third coast percussion · lake forest lyrica, lake forest, il taliesin, spring green, wi eastman...

4045 North Rockwell Street Suite 301 Chicago, IL 60618

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THIRD COAST PERCUSSION Owen Clay Condon Robert Dillon Peter Martin David Skidmore

Hailed by The Guardian for their “special fluency and zest that sets them apart,” Third Coast Percussion explores and expands the extraordinary sonic possibilities of the percussion repertoire, delivering vibrant performances for audiences of all kinds. Since its formation in 2005, Third Coast Percussion has gained national attention with concerts and recordings that meld the energy of rock music with the precision and nuance of classical chamber works. These “savvy and hyper-talented young percussionists” (Musical Toronto) champion the awe-inspiring works of John Cage, Steve Reich, George Crumb, Arvo Pärt, Gérard Grisey, Philippe Manoury, Wolfgang Rihm, Louis Andriessen, Toru Takemitsu, and Tan Dun, among others. Third Coast has also commissioned and performed world premieres by today’s brightest up-and-coming composers, including David T. Little, Marcos Balter, Matthew Barnson, Ted Hearne, and ensemble members Owen Clayton Condon and David Skidmore. In 2012, the ensemble will premiere a major new work from acclaimed composer Augusta Read Thomas, scored for over 100 bells from around the world. Third Coast’s recent and upcoming concerts and residencies include the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Austin Chamber Music Festival, Millennium Park, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, and more.

Third Coast has also introduced percussion music to audiences in Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois, securing invitations to return to many of these series. In addition to its national performances, Third Coast Percussion’s hometown presence includes an annual Chicago series, with four to five concerts in locations around the city. The ensemble has collaborated in concert with acclaimed ensembles Eighth Blackbird, Signal, and the Garth Newel Piano Quartet, pianists Amy Briggs and Lisa Moore, cellists Nicholas Photinos and Tobias Werner, flautist Tim Munro, vocalist Ted Hearne, and video artists Luftwerk. Third Coast’s passion for community outreach includes a wide range of residency offerings while on tour, in addition to a long-term residency with the Davis Square Park Community Band on Chicago’s South Side. The members of Third Coast Percussion —Owen Clayton Condon, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore—hold degrees in music performance from Northwestern University, the Yale School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and Rutgers University. Third Coast Percussion performs exclusively with Pearl/Adams Musical Instruments, Zildjian Cymbals, Remo Drumheads, and Vic Firth sticks and mallets.


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RECENT AND UPCOMING PERFORMANCES (Partial Listing) 2012-13 Loops and Variations – Millennium Park, Chicago, IL Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, NY Kennedy Center – Millennium Stage, Washington, D.C. University of Notre Dame – DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, South Bend, IN Austin Chamber Music Festival Make Music Chicago New Music New College, Sarasota, FL University of Denver – Lamont School of Music Colorado State University University of Colorado Boulder Festival of New American Music – Sacramento State University, Sacramento, CA Pomona College, Claremont, CA Illinois Day of Percussion, Naperville, IL Princeton University, Princeton, NJ Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL 2011-12 Dusk Variations – Millennium Park, Chicago, IL Garth Newel Music Center, Hot Springs, VA Taliesin Centennial Celebration, Spring Green, WI Nightnotes Series, Detroit, MI Queens University, Charlotte, NC Furman University, Greenville, SC Dickinson College Guest Artist Series and Residency, Carlisle, PA Chicago Cultural Center Millennium Park Luminous Field installation, Chicago, IL Horizons Series, Flagstaff, AZ Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ. Lake Forest Lyrica, Lake Forest, IL 2010-11 Garth Newel Music Center, Hot Springs, VA Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK Dickinson College Guest Artist Series, Carlisle, PA Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL Music on the Edge, Pittsburgh, PA University of Louisiana-Monroe, Monroe, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL McMurry University - Chamber Music America Residency, Abilene, TX EMPAC, Troy, NY Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY 2009-10 Lake Forest Lyrica, Lake Forest, IL Taliesin, Spring Green, WI Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY Rocky River Chamber Music Society, Rocky River, OH


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TEACHING AND RESIDENCIES

As a leading professional percussion ensemble, Third Coast Percussion is uniquely positioned to offer both interactive hands-on learning experiences for a wide range of students and community members, and concert experiences of the highest caliber for all audiences.

