harrison-- The Song of Queztecoatl
David Skidmore-- Ritual Music

We also gave our audience a list of other works that might be appropriate for their students, which was slightly abridged to keep the handout to a reasonable length. Here is a more detailed list of works:

TCP- Midwest Bibliography-Full.pdf

Thursday of our Taliesin week was the day of panel discussions-- one with the four of us talking with the architecture students about what we do, and one for the general public, discussing connections between music and architecture with Sidney Robinson. Sid is a faculty member at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture there, as well as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an architecture scholar with a particularly deep knowledge about Wright. He also has a serious interest in music and, lucky for us, is an avid fan of Third Coast Percussion.
(Interesting side note relating to music and architecture: Sid lives in a house designed by Bruce Goff, an architect who also composed a number of pieces of music for the player piano.)
In order to prepare for our panel discussion with Sid, we met up with him the night before in Wright's home to talk through some ideas and get a sense of where the public discussion might head. Pretty awesome hanging out in Frank Lloyd Wright's living room, pontificating.

This is the room. You can't see us in this picture, but I can assure you, we're all wearing corduroy blazers with elbow patches.
The discussion unfolded very naturally, and Sid said at the end of the night "alright, well let's just do this again tomorrow." Both discussions on Thursday did go very well. Easy to talk about these things once you get going. We played a bit in both sessions, and I think blew some young architects' minds.
There's something very special about talking with people who are thinking of their own art at such a high level as these architectural apprentices are, but who may not have an extensive about your own art-- contemporary percussion music, in this case. They really got it all, but it was very new for them.
Here's a shot from one of their notebooks:
I totally love it, although I think I look a little like the Unabomber in this sketch...
In drawing parallels between the various people involved in the creation of a building or a piece of music (ie, the architect is the composer), an audience member brought up a fascinating idea (and not the obvious answer), that the inhabitants of a house are analogous to the performers of a piece of music in some way: they live with the piece for the long term, and if they leave and new inhabitants move in, they will 'perform' the house in a different way. My mind=blown.

On a different subject, in case anyone was worried, we did find the closest establishment with a pool table as well. There is one in Spring Green, and Clay can smell that sort of thing a couple miles away.
And, regarding the title of this week's entry, here are a bunch of other pictures that Peter took with his "real" camera, from the more thorough tour of the grounds Sid gave us the following morning:

Tonight (Sunday, November 22) between 6 and 7 central time, tune in to WNUR to hear an interview with Rob Dillon from Third Coast, and friend of the group and architecture scholar Sidney Robinson, discussing our recent program involving music and architecture. That's 89.3 FM for those of you in the Chicago area with a radio, or WNUR.org for the rest of the world. Check it out!

In early September, Third Coast had the pleasure of visiting the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and School of Architecture at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin. We did a week-long residency, sponsored by the Taliesin Arts and Culture Program, which included an architecture-themed concert as well as a variety of activities to engage the architecture students, kids from local schools and the area community throughout the week. All in all, a spectacular experience. Let's start at the beginning:

Sometimes when we tour, we can make arrangements to use instruments from an institution we're visiting (like a university) or somewhere else in the area. This was not one of those situations-- as one might expect, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture doesn't have much in the way of percussion instruments. So we loaded up a UHaul with all of our gear, with just enough room left for Clay's motorcycle:

A recent initiate of the motorcycle community, Clay was excited to take advantage of the scenic country roads in the remotely located Spring Green area.
Anyhow, we arrived at Taliesin late Monday night, and Tuesday morning we stopped in at the local middle school to talk to the kids about music and what the heck a percussion ensemble is. The discussion centered around how musicians (or any kind of artist for that matter) are inspired by things outside their field: other types of music, other types of art, or even by entirely different disciplines. So, for instance, musicians and architects might draw ideas or inspiration from the other's fields. Which was the purpose/theme of our entire week. The kids seemed pretty into it-- among other things we played John Cage's "Third Construction" for them. Always cool to play Cage (granted, it's pretty traditional for Cage-- no amplified cactus here) for middle school kids and have them enjoy it. We did a couple of these sessions over the first two days of our time in Wisconsin, covering all the band classes at the school.
In between, we had some time to unload the rest of our instruments at the Hillside Theater, where our concert would be on Friday, and get some rehearsal time in. Here's what the theater looks like (when it's filled with percussion instruments):



Tour groups would come through ever once in a while as we were rehearsing, and we'd stop and listen to the tour guide-- we heard more or less the same information each time. In case you were wondering, the brightly colored curtain that usually goes in front of the red one is currently on loan to the Guggenheim museum (click here to see it there).
The theater, as well as the rest of the buildings on the grounds, are all Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Really fascinating layouts-- kind of mind blowing. Meanwhile, the whole thing is its own little world, pretty well off the beaten path (Madison-- the closest big city-- is about 50 miles away). So it feels a little like summer camp, if summer camp took place among modernist architectural wonders.
In the pic above, over the stage, you can see, through the open curtain, some wood panels with holes carved in them (corn stalk-like shapes, in reference to the local landscape). On the other side of that is the dining room, where the architecture students and teachers have their meals. The architectural school is very small-- around 20 students-- and it seems like the program is more like an apprenticeship. As far as the dining hall, there's a resident chef, and at each meal, a couple students are assigned to assist him or do dishes after. So there's a delicious home cooked meal for every lunch and dinner, and everyone's helping out at their time in the rotation. Kinda like a commune. Or summer camp.
Here's a view of the dining hall from the floor above:

