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From concert and album reviews to feature articles, Third Coast Percussion is in the news.
We are fortunate to have garnered critical acclaim and recognition for so many of our performances and projects. See for yourself what the buzz is all about by reading what the press has to say! Browse reviews, articles, and much more below.
Cedille Records: Take 5 with Peter Martin
September 30, 2019, by Maddie Richter
If you weren’t a musician, what would you be? That’s quite a difficult question, because I can’t really imagine not being a musician J. Thinking back a long time to when I was a kid, I suppose I did have ideas of being a pilot or a doctor. I think perhaps that becoming a veterinarian was my last non-music career idea, but it was so long ago. I started studying piano at age 4, picked up drums and percussion around age 12 and was definitely identifying myself as a “musician” by then. There weren’t any other career aspirations after I started my first rock band in middle school, it was all about being a musician. Was there a formative moment for you as an artist? Most of my “big artistic growth” moments have involved being exposed to something I had never known before. I remember being a young kid in middle…
Milan MiTo September music: at the Teatro Elfo-Puccini the minimalism of Third Coast Percussion
September 24, 2019, by Various Authors
When in 1933 Edgard Varèse presented his Ionisation, for the first time we realized that the percussion in an orchestra had the ability to be something much more than a simple, so to speak, rhythmic motor. And today, after almost a century and many other composers - including Iannis Xenakis, to whom, moreover, we owe the rediscovery of Varèse in 1958 - the ensembles of solo percussion proliferate, devoted to a mostly twentieth-century and contemporary repertoire. It is a story that in the Milanese stage of MiTo, at the Elfo-Puccini theater, is intertwined with minimalism, that musical current that revolutionized the compositional conceptions of our recent past, although it was never really true: the four great fathers (Young, Reich, Glass, Riley) came to the same destination from different and independent paths. As always happens with the purest and most spontaneous revolutions there was something in the air that awaited only…
Third Coast Percussion review – lithe rhythmic precision and Glass’s freshest score in years
, by Philip Clark
"lithe rhythmic precision" "Perpetulum" – and their own arrangement of music from Glass’s "Madeira River" which opened – showcased not only the group’s lithe rhythmic precision but also their ear for dynamic variation and timbral detail, which is more than can be said of Steve Reich’s tired, drab Mallet Quartet. A hint of Vermont Counterpoint knitted without purpose or reason into the rhythmic chug of Different Trains offered little for the musicians to chew on beyond neatly dispatching the notes. An extract from "Perfectly Voiceless", which the ensemble has been working up in collaboration with the British singer/producer Devonté Hynes (AKA Blood Orange), wore the Reich influence too keenly – arpeggios, arpeggios, always the arpeggios, but without ever defining a convincing context. "ear for dynamic variation and timbral detail" "The Other Side of the River" by another British composer, Gavin Bryars, developed as a curious-getting-curiouser creeping ritual in which jagged, uneven layers circled each…
Performance review: The Bell Ringers
September 20, 2019, by Jillian DeGroot
On September 9, 2019, composer and arts educator Danny Clay teamed up with Third Coast Percussion for the premiere of The Bell Ringers, an evening-length participatory work on the great lawn of Chicago’s Millennium Park–transforming the soundscape of the city through Clay’s use of “play” alongside performers from a wide range of experiences and backgrounds. Green flags and snare drums encircled the lawn. A giant golden bell sat in the center. Early arrivals were already camped out in lawn chairs. Park security bustled across the grass with chattering radios. A toddler voraciously ran up to a snare and gave it a good bum-bum-bum-bum before a security guard shooed him away. Those nimble enough couldn’t help letting a cartwheel or two loose on a rare pleasant, humidity-free evening in Chicago. In the distance, Third Coast Percussion organized a crowd of performers with a bullhorn. It wasn’t long before Robert Dillon welcomed spectators to a “unique musical universe.” Then,…
Album review: Philippe Manoury’s Book of Keyboards, Third Coast Percussion’s Masterful Rendition
September 17, 2019, by Allan J. Cronin
Philippe Manoury (1952- ) is a French composer who worked at IRCAM and is professor emeritus at UCSD. Knowing just these facts I must admit that I let this one languish a bit before giving it a good listen. I was just not ready for some obtuse Boulez-oriented complexity. But Manoury is nothing if not original and even if his music has complexities it does not fail to communicate very well to the listener. My apologies to Third Coast Percussion and the ever interesting New Focus recordings for the delay now that I’ve put my fears to rest and given the music a chance. There are two works on this disc, Le livre des claviers, Six pieces for 6 percussionists (1987) and Métal for sixxens sextett (1995). The first piece, which translates as, “Book of Keyboards” invites connotations of monolithic masterpieces such as Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Boulez’ Livre pour Quatuor, or any of a number of pieces with such…
