It has been nearly 20 years, but Third Coast Percussion has managed to retain its uncanny freshness and vitality. The Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra remains one of the most original scores in the chamber repertoire. And given that its composer, Lou Harrison, bent tradition every creative which way, that is really saying something. For much of his creative life, Harrison was a musical chameleon, as at home with the 12-tone techniques of Arnold Schoenberg as he was with the diatonicism of Aaron Copland and clamorous pastiches of Charles Ives. Yet his affinity for rhythm — and the often-forceful use of it — established him as a unique voice in 20th-century American music. Harrison helped rethink the percussion ensemble as a viable expressive force. Several works, such as Concerto No. 1 and Canticle No. 1, call for sizable percussion sections. But above those stands the Concerto for Violin and…

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Within classical music, many like to pretend that a performer’s role — whether presenting a classic work, commission, or arrangement — is to access something static and predetermined about the composer’s intent.  The reality: Through the act of performance, musicians give unique embodiment to a score, imbuing it with singular and experientially specific emotional resonance. In this way, performers are collaborative producers in every work, be it a staple of the canon or a world premiere. Few ensembles lay out this case in clearer terms than Third Coast Percussion did in its Friday night program at the Nimoy Theater for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. The ensemble’s interpretive powers expanded the emotional architecture of commissions from Gemma Peacocke and Danny Elfman. And across arrangements of music by Philip Glass and Clarice Assad and a collaborative realization of composer Jlin’s electronic scores, Third Coast’s distinctive footprint came into even clearer focus. Peacocke’s Death…

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Third Coast Percussion gave another wonderful performance at DePaul’s Gannon Auditorium on Friday night. The program included several works that have appeared on recent TCP releases. Highlights, however, were provided by composer/violinist Jessie Montgomery, the Mead Composer-In-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Montgomery ended the concert with a performance of Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra. To pull that off, TCP members Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore were joined by a fifth percussionist, She-e Wu, who is the Director of the Percussion Program at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. TCP performances are fun to watch. Upon entering the hall, the audience is confronted by a stage full of noise-making devices. Center stage on Friday were the keyboard instruments vibraphone, marimba, and glockenspiel arranged to face each other. Nearby were drums, bass drums, pipes, whistles, mallets, violin bows, and many other objects. Stage right had single…

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Third Coast Percussion performed three songs for students and participated in a panel discussion Thursday night at Wheeling Park High School as they prepared for a performance with the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra at 7:30 p.m. tonight. During the concert, retiring WPHS strings instructor Benjamin Podolski will be presented with the WSO’s inaugural “Music Educator Award” – an honor given “in recognition of an educator that exemplifies extraordinary dedication to music education so that students are inspired and empowered through music performance.” Students from both WPHS and John Marshall High School attended Thursday night’s panel discussion. Asking questions and adding comments were WSO Music Director John Devlin and WPHS band director Jason Birch. Third Coast Percussion members Rob Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore and Sean Connor discussed how they discovered percussion as friends in middle school, then went on to pursue music education degrees at Northwestern University near Chicago where they…

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Between Breaths, the latest album from Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion, features five world premieres linked by the idea of meditation. Missy Mazzoli’s five-movement Millennium Canticles imagines a community attempting to recreate the rituals of human life after some kind of catastrophe. The eclectic palate includes wooden planks, drums, metal pipes, and chimes, plus vocal sounds suggesting shock, rage, and hope. “Famous Disaster Psalm,” for example, involves sharp intakes of breath over muted xylophone, while the snippy percussion in “Bloodied Bells” punctuates a soundscape of reverberating chimes. “Choir of the Holy Locusts” mixes insect-like buzzing with bursts of chant, and “Survival Psalm” channels Kathak drumming with its plosive vocalizations. Tyondai Braxton’s feelgood Sunny X adds electronics to an array of gongs, woodblocks, metal pipes, and plates for a fast ride in a minimalist-inspired machine. Hypnotic patterns built from tiny unpitched phrases combine with funky electronic washes in a work that oozes…

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