You can see those same "corn stalk" wood panels from the other side here. The open space that connects these different rooms on different floors is pretty amazing. You get this crazy sense of fluidity between the rooms that you don't get in most buildings.
Meal times gave us a good chance to meet some of the students-- really fascinating individuals with a very solid knowledge of their field-- as well as the teachers, who are themselves professional architects. We decided to jump in and wash some dishes on the first night-- the students were all super busy working on their final projects for the term (more on the Taliesin calendar later) and we figured it would indebt them to clap loudly at our concert...

More to come!

Labels: architecture, touring

Hi everyone!
It must be painfully obvious that I've fallen a bit behind on the blog updates lately. There's plenty to tell between August and October of 2009, so let's get down to business:


Rush Hour 2009:
August 25 was our third appearance at the Rush Hour Concerts series at St James Cathedral. This year marked Rush Hour's 10th anniversary season, and they offered us the particular honor of performing the final concert of this season. They also asked David to compose a fanfare for the occasion, which he called "Fanfare for a New Audience." We gave the unofficial premiere of the fanfare at a fundraising event for Rush Hour's Fanfare Committee (which is geared toward building Rush Hour's under 40 audience) in the spring, but this concert marked the official world premiere. More on that later.
Before the concert, Deborah Sobol, Rush Hour's Artistic Director, interviewed us for Rush Hour's weekly podcast. We discussed the new fanfare, the unique role of percussion in today's musical environment, the absence of coffee cans in this year's concert, and "Mr. Tambourine Man." (Click here to listen to this edition of "Rush Hour Conversations.")
We always love playing the Rush Hour Concerts because they bring us such a large and energetic audience, and a spacious environment to fill with big sounds. Dave's fanfare was written with the cavernous dimensions (and acoustics) of St James Cathedral in mind, using a few chimes and crotales for pitched bell-like sounds, along with the drumset-like set-ups used for Dennis DeSantis's rockin' piece "Shifty" which we also performed on this concert. We'd also be foolish not to include some marimbas on this concert, because the resonance of the space makes them sound AMAZING.

(See? The sound is so beautiful that a beam of light comes down from heaven when you play marimba there.)
So we played Christopher Deane's "Vespertine Formations," which we played almost 4 years ago at the first concert that the four of us ever played together. We also closed the concert (and Rush Hour's Season) with Clay's "Quadruple Helix," which has become a Third Coast favorite.
At the end of the day, it makes for a lot of instruments on stage, but I guess that's just what we do:


One last note: on the concert, between pieces, I was telling the audience about our awesome new website, and I got some good laughs by emphasizing that there were a lot of photos of us on the site. Apparently, this evoked images of young admirers swooning over our percussion action shots... well, here's a little treat for them, if they're out there:


Peter

























Rob



















Clay

(spoiler alert-- this may be your last chance to see him with a goatee...)













... and David.

Hi everyone,
Welcome to the new and improved thirdcoastpercussion.com! You can check out recordings, videos, pictures and our blog, along with information about the group, upcoming performances, etc.
This website brought to you by Ben Wilhelm, web designer, lighting designer and friend of the group. Enjoy!

While we're in the planning stages for this coming season, I thought I'd post a little something from our past for anyone who may not have seen it at the time.
Casey Farina is a composer, sound designer and installation artist who's put on some pretty interesting stuff in Chicago in the last few years. One that particularly sticks out is project CONDOR, which involved a bunch of small blimps, each with speakers attached, flying around the Broadway Armory playing music.
We performed a piece by him in 2007 called bitsmoke, which is a video score-- it's a 15 minute long video projection, entirely black and white abstract shapes. It's meant for 4 performers, but the instrumentation is not specified-- it could be 4 flutes, or 4 different brass instruments, or a xylophone, a tuba, an accordian and a singer. Whatever. Each performer is assigned a quarter of the screen to follow, and is supposed to make sounds based on what's happening in their quadrant.

white= sound
black= silence

Here's a video of the score, with the recording of our first performance of it in 2007:




It's such a cool piece, because it really makes the performer and audience think about the relationship between visual images and sounds. Like, what do a bunch of rapidly flashing squares sound like? vs What does a smoky cloud sound like? As listeners or musicians, we all have metaphors for music-- that it tells a story, or that it behaves like a spoken language, etc-- which help us understand music in different ways. This new one, "what would that sound look like or what would that image sound like?" can provide a new insight, one maybe particularly well suited to the (often rather abstract) aesthetic of contemporary music.

Third Coast performed bitsmoke again in January of 2009 on the Sonic Inertia concert series at Sherwood Conservatory. That venue allowed us to set up the four of us around the audience, so everyone got to hear the four different quadrants coming from different directions.
Bitsmoke works particularly well for percussion (in our opinion) because of the wide variety of sounds at our disposal-- we can really give different shapes their own sound character. The performance above used a toy piano, rice bowls, cowbells, cymbals, log drums, some hand drums and more...