TCP included on Donnacha Dennehy’s “Surface Tension/Disposable Dissonance”
September 13, 2019, by Liam Cagney
Donnacha Dennehy’s arrival as a composer in the late 1990s heralded what was dubbed the new Irish classical. Often performed by the amplified Crash Ensemble (which he co-founded), Dennehy’s music injected welcome verve, grit and streetwiseness into the Irish classical scene. As a teacher at Trinity College Dublin, Dennehy had a lasting influence in the early years of the new millennium on the youngest generation of Irish composers. Now based in the US, Dennehy in some of his recent music has shifted more towards the centre ground, but these two works hearken back more to that early edginess. In Surface Tension (2015), inspired by the Irish bodhrán drum, Dennehy explores glissandos on the drumskin’s surface. A pulsating texture of continuous semiquavers on tom-tom gradually rises and falls in pitch, with strikes on other drums cutting through the texture. After a while, a marimba joins in; later, a bowed vibraphone carves out a…
Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion to release new album ‘Fields’ in collaboration with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes
August 26, 2019, by Third Coast Percussion
August 23, 2019 by Jessi Roti "Seeing what Third Coast Percussion had done with these pieces was magical.” - Devonté Hynes Singer-songwriter Dev Hynes has become one of the millennial generation’s most influential, artistic Renaissance men. From his own efforts as Lightspeed Champion and later Blood Orange, his hipster-approved, synth-pop/R&B outfit known for songs such as “Champagne Coast” and “Augustine," to writing and producing for artists like Solange, Sky Ferreira, Carly Rae Jepsen and numerous others, forays into ballet, film and modernist art — Hynes has shown time and again that his creative interests and musical acumen cannot be contained. But would you think the performer was going to follow-up 2018′s massively compelling “Negro Swan” and this year’s “Angel’s Pulse” mixtape with an album of classical music? Hynes is doing it in collaboration with Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion. The ensemble, best known as the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Notre…
The Fader: “Fields” Album Announcement
August 20, 2019, by Third Coast Percussion
August 20, 2019 by Alex Robert Ross Blood Orange announces classical LP Fields The album is due out on October 11 via the Chicago-based classical label, Cedille. Dev Hynes, the London-born musician better known as Blood Orange, has announced his first classical music album. Fields— written by Hynes, arranged and performed by the Chicago ensemble Third Coast Percussion — is due out October 11 on Cedille. “This was the first time I've written music that I've never played, and I love that,” Hynes said in a press release. “It's something I've always been striving to get to. Seeing what Third Coast Percussion had done with these pieces was magical.” In the album's liner notes, excerpted in the press release, Third Coast Percussion lauded the unique process behind the record: “We’ve always felt that the future of classical music depends on deepening the collaborative process and removing the strict barriers between composers and performers. Dev…
Pitchfork: Devonté Hynes Album Announcement
, by Third Coast Percussion
August 20, 2019 by Matthew Strauss Blood Orange Announces New Classical Music Album Fields Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion perform Devonté Hynes’ classical compositions Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) is releasing his first album of classical music compositions. The collection is called Fields and it’s performed by the Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion. It’s out October 11 via Cedille. Check out the tracklist and album cover below. Fields consists of a suite called “For All Its Fury” (the first 11 tracks of the album), followed by compositions titled “Perfectly Voiceless” and “There Was Nothing.” Hynes composed all the music in a Digital Audio Workstation and then sent the recordings and sheet music to the members of Third Coast Percussion who arranged and orchestrated them for their own instruments. “This was the first time I’ve written music that I’ve never played, and I love that,” Dev Hynes said in a press release.…
Album review: Perpetulum
August 12, 2019, by Third Coast Percussion
August 10, 2019 by Graham Rickson "a beautifully produced and stunningly engineered double album" Think minimalism and you think tuned percussion, though Philip Glass’s Perpetulum is actually his first work specifically written for percussion ensemble. Beginning with several minutes of unpitched shakes and rattles, it's hugely enjoyable, confirming my suspicion that Glass is at his best when writing on a small scale. Who'd have thought that percussion music could be so expressive and emotionally involving, Perpetulum upbeat and menacing by turns. There's a mind-bending cadenza; how can this much noise be generated by just four players? Glass’s chord progressions are naively simple at times, though they've an extra sharpness and oomph when delivered on marimba and xylophone. The work’s soft fade is enchanting, and phenomenally played. Gavin Bryars’ The Other Side of the River is a rhapsodic treat, the occasionally cheesy themes deliciously incongruous played on tuned percussion. This is…
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