PROGRAM

Bulldog by Andrea Venet
…hence the term, well adjusted. by Robert Dillon
Narratology by Hunter Ewen
the season of Big rain (Mbura ya Njahĩ) by Nyokabi Kariũki
R.I.N. by Andys Skordis

Third Coast Percussion’s “Currents” is made possible by the generous support of Sidney K. Robinson, and by Third Coast Percussion fans like you. Thank you!

Third Coast Percussion’s Currents Creative Partnership is made possible by the DEW Foundation, the Sargent Family Foundation, and Louise K. Smith.

Third Coast Percussion’s programs are supported by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at Prince Charitable Trust, The Illinois Arts Council Agency, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Amphion Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Dr. Andrea Venet is a percussion artist, educator, and composer specializing in contemporary and classical genres. She is Associate Professor of Percussion at the University of North Florida where she directs the UNF percussion ensemble, teaches applied lessons, pedagogy, methods and percussion literature. As an international soloist, chamber musician, and clinician, she maintains an active performance schedule with appointments in Europe, Japan, Canada, and Trinidad. Andrea’s compositions and arrangements can be found self-published via her website, through Keyboard Percussion Publications (KPP), and Tapspace, in addition to articles published with Percussive Notes and Rhythm!Scene Journals. Andrea is an artist for Malletech, Black Swamp Percussion, Remo, and DREAM Cymbals. She currently serves as the Percussive Arts Society Florida Chapter President and on the Board of Directors for The Green Vibes Project. 

“My beloved English bulldog, Shosti, is no stranger to drums and percussion. She has been surrounded by these sounds her whole life. She lays under the marimba while I practice and refuses to be far from sight when I’m playing drums at home. Added bonus: most of the things she does are rhythmic with some level of consistency. For example, Shosti drinks water in combinations of 7/8 and 9/8, which is represented at letter B. She witnesses a lot of creativity that happens at home and much of it is a direct result of interacting with her in idle moments because I am a huge dork. Consequently, one hilarious and interesting thing about her is that she loves paradiddles. Whether it be drumset, or a multi-setup, or tapping a groove on nearby objects, it instantly sets her off into a boisterous “play mode” frenzy, even from a dead-sleep. She also gets very fired up when hearing Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”!
“Bulldog” is inspired by Shosti and our jam time. The content of the piece is based on paradiddles in various forms, and includes rhythmic grooves and patterns that represent things I associate with the bulldog “freestyle”. Within paradiddle groupings of different lengths, there are variations of voicing, sticking, and patterns. One versatile thing about paradiddle language are the funky grooves that emerge when extracting one voice/hand, especially when juxtaposing over a contrasting but steady pulse. Like an English bulldog, the piece is intended to be fun, sturdy, thick, short and sweet!”

–Andrea Venet

Third Coast Percussion member Robert Dillon has enjoyed a career as an orchestral, solo and chamber musician, as well as an educator for all ages, and since college, has pursued music composition as an additional expressive avenue. His music appears on TCP’s just-released Archetypes album as well as the Grammy-nominated 2019 release Perpetulum, and his music has been performed by university percussion ensembles across the country and overseas.

“I find the hardest part of writing a new piece is getting started. I began this piece in 2017 with a sound I wanted to explore — a rapid movement between many different instruments and objects, all with the same pitch. I liked the idea that one note would come through clearly, even while the timbres were changing too quickly for the listener’s ear to hold on to any one sound.

The hardest part is getting started, and once I had an initial sonic idea — a single note made of many colors — I could begin building on that one note to form harmonies, and with each new step, more and more possibilities opened up. 

I do find the hardest part of writing a new piece is getting started, but sometimes, even once I feel sure about where to begin, I can be paralyzed by the options of where to go next. The second step is when I actually have to decide what the piece is “about,” or whether there’s even really a piece there at all.

I find the hardest part of writing a new piece is getting started, but often the part that excites me the most is a big-picture idea about the form or structure of a piece. I really like it when a book or movie or a tv show organizes its story in a clever way. Part of the eternal charm of “Groundhog Day,” for instance, is the way its imaginative premise speaks to the mundane challenges of our everyday lives. Many of our journeys unfold not in heroic arcs with inevitable ends, but in familiar cycles we have to repeat, again and again, until we figure out how to escape them, or at least until how we get them to lead where we want to go.”

