This year marks the 20th Anniversary of Third Coast Percussion. They are celebrating by continuing to do what they have always done: look forward, take on challenging collaborations and recording new music. Just as David Skidmore hoped they would be able to do.

Skidmore is a founding member of Third Coast Percussion and serves as the ensemble’s Executive Director. The other members are Sean Collins, Robert Dillon and Peter Martin. Their latest album, Standard Stoppages, was released on April 11th. The composers who wrote new works for them for the album are Musekiwa Chingodza, Jlin, Tigran Hamasyan, Jessie Montgomery and the late Zakir Hussain.

They recently completed a tour with Twyla Tharp Dance performing the music of Philip Glass. And on June 28th, they have an all-day celebration in Chicago (their home base) called Rhythm Fest.

That gave Skidmore and me a lot to talk about. And a lot that couldn’t be included in this interview. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. There’s so much more that Skidmore had to say and I urge you to see the full interview. To do so, please go HERE to our YouTube channel.

Q: In the months prior to June of 2005, what were your earliest goals about what Third Coast Percussion could actually become? 

We only really knew that we loved the music that we got to play in school at Northwestern studying with Michael Burritt and we felt like most percussion ensemble music was played by students in schools. There was no reason that it shouldn’t be on other stages and in front of audience members. So we thought to ourselves, let’s go out and play concerts. And then shortly after we’re like, well, why don’t we try and make a living doing it. Then figuring out how to actually do that took years. 

You were getting started at a time where music was shifting to streaming as opposed to physical product. So that’s a dicey time to be thinking about a career in music, isn’t it?

There were a lot of things about when we got started that in retrospect were tricky, but also taught us a lot of valuable lessons I think we carry forward. We put out our first album on CD in 2006, and then we didn’t put another one out until 2011 or 12, I think. I think we were figuring it out. We weren’t listening to CDs anymore, even by that time. The idea of the album in some ways disintegrated, but we were focusing on live shows and other ways of getting our music out.

20 years ago would you think that you would have composers coming to you to commission works for you? Would you think that you would be collaborating with with the likes of Twyla Tharp or Philip Glass?

That’s definitely no. We would have been excited to hear that’s where it was going to go. But our worldview was so much different and in a lot of ways more limited back then. We were focused on the music that we knew: music by Steve Reich, music by John Cage. By the way, still music we love and that we play. A lot of the directions the group has gone in, there was no way we could foresee it.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned in the 20 years through that journey of where you are today? 

I think one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned is that, as an artist, you have to start rooted in a practice, in a tradition, in a way of making your art that you’ve studied and apprenticed in. You can go so much deeper if you can, at least on some level, master your own art form and then be able to take it different places.

And I think a big part of our journey has been figuring out that every time we challenge ourselves to bring our musical world in conversation with a completely different mode of expression, we grow. Our audience grows. I think the artists we work with grow and everything gets more interesting.

I don’t believe that music is a stagnant thing, once it’s written that’s how it’s performed. The great thing about Third Coast Percussion is you have a unique perspective on how music can be performed.

Thank you. I completely agree with you. One of the big challenges that Western classical music faces is any perception that any performer or audience has that a piece of music should be fixed; not a living, breathing thing. It’s amazing actually that Bach, Beethoven and Schubert left behind road maps for how their music can be performed. And it should be performed because it’s wonderful. But the idea that there’s one way to do it is limiting. Great music isn’t only the arrangement and orchestration that people know of it already. Great music can be great with a lot of different costumes.

What are you looking for in collaborations so that you can be excited by what you’re doing?

The thing that we look for more and more is someone who is going to, not only inspire us, but also challenge us. So with Twyla, we’ve followed her career. Once we started the collaboration, [we] did just such a deep dive into her life and her writing and her work that we could find. And who she’s collaborated with. 

If you think about it too much, you can have an inferiority complex and imposter syndrome. But those are the collaborations where we really grow because we sort of go in with what we have. We keep our ears and eyes open so that we’re learning as much as, or far more than, we’re offering. We come out on the other side of a collaboration like that, more ready for the next one.

I think the best collaborations are the ones where we sort of look at each other and we say, can we actually pull this off? Because if we go in thinking, yeah, this is going to be no problem, then it could still be great. But maybe it won’t push us as hard as it could and get us to the next step.

Third Coast Percussion collaborated with Zakir Hussain, who passed away in December. I looked up some interviews that Hussain gave through his life. And there was one quote that really stood out to me. He said, “Every time I play with someone, just interacting with them points me to a different nook or a corner in my playing that I had overlooked.” What nooks and corners did playing with Zakir Hussain point to you?