Master classes on topics including entrepreneurship, 20th/21st century music performance, chamber music skills, and more

Coachings for chamber music groups, percussion

ensembles, percussion sections in larger ensembles, and more

Collaborative performances with students of all

skill levels Reading, performing and coaching student

compositions

Community-building performances in schools, libraries, hospitals, correctional facilities, and more

Pre-concert and post-concert discussions and audience feedback

Interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, architects, astronomers, and more

Lecture/presentations on a variety of topics

Performances and workshops for conducting

students


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SAMPLE OF PAST RESIDENCY Dickinson College – Fall 2011 TCP coaches and performs Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and John Cage’s Radio Music with freshmen music seminar students. Lecture topics include historical context, influences, and the legacy of each composer. Culminating in performances for the student body and general public. TCP participates in flash mob performance of Terry Riley In C in student center with student ensemble. Collaborative workshop with advanced dance techniques class. Topics include Cage/Cunningham collaborations, improvisation, and dance/music correlatives. Perform John Cage Second Construction with student conductors for their final project and offer feedback. Read student compositions and offer feedback. Educational performance for local public high school. Coach percussion students. Watch a brief video documentary of this residency online by clicking here or by clicking the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThrSWkkAlg4 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Since the group was founded in 2005, Third Coast Percussion has been dedicated to performing and teaching in communities with limited access to the performing arts. The ensemble has partnered with Urban Gateways, the University of Chicago Presents, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s MusiCORPS, and Chamber Music Amercia’s Residency Partnership Program to bring educational and community-based performances to a wide range of audiences throughout Chicago and across the country. In addition, members of Third Coast have served as Fellows in the Academy – a partnership between Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, and the New York City

Department of Education; on the roster for Young Audiences New Jersey; and on the faculty for the Merit School of Music in Chicago.


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PRESS

“Vibrant…superb” -Alex Ross, The New Yorker “Brilliant” -The Independent (UK) “Savvy and hyper-talented young percussionists” -Musical Toronto “Fluency and zest” -Andrew Clements, the Guardian (UK) “Even in their most tonal and banging moments, there was a warmth and even a whimsy” -The Village Voice “Sonically spectacular” -Chicago Tribune “One of Chicago’s most notable chamber ensembles...a tour-de-force performance” -Sequenza 21 “One of the country’s finest new music ensembles” -Chicago Reader “They absolutely nailed it all.” –Consequence of Sound (New York City) “Undeniably groovy…masterfully performed” -Time Out Chicago

“Energetic and thoroughly engaging” -NewMusicBox “Dramatic and expressively nuanced” -Chicago Classical Review

“[Third Coast Percussion] filled the auditorium with so much sound it was as if an orchestra was performing...leaving their Richmond audience eager and buzzing for their next visit.” -Commonwealth Times (Richmond, VA)

The John Cage Century September 4, 2012 by Alex Ross John Cage would have been a hundred years old tomorrow. Scratch that: Cage is a hundred. He remains a palpably vivid presence, still provoking thought, still spurring argument, still spreading sublime mischief. He may have surpassed Stravinsky as the most widely cited, the most famous and/or notorious, of twentieth-century composers. His influence extends far outside classical music, into contemporary art and pop culture. When I wrote at length about Cage in 2010, I noted that he accomplished something like a colossal land grab, annexing the entire landscape of sound, from pure noise to pure silence. If you hear several radios playing together, it sounds like Cage. If the P.A. system makes a horrible noise during a lecture, it sounds like Cage. (I’ve used that joke more than once.) Because Cage made his music sound like the world, the world sounds like Cage. It’s a neat trick, and it could be done only once.