–Robert Dillon

Hunter Ewen is a dramatic composer and educator. During the day, Dr. Ewen designs systems for artificially intelligent creativity. At night, he masks up and fights crime with loud noises and strange ideas. His work rails against the waning borders of science and art—meaning and meaninglessness. Ewen values clamor and deviance. Clarity and frenzy. Space. Yowls and yips and screams that masquerade as music. He’s worked some of the same jobs and won some of the same awards as other composers too.

“For percussion quartet and pre-recorded narrator, Narratology is a reflection on ambiguity and lack of autonomy in our public discourse. We Americans are slowly becoming more divided, more political, and more contentious. Society is forcing us into lockstep. We’re having to choose sides—and we keep getting quieter…and angrier. It’s hard to disagree peacefully anymore. So how can we have a real conversation if we just repeat talking points? How can we find our own voice in the 21st century, and how can we reclaim the strength to speak up? Narratology is what happens when we discover our patterns and start pushing back against the systems that deny our autonomy.”

–Hunter Ewen

Nyokabi Kariũki (b. 1998, she/her) is a Kenyan composer and performer based between New York, Maryland and Nairobi. Her sonic imagination is ever-evolving, with compositions ranging from classical contemporary to choral music, film, experimental pop; and further includes explorations into sound art, electronics, and (East) African musical traditions. She is dedicated to using composition as a tool to not only re-discover the stories of her culture, but also to highlight its significance, and contribute to the preservation of African and Black stories.

Nyokabi’s works have been performed across the United States and internationally, and she has been commissioned by various performers and ensembles including Tetractys New Music, the Heartland Marimba Quartet, piano duo Chromic, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Men’s Ensemble. Most recently, she was the recipient of the 2021 Hearsay ‘Art’ Award, which celebrated her piece ‘A Walk Through My Cũcũ’s Farm’ as “audio that transports, transforms, evokes, immerses, transports”. 

“I never hesitate to look for guidance and inspiration for my pieces in home, Kenya. My ethnic group, the Kikuyu, are farmers, and seasons are based on planting and harvest. The season of ‘big rain’ is known as Mbura ya Njahi, which refers to the rain that comes that allows the beans to grow (usually from April to July). When writing the piece, I found myself thinking of the sound of the tapping of rain on the roof of our home in Kirinyaga, where my father and his sisters grew up. It is one of my most favourite, most peaceful places to be.”

–Nyokabi Kariũki

Andys Skordis (Cyprus, b. 1983) is a composer of contemporary music, with special emphasis on large scale works, music theatre and site specific pieces. His music is often characterized as archaic and dark, resulting in performances which are frequently compared with rituals or ceremonial occurrences. His work list includes operas, orchestral and chamber pieces, Gamelan music, vocal works, as well as music for dance, theatre and short films. In addition, he has created various music theatre performances in site specific locations like quarries, temples, abandoned buildings, forests, floating stages, and more. Recently he was awarded with the Black Pencil Prize in 2020. Besides composing, he is an artistic collaborator with the Greek National opera, the music curator of Xarkis festival and the guitarist of Monsieur Doumani, a multi awarded trio from Cyprus. 

“’R.I.N’ is inspired by a process where one goes into a deeper state of existence…an introverted state, going deeper into their own body and soul. The piece is divided into two movements, where the first one resembles the journey of going deeper in yourself and the second reflects the state when someone has arrived that state; in other words the two movements could be called as descent and exploration. The piece finishes when the whole process has finished, returning back into an altered state of mind and ultimately, existence.

The four percussionists represent a single entity broken into four pieces, where absolute harmony in all aspects should function in order for the collective “ego” to go through the entire process. The bass drum represents our mind, the nucleus of ourself which is broken in other pieces, and so on.

Lastly, as a personal note for the piece, I tried to engage percussion instruments found in various cultures around the world, thus reflecting my personal journey as a composer, expressing timbre and patterns from the various cultures I have studied as a musician, to arrive at the present time. The piece is dedicated to Third Coast Percussion, and our entire journey in creating this piece from the very beginning.”

–Andys Skordis

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Third Coast Percussion’s programs are supported by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at Prince Charitable Trust, The Illinois Arts Council Agency, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Amphion Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University.