The big one was improvisation because it’s not the strong suit of a Western classically trained person most of the time. One of the incredible things about Hindustani classical music is that it is a rigorous fixture of compositions. But also spontaneous improvisation as such an important part of it. Zakir was very kind to us. Primarily the piece is written out at the end of the second movement. And at other little moments throughout, there are choices to be made. And that has been fantastic as a challenge to ourselves. We have a lifetime more to learn in terms of improvisation

I will also say that the conception of rhythm in Hindustani classical music is something that has become integral to us as well. It was simple to understand, difficult to execute, concepts behind even just how they count, complicated rhythms and conceptualize them that open up an even broader world of rhythmic innovation to us.

A 20th anniversary is not just about looking back, it’s about looking forward. What does Standard Stoppages indicate about where Third Coast Percussion is today and where it’s going?

The album was about us looking to our past and we reached out to, and continue to reach out to, some of our favorite past collaborators and asked them to write new music for us. Jlin is a composer on that album. We’ve worked with Jlin a number of times. She’s one of our absolute favorite collaborators of all time. She wrote a new piece inspired by one of her favorite composers. She drew from the Bach Mass in B Minor and reworked a couple of phrases from that into a whole new piece.

In addition to looking to our favorite past collaborators, we also put together a list of our musical heroes that we wanted to ask them to write new music for us. So that’s the new pieces by Jesse Montgomery, Tigran Hamasyan and Zakir Hussein. I forgot to mention Musekiwa Chingodza, who’s another favorite past collaborator of ours, and another person who’s really pushed us outside of our comfort zone in terms of his way of conceptualizing music and teaching music. Even concepts of ownership of music are just so different in so many different places that we’re constantly learning.

How much is being scared a part of the ability for you as a musician to move forward? 

I think that when you’re actually scared, it’s quite counterproductive. I think when you can get to a place where you realize that it’s a challenge and nothing to be afraid of, but rather an occasion to rise to, that’s when it can become the best situation because you’re growing and you’re learning and you’re not staying stagnant. The big lesson for us in this 20th anniversary season is that 20 is just a number. It’s a landmark. It’s a place to stop for a moment on our journey and look around and say, OK, well, where have we been and where are we going? We weren’t interested in doing a retrospective tour or like a greatest hits album or something like that. We wanted to challenge ourselves more, push ourselves even further.

I think for us the worst thing we could do is to reach a stagnant point. I think that wouldn’t be inspiring and I don’t think we would be as happy and I don’t think the music would be as interesting.

Would that be the point where you would say enough is enough? 

I’d suppose so. That conversation around enough is enough has not come up. We really feel fortunate. We love what we do. The hard days are so worth it and we’re so fortunate because we’ve got an amazing team of people that supports what we do. I do think if we were bored and uninspired that might come up sooner.

What do you think your ensemble’s influence has been on composers in creating new works for you and therefore pushing the edge of what a percussion ensemble can and should be?

One thing that I hope works that have been written for us open up for future composers is the concept of how music is created. Every piece that we commission is a collaborative effort. We’re asking a composer to be the creative visionary around a work that we’re going to help create.

I do feel like there is a conception in Western classical music that the composer stands alone, the performer stands alone. They shouldn’t really interact too much. The composer’s vision shouldn’t be diluted.

We think when a composer and a performer work together collaboratively you get the best work. You get the creative vision and you get all kinds of different things from composers. Maybe you get an amazing formal structure, amazing melodies and harmonies, amazing sound concepts, amazing programmatic concepts. But if you marry that with performers who are dedicated to a collaborative process, then you can have it realized on the instruments in a more successful way. That’s the thing that we would love for the future of our instrumentation and really the future of all classical music.

Philip Glass is quoted as having said, “I don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s the not knowing that makes it interesting.” What is it that you didn’t know that made it interesting 20 years ago at the start of Third Coast Percussion and what is it you hope you know going into the next 20 years?

We didn’t know how broad the umbrella of classical music could be when we got started. It’s been interesting and inspiring to continue to grow our umbrella over the years. I just want us to keep doing that. 20 years from now, I want us to look back on 2025 and say, we were getting there, but we were still limiting ourselves in all these ways. You asked if there was any collaboration, any challenge, that was too great that we had failed. I can’t think of any, but maybe we should push ourselves until we get to that point and know where the frontier is.

I think to the Philip Glass quote, I think there’s something in that, to me, of not having a fear of failure. Because how humans learn is pushing themselves. And I think especially the further along you get on your journey, the easier it is to not push yourself. I wanna work in the opposite direction.

To watch the full interview with David Skidmore, please go HERE.

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