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.
Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion new ensemble-in-residence
October 17, 2019, by Third Coast Percussion
Third Coast Percussion will be in residence for several days in December and February. The group already is scheduled to take part in music, psychology, and studio art classes. They also will perform at Denison during Granville’s annual candlelight walking tour. “We are excited to have Third Coast Percussion join us on stages and in classrooms across the campus,” says Michael Morris, director of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts, and the Vail Series. “Our students and faculty have a history of really connecting with our ensembles-in-residence. We’ve seen great exchanges through these relationships and we’re thrilled to be able to expand the program to include this talented group of people in the Denison circle.” David Skidmore of Third Coast Percussion says, “We are so excited to have the opportunity to work closely with the bright and gifted students at Denison University. We were able to visit…
Out of the comfort zone: Danny Elfman has world premiere at Philip Glass Festival
October 11, 2019, by John Malkin
Danny Elfman says his success as a musician and composer is due to continually stepping out of his comfort zone. After success with the ’80s new-wave band Oingo Boingo, Elfman broke into composing film soundtracks with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985. His credits now include more than 100 Hollywood movie scores including “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Circle.” He also wrote the theme music for TV’s “The Simpsons.” Now Elfman is taking another musical leap into composing symphonic concert music. The Elfman Percussion Quartet will have its world premiere at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, as part of the Days and Nights Festival. Philip Glass founded the festival in 2011 and his own composition Perpetulum will also be performed by Grammy-award winning Third Coast Percussion Ensemble. The evening will begin with a Q&A session with Elfman and Glass. The Days and Nights Festival runs through Sunday,…
Haas premiere highlights Third Coast Percussion’s UC concert
October 14, 2019, by Third Coast Percussion
The concert was the second in UChicago Presents’ opening weekend, and a production of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition (CCCC), a “dynamic, collaborative, interdisciplinary environment” founded at U of C last year by composer and teacher Augusta Read Thomas, with an advisory board that includes Brodsky. In his prefatory comments, Brodsky drew attention to the reality that new music is a perennially hard sell, and not necessarily just at the box office. He went on to comment appreciatively on the ample audience assembled at Logan for that night’s performance: “All future concerts will be Third Coast,” he joked. "The ensemble offered the type of consistently thoughtful, dynamic performances that have earned them their reputation." Having a Grammy-winning local headliner like Third Coast Percussion (TCP) can certainly help fill the seats for new music. The quartet of young men has become one of the most prominent such ensembles and has…
Third Coast Percussion premiers Danny Elfman piece at Days and Night Festival
October 11, 2019, by Jesse Herwitz
These days, stage fright is not a problem for Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion. With a busy touring schedule and rapid album releases – four in the last two years – one might wonder how the quartet keeps their nerves calm. They premiered Philip Glass’ “Perpetulum” in front of Philip Glass at 2018’s Chicago Humanities Festival. Now they are performing the world premiere of Danny Elfman’s “Percussion Quartet” in front of Danny Elfman at this year’s Days and Nights Festival. That could wear on anyone. “We perform a lot,” says ensemble member Robert Dillon. “Concert nerves translate themselves primarily as a level of excitement and energy on stage.” That stage comfort might also have something to do with winning a Grammy Award – the first ever given to a percussion ensemble – for their 2016 album featuring music written by pioneering minimalist composer Steve Reich. “Winning that award felt like…
Devonté Hynes and Third Coast Percussion: Fields review – a crystal-clear connection
October 8, 2019, by Siobhán Kane
"There is a heady telepathy among the quartet, who approach the compositions with grace, clarity and dexterity..." So a collaboration with Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion seems fitting – the quartet of David Skidmore, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and Sean Connors are similarly synonymous with a progressive ethos, slipping the shackles of their form. Hynes and the quartet have another connection, in Philip Glass. Third Coast have commissioned and performed works by him, and Hynes has performed with him, and elements of Glass’s work – and, at times, his contemporary Steve Reich – weave around this record. "Fields is impressive." Fields is impressive. The first 11 tracks are a suite, For All Its Fury, followed by two longer pieces, Perfectly Voiceless and There Was Nothing. All were composed by Hynes; recordings and sheet music were sent to Third Coast, who arranged and orchestrated them for their instruments, and a dialogue between composer…
Mallets and sticks: Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion
September 30, 2019, by Mark Tiarks
Out of this environment came Third Coast Percussion, four young players who were all students at Northwestern University in 2005. Their first gigs had been educational concerts in Chicago’s public schools and city colleges, but they soon branched out with public performances on their own, many in small neighborhood bars and nightclubs. Now Third Coast is one of the hottest classical music groups in the world, hailed as “commandingly elegant” by The New York Times and “absolute masters of the art,” by BBC Music Magazine... The quartet of Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore makes its Santa Fe debut on Tuesday, Oct. 1, under the auspices of Performance Santa Fe. Their program includes music by Philip Glass (Perpetulum, a co-commission by PSF and Third Coast), Augusta Read Thomas, Mark Applebaum, and Devonté Hynes (better known to you contemporary R&B fans as Blood Orange), along with four of their own compositions.…
Cedille Records: Take 5 with Peter Martin
, 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,…
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