PROGRAM
Common Patterns in Uncommon Time by David Skidmore (b. 1982)
Prelude – Material Study 1
Mvt. 1 – Entity
Mvt. 2 – Design
Mvt. 3 – Repose
Interlude – Material Study 2
Mvt. 4 – Diversity
Mvt. 5 – Entity
Mvt. 6 – Repose

This concert is support by Sidney K. Robinson. Special thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin Preservation for partnering with us on the event.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Common Patterns in Uncommon Time (2011) was commissioned by Sidney K. Robinson in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Taliesin, the studio and residence of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Of Common Patterns, the composer David Skidmore writes:

“In writing this piece, I drew inspiration from the following Wright quotation:

‘…striving for entity, oneness in diversity, depth in design, repose in the final expression of the whole – all these are there in common pattern between architect and musician.’

The piece is comprised of six movements and an interlude performed without pauses between the movements. Each movement draws its title from one of the key words from Wright’s quote: entity, diversity, design, and repose.

When I was asked to write this piece, I quickly realized that I was not interested in writing music ‘about’ a piece of architecture. Even if the notion had interested me, I have no idea how one could accomplish such a thing. Instead, this is a piece inspired by architecture, and, more specifically, the work of one of the great creative minds of the last century, Frank Lloyd Wright. I am an amateur aficionado of architecture, not an expert, so I approached the project as such. When I look at a Frank Lloyd Wright building, the characteristic which most fascinates me is the manner in which simple geometric shapes – squares, rectangles, circles, triangles – are layered in such intricate and unpredictable ways to create the deep complexity and beauty of the whole work.

These simple shapes in complex layers, along with the quotation above, inspired both the title of the piece and the vast majority of the musical material. I have taken some basic building blocks of music –rhythmic groupings of 3, 4, or 6 notes; harmonies with 3, 4, or 6 pitches – and layered these elements in many, many different ways, each layer leading to a new musical idea, a new sound, a new inspiration. Taliesin is unique among Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings in that he worked on it continuously from 1911 until his death in 1959. The house is therefore not a single, self-contained architectural idea but instead a fluid structure nearly 50 years in the making. Yet somehow Wright managed to create continuity across his decades of work on the building.

As my good friend, architectural guru, and progenitor of this piece, Sidney K. Robinson once said “Taliesin was always changing, but it was always Taliesin.” I have thus endeavored to capture some aspect of this combination of evolution and continuity. While the piece is a palindrome harmonically, with the end of the piece circling back to exactly where it began, the rigid and repetitious rhythmic nature of the beginning slowly loosens throughout the course of the piece and eventually completely dissolves as the piece draws to a close.

The materials of the percussion instruments used (glass, wood and metal) are woven throughout the work in much the same way Wright integrated materials to unify his own designs. This represents a striking similarity between percussion and architecture: more so than in any other music, percussion music is defined by the materials used in performance. A piece may call for marimbas and vibraphones, or it may call for radios, electric buzzer and tom toms; whatever palette the composer chooses, his or her work is defined and structurally unified by these materials as an architect’s work is defined and unified by his or her use of limestone, or plaster, or wood.”

Hear Common Patterns in Uncommon Time on Third Coast Percussion’s album Unknown Symmetry: click here to listen on Spotify, and click here to purchase the album.

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David Skidmore is an Ensemble Member and Executive Director of Third Coast Percussion. As a chamber musician, David has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center Festival, Kimmel Center, EMPAC, June in Buffalo, Klangspuren Schwaz, the Ojai Music Festival, the Bang On a Can Marathon and three Percussive Arts Society International Conventions. David was a member of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble from 2007-2011 and Ensemble ACJW from 2008-2010.

David has performed and collaborated with many of the world’s finest musicians including conductors Pierre Boulez, Lorin Maazel, David Robertson, and Michael Tilson Thomas, composers Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Eötvos, and chamber ensembles Eighth Blackbird and Ensemble Signal. David has performed as a soloist in Europe, Asia, and the United States. David has also performed as a member of the Lucerne Festival Academy, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Pacific Music Festival, and the National Repertory Orchestra.

David is also a composer, and his works are performed regularly in concert halls and universities across the country. David taught for four years on the percussion faculty at the Peabody Conservatory. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern University and a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music. His teachers were Michael Hernandez, Shawn Schietroma, Michael Burritt, James Ross, and Robert Van Sice.

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Common Patterns in Uncommon Time was commissioned by Sidney K. Robinson for the Taliesin Centennial Celebration.

Third Coast Percussion’s programs are supported by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at Prince Charitable Trust, The Illinois Arts Council Agency, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Amphion Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University.

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