Boston Classical Review - Lunsquilunsqui.com/shi_third.pdf · 2015. 7. 31. · The performers began by grooving to Fractalia by Owen Clinton Condon, a rhythmic ramble for four players

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Third Coast Percussion taps, teases and tickles in Stave Sessionsfinale

March 22, 2015 at 2:50 pm

By David Wright

Third Coast Percussion performed Saturday night in the Celebrity Series’ StaveSessions festival.

Stave Sessions, the week-long mini-festival of cutting-edge musical presentations by Celebrity Series of Boston,ended with a bang Saturday night. And a whisper, and a murmur, and a caress.

Anyone who thought an evening of music entirely for percussion instruments would sound like a pots-and-pansrack falling off the wall was in for a surprise, as the Chicago-based quartet of players called Third CoastPercussion led listeners through their mysterious, funny, endlessly inventive and often exhilarating musicalspecialty.

The fact is, this group didn’t actually manage a healthy kitchen-implement fortissimo until the last piece on theprogram, so intent were they on teasing and tickling the audience’s artistic sensibility. But when it came, theraucous climax of John Cage’s Third Construction put an exclamation point on Celebrity Series’s new venturedevoted to everything young, cool and emerging–not just in performers but (it is fervently hoped) in audiences.

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Even the performance space wasthe newest in town: the BerkleeCollege of Music’s high-ceilingedcafeteria, open barely a year,with its two-stories-tall windowslooking out over MassachusettsAvenue, was transformed for thisseries into a club, with a hundredor so patrons seated at roundtables, plus a couple of rows ofchairs for those less able to thinkoutside the concert box. In theback, a small bar served beer,wine, soft drinks, and the Stave8, a frozen cocktail apparentlyinvented for the occasion.

In club fashion, the performers—David Skidmore, Robert Dillon,Peter Martin and Sean Connors—took turns engaginglyintroducing the numbers fromthe stage. But a set list obtainedafter the concert was a reminderof how helpful a printed programcan be. Knowing, for example,that the haunting secondmovement of Augusta ReadThomas’s Resounding Earth forsinging bowls was subtitled“Homage to Luciano Berio andPierre Boulez” added a layer ofmeaning to the music.

On the other hand, there’ssomething liberating about the box-of-chocolates approach—you never know, et cetera—so maybe the answerwould be to make the printed list discreetly available to patrons on their way out.

Minimalism and percussion ensembles seem made for each other, the one delighting in the play of patterns, theother traditionally assigned the role of timekeeper. So it was no surprise that half the items on Saturday’s programeither sounded like they might have been composed by Steve Reich, or actually were. Put another way, half thepieces were mainly about the groove, while the rest had other, equally interesting agendas.

The performers began by grooving to Fractalia by Owen Clinton Condon, a rhythmic ramble for four players at two



marimbas, amusingly disrupted by non-Reichian thwacks and other effects on drums. In the and-now-for-something-completely-different spirit of the evening, Condon’s piece for familiar percussion instruments wasfollowed by one where the only instrument was a table.

In Table Music, composer Thierry De Mey took a Baroque term for a musical accompaniment to dinner andinterpreted it literally, carrying the concept of drumming with one’s fingers on a tabletop to unheard-of heights. Seated at a flat surface equipped with discreet amplification, their hands spotlit like dancers, the three playerstapped and clapped, slid and slapped in a mesmerizing audiovisual show, with music seemingly by Mr. Bojanglesand choreography by Pilobolus.

Thomas’s bowls came next, 20-plus of them, tuned chromatically and manufactured especially to play thispiece. Tapped and stroked by four players in elusive rhythms and often at the threshold of audibility, the bowlsmingled their long-lasting tones to produce an abundance of those uncanny meta-vibrations called “beats.”

Where to go from this moment of spiritual stillness? Why, to a piece inspired by Meshuggah, the Swedish heavy-metal band, of course. As David Skidmore described his composition Percussion Quartets, the inspiration camenot from the band’s loudness but from its experimentation with complex rhythms. Players prowled around thearray of marimbas, steel bars, tuned blocks, and other instruments to produce a Reichian mix of fractured andsuperimposed rhythms, which yielded for a time to a steady, hypnotic tap of eighth-note chords, only to returnwith even greater complexity at the end.

The concert’s second half opened with the only actual Steve Reich composition of the night, Music for Pieces ofWood. Equipped only with a block in one hand and a stick in the other, the four players swayed and stroked andeyed each other like a string quartet as they tapped out Reich’s infectious, ever-changing rhythms.

Following that, Peter Garland’s Apple Blossoms for two marimbas seemed to contradict the whole idea ofpercussion, as the quartet used fluffy beaters that looked a bit like flower clusters on sticks to slowly set theinstruments’ resonators vibrating until they swelled to an organ-like sonority. With the players’ wrists shakingrapidly throughout, one can only imagine the stamina it took to play this gentle piece.

Of course, found objects are the joy of percussionists and their audiences, and so, according to Peter Martin’sintroduction, Alexandre Lunsqui’s Shi (which means “food” in Mandarin) began with a trip to Chinatown (Chicago?New York? San Francisco? Rio de Janeiro?) in search of things to make sound with. The resulting array of racks,plates, glassware, bamboo mats and more, played mostly with ivory-colored plastic chopsticks, inspired some ofthe more manic behavior of the night, to the audience’s audible delight.

The program closed with music by the patron saint of found objects, John Cage. This being Boston, it seemedappropriate to hear a piece of early music, and Cage’s Third Construction was composed in 1941, which is abouteight centuries ago in percussion-music years. Coffee cans and a pasta strainer joined deep tom-toms in theensemble, along with two rope drums, objects that, when a string is pulled, emit a groaning sound not unlike thebellow of a bull moose.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this radical expression of yesteryear was how comfortable it all soundednow, as Cage’s score settled into a nice groove one could dance to. But that was before the rope drums rumbledtheir mating call, and Martin began blowing great blasts on a conch shell. The avant-garde beat goes on.

The next music presentation of Celebrity Series of Boston will be Lisa Batiashvili, violin, and Paul Lewis,

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Boston Classical Review - Lunsquilunsqui.com/shi_third.pdf · 2015. 7. 31. · The performers began by grooving to Fractalia by Owen Clinton Condon, a rhythmic ramble for four players