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I’ve attended quite a few Cage concerts this year—an event at Juilliard’s FOCUS! Festival, last winter; tributes during the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks festival, in March, including an uproarious concert by So Percussion; portions of a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” in the marathon format pioneered by Cage in 1963; a vibrant outdoor show by Third Coast Percussion, at MOMA; and, most recently, “Europeras 1 and 2” in Bochum, Germany, reviewed in this week’s New Yorker—and it strikes me that much of the resistance to this composer has melted away. Even more than the pioneering radicals of twentieth-century music, Cage requires a fundamentally different mode of listening: you need to relinquish expectations that successive sounds will fall into familiar harmonic relationships, or indeed relationships of any kind, and instead treat each moment in isolation. You “regard” the sounds as you would objects in a gallery. More and more, audiences are arriving with the right expectations, or, at least, without the wrong ones. On a deeper level, Cage’s anarchic view of the world, his profound distrust of institutions and traditions, may have an especially broad appeal at the present time. For much of his life, Cage was cast as a court jester or holy fool. As empires crumble, he seems saner than ever. The global scope of the Cage celebrations has surprised even the composer’s most committed admirers. The calendar maintained by the John Cage Trust lists dozens of concerts this week, from Russia to Australia to South Africa. Two especially significant American celebrations are a seven-day Centennial Festival in Washington, D.C., now under way, and a festival presented by the superb Southern California series Jacaranda, starting on Thursday. Here in New York, the S.E.M. Ensemble will present a Beyond Cage festival in late October and early November. If you have a taste for mushrooms, the New York Mycological Society, which Cage co-founded, is hosting several events at Cooper Union; Peter Canby previews those festivities in the Talk of the Town this week. There’s a Cage installation out on the High Line, in the vicinity of Fourteenth Street. Third Coast Percussion has a superb new disc of the percussion works on the Mode label, whose Cage Edition now runs to forty-five volumes. And iPad users can play with the John Cage app, sampling the sounds of his prepared piano. Even if a Cage event isn’t within easy reach, you can still mark the day by listening to the world around you with open ears. Allan Kozinn, who wrote Cage’s obituary for the New York Times, recently contributed a fine essay on this theme, talking about how he treated himself to a private performance of Cage’s most famous work while riding on the A train. The piece has a beautiful chance ending, courtesy of the former Times critic Tim Page, and by way of closing I’ll simply send you there.

July 19, 2012 by Andrew Clements This is the 45th release in Mode's John Cage series, and the second to be devoted to his works for percussion. It includes what are perhaps the best known of all early Cage works, the three Constructions that he composed between 1939 and 1941, alongside other pieces from the same period – the Quartet and the Trio, from 1935 and 1936 respectively, and Living Room Music of 1940. Performing this repertoire has been the raison d'etre for Third Coast Percussion since the Chicago-based group formed in 2004, and these performances have a special fluency and zest that sets them apart from most other recorded versions. The way in which Cage's sound world steadily expands through the three Constructions – the first for metallic instruments only, the last for a huge range of familiar and exotic percussion – is vividly exploited, while the rhythmic cycles that are so rigorously layered in all three become a means to an exuberant end. The rest of the disc pales by comparison with these extraordinary pieces, but even the tiny Trio from 1936 has a wit and charm about it here. Musical Toronto John Cage percussion music a springboard of sonic possibilities June 29, 2012 by John Terauds William Walton, Dmitri Shostakovich and Samuel Barber wrote pieces 70 years ago that are now part of the classical canon. While mainstream audiences still look away in anxiety when anyone mentions the name of John


