March 19, 2014
by Kyle MacMillan

Augusta Read Thomas is bats about bells. The nationally known Chicago composer has included them in her music and has used other instruments to evoke their ringing tone and resonance. In her new piece she takes her infatuation further than ever.

“Resounding Earth” incorporates 125 bells and other instruments and metal items that make bell-like sounds—300 objects overall. “It wasn’t like, ‘OK, now, I’ll do something crazy.'” she said. “It was to take something that was true to my music and push it all the way.”

The 35-minute piece, which next will be performed March 24 at the University of Buffalo and March 26 at Penn State Erie, was commissioned for Third Coast Percussion by the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. Since the work’s world premiere in September 2012, the Chicago-based ensemble has performed it nearly 20 times across the country, with the composition’s first New York performance set for March 2015 in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.

Across four movements, the work’s bells, including 18 Burmese spinning bells and 26 Japanese “singing” bowls, as well as cymbals, gongs, triangles, coiled springs, metal pipes, and vibraphone come together to create an ethereal, Eastern-tinged sound with changing moods and colors—what the composer calls “perfumes.”

While “Resounding Earth” is novel, it also continues the explorations of sound that the 49-year-old Ms. Thomas has pursued since she first plunked her family’s piano as the youngest of 10 children in Glen Cove, N.Y. She tries to listen daily to music of all kinds, including jazz and world music. She said, “I like any music that is good.”

Ms. Thomas likes to say that she “writes by ear,” which for her means often composing at the piano and vocalizing what she has written—”dancing it, beating it, feeling it, embodying it,” she said. She avoids the arcane algorithmic systems that some experimental composers employ and tends to work more organically, putting an emphasis on tonal music with sometimes sharp contrasts from rhythmic bursts to quiet soundscapes.

One of the biggest boosts to Ms. Thomas’s career came in 1997-2006, when she served as composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She teaches at the University of Chicago, living and composing music in a high-rise apartment that overlooks Lake Michigan.

“It’s a ‘yes’ kind of a city,” she said of Chicago. “You want to do something? ‘Yes, let’s do it.'”

In 2011, she approached Third Coast Percussion about her idea for a work centered on bells, and the foursome was immediately receptive. To overcome the many hurdles inherent in such an unconventional piece, they met a dozen times during the work’s one-year composition.

Big challenges for Ms. Thomas were understanding the tonal quality of each of the bells and other instruments and crafting a suitably diverse sound world without drawing on strings, woodwinds or even drums. “You just have metal,” she said.

The four percussionists had to figure out how to choreograph their movements and configure a stage full of instruments, ranging from bells less than 1 inch tall to a gong 32 inches in diameter, so they could get to them easily during a concert. The group also had to learn the subtleties of each of the unfamiliar sound-makers. In the first movement, for example, a three-note passage from Thai gong to Chinese opera gong to coiled spring, and it has to sound fluid and homogeneous.

“Then you expand that across the whole 35-minute piece,” said Third Coast member David Skidmore. “It was very fun but it was a real challenge to find how to really sculpt our preparation so that we were managing these objects, which are very different from one another, and to kind of bring them together to create one musical idea.” Third Coast is planning another collaboration with Ms. Thomas: an octet for percussion and string quartets.

It’s a good bet that the music will have at least a few bells tucked in here and there.

 Read the original article here.

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