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Learn MorePublished on January 12, 2025
by John von Rhein | Share this post!
“The stage was arrayed with a veritable arsenal of pitched and unpitched mallet percussion that lent an intriguing visual dimension to a stimulating program of mostly new music whose rhythmic asymmetries and textural complexities were like mother’s milk to TCP’s astonishing resident virtuosos … The more intricate the music, the more incisive and precise their reflexes.”
Presenting chamber groups in classical configuration has been the stock in trade of the Northwestern University Winter Chamber Music Festival since the series’ inception nearly two decades ago. But the 28th season demanded an add-on concert to honor the 20th anniversary of Third Coast Percussion.
The ensemble’s four founding members are all Northwestern alumni, having met there in 2005 when they formed the internationally celebrated ensemble that played to a packed Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on the Evanston campus Saturday night.
The stage was arrayed with a veritable arsenal of pitched and unpitched mallet percussion that lent an intriguing visual dimension to a stimulating program of mostly new music whose rhythmic asymmetries and textural complexities were like mother’s milk to TCP’s astonishing resident virtuosos David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon and Sean Connors: The more intricate the music, the more incisive and precise their reflexes.
The majority of pieces centered around, but were hardly limited to, marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, drums and the like. A veritable gamelan ensemble of exotic instruments—including bell plates, brake drums, cowbells, Thai gongs and flower pots—added to the sonic mix for the golden oldie of the evening, the great American experimentalist Lou Harrison’s 1959 Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra.
The first half was devoted to three brand-new pieces TCP commissioned as part of its 20th anniversary. Pride of place went to Lady Justice (2024) by Jessie Montgomery, a major force in new music in Chicago who last year completed a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. The 15-minute opus, whose title references the increasingly important role of women in political and judicial roles, was developed in workshop with TCP out of an earlier Montgomery piece, Study No. 1.
A tremendous amount of kinetic energy is packed into a 15-minute twittering machine that assigns prominence to two layers of sound – the rising and falling pitches of tom drums hooked to air hoses blown by the players, and the shimmer of pitched crotales dipped in pans of water. Around these sounds swirl intriguing ostinatos of patterned clangs, clacks, twitches and rustles, creating powerful crescendos that suggest a gigantic percussion organ with all stops pulled out. Watching the players hop from one instrument to the other and switch mallets at lightning speed was quite a show in itself.
So, too, was Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion (2024), whose three movements integrate a remarkably wide field of influences, from classical to jazz-rock to Armenian folk, without sounding in any way like gimmicky pastiche. Indeed, the quality of musical invention is often highly imaginative throughout the work’s 20 absorbing minutes, not least in the outer movements, which explore subdivisions of 23-beat rhythmic cycles. The central movement, with its delicate, bell-like glints of sound over a chocolatey chordal foundation was especially beautiful in its simplicity.
The third commissioned piece, Please Be Still by the single-named composer who calls herself Jlin (nee Jerrilyn Patton), did not rise very far beyond the jogging-in-place repetitiveness of so much recent post-minimalist music. At least it had brevity in its favor, and it was fun to behold the TCP quartet trading driving, Bach-inspired rhythmic riffs with such punchy alacrity.
Montgomery, as both composer and performer, was well represented on the second half of the program.
Connors’ 2024 arrangement for percussion quartet of three brief movements from Montgomery’s In Color (2014) teased the ear with subtle contrasts of timbre and texture – keys struck by soft and hard mallets and fingers, the atmospheric whistling of a vibraphone stroked by a violin bow atop a thrumming harmonic cushion.
The Harrison concerto enlisted the considerable skills of Montgomery as violin virtuosa, accompanied by an enlarged battery of unpitched percussion that drew on the talents of guest percussionist She-e Wu, an associate professor and head of the percussion program at NU’s Bienen School of Music.
Along with his composing colleagues Henry Cowell and John Cage, Harrison was the first American composer to write classical pieces for percussion ensemble; a central objective was to create an American counterpart to the Javanese gamelan.
Harrison did so brilliantly in the concerto, a wonderful work in the literal sense of being full of wonders. The solo fiddle traces now declamatory, now meditative, now soaring lines over an instrumental array so expertly integrated that the diverse elements, whether maracas or clay pots, never feel exotic. Although the original inspiration for the work dates from 1940, the music still feels fresh and innovative, as one TCP player observed in his helpful spoken introduction.
Montgomery powered her richly malleable sound through an ear-grabbing panoply of layered rhythmic complexities, reserving her most expressive playing for the slow movement, an achingly beautiful soliloquy punctuated by sparse percussion. A few balance problems aside, this was a gorgeous performance of a true American masterpiece.