On Saturday at DeBartolo, Third Coast Percussion and guest mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway give the world premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s “Goldbeater’s Skin.” Cerrone is best known for his operatic adaptation of Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities,” which made the composer a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. For “Goldbeater’s Skin,” Cerrone set texts by poet G.C. Waldrep.

The poetry runs the gamut from the humorous to the mystical, and Third Coast member David Skidmore says that Cerrone’s music should be easily accessible to listeners even at first contact.

“There are a lot of ways to describe what he does, but it’s best described as ‘beautiful music,’ which is saying a lot,” Skidmore says.

Cerrone’s score requires the four players to use a ton of gear.

“There’s usually a massive collection of instruments at our concerts,” Skidmore says, “but this one is crazy.”

Calloway also joins them for a second selection in the concert, György Ligeti’s “Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel,” which expands the percussion inventory still further.

“It calls for a ridiculous battery of instruments,” Skidmore says. “It’s almost like Ligeti is making fun of the way percussionists are constantly going from one instrument to the next. There’s a place in the last movement where I almost never play the same instrument twice. Every note is a different sound.”

The song cycle, which translates as “With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles,” finds Ligeti fusing traditional Hungarian folk music with his own arch-modernism. Calloway faces the challenge of singing passages that jump from tricky Hungarian pronunciations to outright gibberish.

Using poems of Sándor Weöres, Ligeti composed the music in 2000 for his fellow Hungarians in the Amadinda Percussion Group.

“He wrote it with their very specific collection of instruments in mind, so the piece is almost never performed, because some of the instruments are so hard to come by,” Skidmore says.

The Ligeti composition requires non-percussion instruments such as slide whistles, chromatic harmonicas and a railway whistle. Among dozens of other drums, marimbas and accessories, there’s also castanets, temple blocks, tuned Burmese gongs and a cymbal that should sound like a broken pot.

Saturday’s concert also features selections composed by Third Coast’s own musicians. Skidmore, along with colleagues Sean Connors, Robert Dillon and Peter Martin, worked jointly to create “Reaction Yield,” which premiered in October. Skidmore says that instead of looking to poetry for inspiration, they turned to science, specifically the “phone book of molecules” that are the building blocks of synthetic chemistry.

Martin composed the concert’s opener, titled “Bend.” His source was transcriptions of player-piano rolls originally created by the outlandish architect Bruce Goff — an amateur musician — in the 1930s.

Eight days after this concert, the group will attend a different gig altogether, as the musicians will be in Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards show on Feb. 12. Last year’s album of Steve Reich compositions, released on Cedille Records, has earned Third Coast Percussion a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

Skidmore says that nobody has whispered a word yet about the results.

“Even in this day and age, with all these leaks, absolutely no one knows,” he says. “They really keep mum about it.”

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