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Cage, a new wave of savvy and hyper-talented young percussionists may be able to change fear to love (or at least respect). You know that a piece of music has your complete attention when the brain is twitching as hard as the hips and left foot. Here, the creations of composer John Cage (1912-1992) are banged out by Chicagoans Third Coast Percussion. These men are formidable musical aliens, hijacking every neuron and sinew as they put their own masterful spin on six pioneering works from when the pioneering American master was in his 20s. So much experimental music is fascinating to analyse and debate with interested friends. But it doesn’t always engage strongly enough to bypass the intellect — and not everyone wants to think their way through a concert. This is reason enough to celebrate the latest addition to Mode Records’ ongoing, comprehensive survey of Cage’s compositions. Released to help mark the centenary of Cage’s birth, the album, also available on high-definition DVD, shows how banging, scraping, tapping and scratching are not the vain gestures of cave dwellers, but pathways to new ways of experiencing organized sound. Or, as Cage put it, “Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to to the whole unexplored field of sound.” The now explored, but still underappreciated, fields on offer here are the First, Second and Third Constructions, which are studies in combining different combinations of instruments and found objects. The members of Third Coast Percussion (augmented for Third Construction) lavish each touch with the sort of microscopic attention to detail and steely (especially in First Construction) command of the larger musical flow that Angela Hewitt brings to a Bach fugue. Kudos also go to the recording engineers, who have miraculously kept the sound from being sudio-dry, while managing to capture fine detail as well as giving each sound a bit of space to breathe. A bit less interesting are Trio and Quartet, the first two pieces Cage wrote for percussion in the mid-1930s, but they help provide context for the growing complexity in sonic texture and rhythm that was to come. The boys really go wild in the final piece, Living Room Music. The title doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to play it for friends and family after dinner, but that you can use the whole room as percussive inspiration (assuming you don’t live in a condo or semi-detached house). The quartet descended on the rounded architectural whimsy that is Ruth Ford House (built in the late-1940s in Aurora, just outside Chicago), where they received permission to turn the place into their own personal instrument. This is where the DVD comes in handy. The result is more than a concert. It is its very own Gesamtkunstwerk – theatre, movement and music combined into a force much larger than its parts.

August 4, 2012 It’s boom time for Cage fans – barely a month goes by without another album confirming his status as surely the most underrated composer of the 20th century. This second volume of his percussion music focuses on early works such as the hugely influential Third Construction (1941), a monumental piece incorporating instruments such as the Peruvian quijada, Mexican teponaxtle and Indian cricket callers. Elsewhere, the second very slow movement of Quartet (1935) uses the long delay times of bells and gongs to impose meditative calm, while in Living Room Music (1940), an actual room provides the sound sources so inventively mined here by the brilliant Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion.


