September 27, 2012
by Jack Walton

Composer Augusta Read Thomas is working on a concerto for superstar cellist Lynn Harrell.

That job is a breeze compared to her new work for Third Coast Percussion, titled “Resounding Earth.”

“I’ve been composing for over 30 years, and this was far and away the hardest piece for me to compose,” Thomas says by phone from Chicago.

It’s challenging for a composer, working in silence, to envision the sound of an orchestra with cello soloist. Envisioning the sound of 300 pieces of metal is practically impossible.

“If you hit a bell at place X, you get a certain set of overtones,” she says. “If you hit it 3 inches from X, you get a different set of overtones. It becomes complicated, even to write one measure.”

Thomas consulted the Third Coast musicians during the writing process, and they invariably assured her that they could play the difficult parts she was writing.

Of the 300 metal items, about half are bells. One sequence calls for 18 kyeezees, or Burma bells, which is literally unprecedented.

“There’s no other piece on the planet with 18 Burma bells,” Thomas says.

Third Coast member David Skidmore says that the bells are rare, genuine items originally used for spiritual purposes.

“The (Burmese) monks wake up early in the morning and walk the streets with these spinning bells,” Skidmore says. “They’ll strike the bells and that’s everyone’s signal to go out and give alms.”

“Resounding Earth” lasts about 30 minutes, and its four movements play on our associations with bells as warnings, timekeepers, announcements of joy or sorrow.

“I like the extremeness of it — a half hour of metal,” Thomas says. “But it means that one has to sculpt the time, so it’s not just everybody wailing away on metal for half an hour. Each movement is its own sonic universe.”

Because the instruments carry myriad cultural and religious connotations, Thomas gave the work an informal subtitle, “A United Nations of Resonances.” The second movement, “Prayer,” employs tuned Japanese bowls called rin.

“When you rub the edges of them, they start to hum,” Thomas says. “It starts to sound like they are actually singing.”

Third Coast Percussion gives the premiere of “Resounding Earth” Sunday at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. DeBartolo co-commissioned “Resounding Earth.” The quartet will also perform works by John Cage, Steve Reich and Third Coast member Owen Clayton Condon.

Formed in 2005, Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion has already become a prominent name in the field, specializing in works of maverick composers, including Iannis Xenakis, Toru Takemitsu and George Crumb.

Cage wrote his “Third Construction” in 1941, before random chance operations took hold in his composing. This piece is mostly precise in its directions to the players. There are some driving beats, and they serve to anchor more deeply complicated metrical activity.

Cage contended that percussion music processes could point the way to how electronic music would work, and that idea plays out in Condon’s “Fractalia.” It calls for the musicians to strike notes sequentially — as in a fugue or a round — at an eighth note apart. The sound that emerges resembles that of an electronic instrument using a digital delay effect.

“He’s re-creating — acoustically — certain musical phenomena that happen in electronic music,” Skidmore says.

Skidmore notes that Reich’s early work with tape recorder experiments — famously, 1965’s “It’s Gonna Rain” — set a foundation for his subsequent ideas about repetition, delay and decay.

Reich’s “Mallet Quartet,” written in 2009, finds the composer using a traditional three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure. It’s scored for two vibraphones and two five-octave marimbas. The lyrical second movement is slightly out-of-character for Reich.

“(Some avant-garde composers) were trying to get away from harmony and melody. John Cage is a perfect example of that,” Skidmore says.

But late-period Reich reveals that the veteran composer is open-minded about having actual tunes in his music.

“That middle movement is beautiful, and it has melodies,” Skidmore says, laughing. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

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