January 28, 2016

by Jackie Walton

The four musicians who comprise Third Coast Percussion have repeatedly taken on fearsome repertoire over the years. The ensemble specializes in material that’s out of reach to most percussion groups.

The quartet will tackle yet another series of demanding challenges in a pairing of works by Donnacha Dennehy and Steve Reich on Saturday at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, where the quartet has been the ensemble-in-residence since 2013.

Both compositions require the performers to handle a heavy workload, sometimes involving highly unusual extended techniques.

The concert begins with the world premiere of Dennehy’s “Surface Tension.” It was co-commissioned by DeBartolo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Third Coast will repeat this program at the Met in New York City in February.

“Surface Tension” features a phenomenon rarely heard in percussion music: melodies.

“We don’t typically think of drums as having a strong fundamental tone that you could sing, but he wanted that,” Third Coast leader David Skidmore says. “And he wanted the pitch to be able to change.”

Skidmore and his colleagues — Sean Connors, Robert Dillon and Peter Martin — had to talk Dennehy out of his first idea, which was to employ several timpanis. Taking that gear on the road would be too onerous for the group. They settled instead on tom-toms.

The percussionists create pitches by inserting surgical tube through a hole in the tom-tom and then blowing into the tube while they’re playing the drum. They bend the drums’ pitches by changing the pressure, tightening and slackening the drum, wavering between notes.

Although it’s played with a different technique, Skidmore says that the Irish bodhrán drum was Dennehy’s model “sonic image.”

“He wanted to capture the spirit of the great bodhrán players, who can control the way they’re bending the pitch, so that it almost follows the melody that’s being sung or played on a violin,” Skidmore says.

In order to enhance the nuances of the audio spectrum, the four players will perform in unusual spots: one on the far right of the stage, one on the far left and the other two playing from audience boxes.

Two guest musicians, David Friend and Oliver Hagen, join the core quartet for Steve Reich’s “Sextet,” composed in 1984.

The piece calls for the musicians to alternate among a series of instruments, including marimbas, bass drums, crotales, pianos and synthesizers.

One striking innovation in “Sextet” is Reich’s use of bowed vibraphones. Skidmore says that practically no composer had ever called for vibraphones to be played with a bow before, and never in a prominent role.

Usually, vibraphones are struck with mallets. When played with a bow instead, the vibraphone emits a shrill humming tone, which can become mesmerizing.

“Reich puts the bowed vibraphones front and center for the whole second movement, essentially playing a counter-melody to the pianos,” Skidmore says.

Reich’s compositions have been in Third Coast’s core repertoire since its inception in 2005, and the musicians have developed a friendly rapport with the composer himself over the years. Reich personally participated in the first performances of “Sextet,” and he knows as well as anyone just how much virtuosity is required. Early concert renditions of the work tended to run into tough patches.

Third Coast recently made a studio recording of “Sextet,” and it’s included on the ensemble’s brand-new all-Reich album, released on the Cedille label.

“When we told him we were going to record this piece for the album, we asked if there was anything in particular he’d want us to focus on. He just said, ‘The bowed vibraphone part,'” Skidmore says. “‘Make sure you practice that. It’s hard!'”

Read the original article here.

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