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Live: Third Coast Percussion Celebrates John Cage’s 100th Birthday at MoMA August 13, 2012 by Steven Thrasher Third Coast Percussion MoMA Sculpture Garden Thursday, August 9 Better than: Watching almost any contemporary DJ, since Cage was mixing vinyl and live radio with live performance before World War II. Some 69 years ago in 1943 (more than a decade before the first issue of the Village Voice was published), a 30-year-old composer named John Cage made his debut at the Museum of Modern Art. What he presented, some wrote at the time, was described more as "noise" than as "music," but that may not have bothered him too much. "Percussion music really is the art of noise, and that's what it should be called," Cage wrote, and that statement was quoted in the program for "Revolution: The Cage Century," a concert by Third Coast Percussion in the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden that served as the final event of Thursday's daylong John Cage Day celebration. Thursday's concert bore signature motifs of Cage's contemporaries and influences before the first notes were played. Beyond the fact that Cage had his debut there, there were endless reasons why MoMA's garden was the perfect venue for such a concert: the presence of an Alberto Giacometti sculpture on the stage, which called attention to the lack of visual substance in the same manner Cage's music focuses audio voids on the ear of the listener; the façade of Philip Johnson's 1951 Grace Rainey Rogers Annex which, alongside the reflection of Johnson's 1984 Sony building in the glass behind the stage, provides an architectural bookend of the modern era that nearly parallel the years of Cage's compositions; and, most of all, the scattershot printing of the program. If anyone wanted to understand the full program note, a member of the Third Coast noted, you'd have to "do what you had to do before the Internet: ask your neighbor." (Or, err, just go to the internet, where the full program was posted online.) The nearly 90-minute concert was punctuated by passages that were almost romantically lyrical, and even in their most tonal and banging moments, there was a warmth (and even a whimsy) in hearing Cage live and in watching musicians elaborately perform his work. "Second Construction" (1940) is a beautiful piece, with the piano player's hand so far up inside the piano you think he's conducting some kind of anatomical exam. The piano playing strings are played by hand—a signature Cage technique—muting the influence of the keys banging on them until they are so tight, they sound like the staccato riffs in the opening bars of the theme to The Twilight Zone. Live phonograph or radio is mixed into "Credo in Us" (1942); Third Coast used a smartphone that was tuned to WQXR or some other classical outlet as it played something especially Wagnerian. This was mixed with instrumentation that was more typically Cageian; an alarm clock, a colander, a fire alarm. The radio switched from high classical to what sounded like AM talk, as the piano (far less staccato now) started playing pieces that were, if not exactly melodic at first, not quite so tonal; the "hooks" (if you could ever describe Cage's phrases that way) sounded like ringtones before getting bigger, grander and more sweeping—until the smartphone, returned. (It's fun to watch the percussionists of Third Coast follow along with the sheet music, which is placed in precarious and unexpected places. It's also fun to watch how closely they adhere to it, drumming in precise time with each other and ending each piece with a dramatic flourish.) This was followed by "Radio Music" (1956), which in some ways was just four dudes spinning through radio scanners—mostly static, with the odd word or musical phrase slipping out—but which had moments of aural beauty. In the same way "4'33"" focuses the audience not just on silence but on the sounds around them, the


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static of "Radio Music" blended with the sounds of the city outside: the blare of car horns on 54th street; a bus braking on 5th Avenue; a bicycle bell morphing with the screams of an angry pedestrian. Cage wrote music for "Quartet" (1935) but did not dictate its instrumentation. (Third Coast played the first three movements and, in a move that I can't decide if Cage could have appreciated or predicted, invited the audience to download the free John Cage app off of iTunes in oder to make the fourth movement themselves.) As orchestrated by Third Coast, Movement I began with what sounded like coconut "hooves"; the second movement showcased what appeared to be a violin bow across a cymbal; all four percussionists raked, sawed at, and beat the carcass of a dismantled piano during movement three. The penultimate piece was the world premiere of Third Coast's "RENGA: Cage: 100" (2012), for which the group commissioned 100 composers to compose five to seven seconds of music each. A partial list of the instruments used: human hands clapping, human hands waving, lips blowing, a child's toy xylophone, drums, radios, cell phones, a triangle, a Chinese fortune cookie being unwrapped, the fortune's lucky numbers being read aloud, feet stomping, piano, branches of leaves being waved around, a smoke break, a mouth accordion, a conch, ringtones, bells, a tuba being tipped over until dozens of wooden beads spilled out rained down before startled audience members, bottled water maracas, regular maracas, chalkboard erasers, colanders, bows, and a duck call. The final piece was the most lyrical of all, "Third Construction," featuring bows against drums and a melodic conch shell. Overall, the performance was a warm introduction to hearing Cage being performed live. Right after Third Coast played their last note, at the end of a day of threatening rain (and a brief drizzle), blue skies opened up, ambient sunlight peeking down on the stage. Critical bias: I'd only heard Cage's music in recorded form. Overheard: "Well, I composed one of the [five- to seven-second] segments. Did you compose one, too?" Random notebook dump: Choreographer Merce Cunningham was Cage's lifelong partner, and the two collaborated many times. Being able to play Cage's music, though, rivals the demands of a dancer. The only musicians I've ever seen who've had to move nearly as much during a performance are the members of Stephen Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble. Set list: Second Construction Credo in US Radio Music Quartet I. Moderate II. II. Very Slow III. Axial Asymmetry RENGA: Cage: 10 Third Construction

June 21, 2012 by Doyle Armbrust The Works for Percussion 2 reminds us just how undeniably groovy John Cage’s percussion canon can be. In “Third Construction,” 3CP moves beyond precision to nimbly demonstrate the mesmerizing quality of Cage’s rotating rhythmic structure. David Skidmore breaks into an ecstatic, double-fisted kashishi breakdown, as Peter


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Martin shoots blasts from a conch shell. The apex is reached in the final four tracks, “Living Room Music.” Filmed within the red steel rib-cage of the Ruth Ford House in Aurora, the local quartet of Skidmore, Martin, Robert Dillon and Owen Clayton Condon strike floor lamps, handrails and walls with spoons, spatulas and hands. Martin taps out a rhythm of bleeps on a laptop’s space bar. For these details, opt for the DVD package over the CD-only version. Artfully captured on video and masterfully performed by 3CP, the sophomore album deserves an emphatic water-gong crash of approval.

Third Coast Percussion Hammers Cage at MoMA August 14, 2012 by Angela Sutton Third Coast Percussion dodged the raindrops at MoMA on Thursday night, presenting a mostly John Cage concert in honor of the composer's centenary and his 1943 MoMA percussion program. With an extended battery of toys, Third Coast demonstrated both Cage's own broad palette of sound and the room he left for others' invention. For example, in Credo in Us, Cage called for piano, traditional Western and Eastern percussion, and radios tuned to various stations. On the other hand, in Quartet, his first work for percussion, he left instrumentation decisions to the performers. In the third movement of Quartet, Third Coast plucked, striked, and scraped the strings of an unlucky upright piano, which they had stripped down to its harp and laid on its side. Though loose in some respects, Cage's music does have precise dimensions. The launching of various events must be timed correctly to maintain the driving rhythms and highlight unconventional moments. The members of Third Coast (David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon, and Owen Clayton Condon) showed a high degree of coordination and inventiveness in realizing Cage's compositions. Third Coast commissioned the one non-Cage work on the program–RENGA:Cage:100, a series of seconds-long fragments by 100 living composers. The piece included devices at every level of sophistication, from cell phones to rocks, and curiosities such as beads dumped from a Sousaphone and the simultaneous popping of PBRs. Perhaps it was inevitable that transitions between fragments would be the principal performance problem. However, aside from some awkward silences, Third Coast pulled off many of the transitions, primarily by treating them as an opportunity for theater. Cage's Third Construction wrapped up the evening, beginning modestly and ramping up to a vigorous finale that had the performers in a true sweat. It was a fitting conclusion for a program highlighting Cage's strange blend of earnestness and humor.

Sounds Heard: Third Coast Percussion – John Cage: Works for Percussion 2 July 10, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner John Cage’s centennial year has resulted in a gaggle of new recordings, multimedia offerings à la 4’33″, as well as festivals and events around the country. Whether or not one embraces wholeheartedly Cage’s later integration of chance procedures and conceptual thought into his works, there is no denying that some of his most compelling music is the early compositions for percussion, which provide a wealth of insight into the composer’s internal musical landscape. At the time these pieces were created, his sonic palette, which


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consisted of pretty much everything and the kitchen sink, was somewhat revolutionary, though it has now become a common language for percussionists. The Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion has released a new CD and separate surround sound DVD on Mode (available either individually or together) of six early percussion works that will perk up the ears (and eyes, if you choose to include the DVD) of anyone even remotely interested in percussion music performance and/or John Cage. The discs begin with Cage’s three Constructions, presented in reverse chronological order. Third Construction features the widest selection of instruments, with metal, wood, and skin categories all represented in force. The constantly grooving rhythmic complexity and the extensive instrumentation make it a milestone in percussion repertoire. Second Construction begins with a gamelan-esque arrangement of oxen bells, joined by a repeating rhythmic melody on piano grounded by snare drum brush work, and an assortment of shakers and small drums. First Construction (in Metal) is just that—a metallic rainforest of thundersheets, tam-tam, cymbals, and “piano innards.” The 1936 work Trio is a short three-movement composition scored for bass drum, woodblocks, bamboo sticks and tom-toms. Heard after the Constructions, its dance-like, often gently bubbling rhythms sound relatively simple in comparison, and it is illuminating to hear how Cage’s future sense of rhythm and structure grew out of this work. The Quartet for unspecified instrumentation has been sending percussionists on junkyard treasure hunts since it was created in 1935. Here Third Coast has separated the four movements into separate instrument groupings of primarily wood, metal, and skin, and the third movement employs the harp of an old upright piano as the primary instrument to create a beautiful and otherworldly soundscape. The final piece, Living Room Music, finds the performers inside architect Bruce Goff’s Ruth Ford House, literally playing the space—metal beams are struck with spoons, carpet is scraped. There is the open-handed thwacking of wooden surfaces in the first movement, “To Begin.” For the second movement, “Story,” they relax in comfy chairs and, as the liner notes state, “rap” Gertrude Stein. Slide whistle is featured in the “Melody” movement with a background of spoons and a very familiar computer bleep sound that many will immediately recognize. “End” is all glass objects all the time. While every one of the performance films is beautifully presented, with lots of close-ups of fascinating instruments and the hands playing them, the video of Living Room Music captures the space and the performers in a way that makes you really wish you could be there, hanging out with them. In my experience, Cage’s percussion music is best fully appreciated live; being able to see performers play the arrays of coffee cans, flower pots, drums, utensils, and bells brings the music’s visceral character to the forefront of the listening experience. In this case, an added benefit is being able to watch Third Coast Percussion obviously having a blast performing all of these works. The DVD beautifully conveys both the richness and the delightful quirkiness of Cage’s percussion music, instilling a deeper appreciation of the composer’s creative outlook. The recordings alone are of exceedingly high quality and satisfying in and of themselves, and the DVD adds another layer of depth, personality, and—quite literally—color to the music that is well worth the investment.

May 23, 2012 by Peter Margasak John Cage spent part of 1934 studying privately with pioneering serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles, during which time his mentor suggested that Cage would never be able to write music because he lacked a feeling for harmony. Luckily Cage kept at it for the next six decades—and in the years immediately following that discouraging advice, he wrote works for percussion that rank among his greatest, a resounding rejection of harmony's primary role in composition. His inspirations at the time included the opportunity to write for dance troupes and his job as an assistant to animator Oskar Fischinger, who Cage says told him,


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"Everything in the world has its own spirit which can be released by setting it into vibration." Cage's Quartet (1935) didn't specify instruments; when he conceived it he had household objects in mind, and the objects he set into vibration included chairs, books, brake drums, and pots and pans. Imaginative Chicago group Third Coast Percussion has contributed to the Cage centennial celebration with a terrific new CD, The Works for Percussion 2 (Mode), which includes vibrant readings of most of Cage's percussion work from between 1935 and '41.

Beat the Heat: Austin Chamber Music Center Summer Festival 2012 July 26, 2012 by Andrew Sigler Third Coast Percussion’s performance at Bates Concert Hall featured works by Reich and Cage, as well as two pieces written by the performers. Fractalia by TCP member Owen Clayton Condon was a perfect piece to start the show; a short, inviting amuse bouche to whet the appetite. Moto perpetuo figures echoed between marimbas, these figures complimented and set off by occasional accents on toms. The Condon was followed by Reich’s Mallet Quartet, which started off with many of the classic Reich tropes but showed some newer ideas in the second movement. Asymmetrical phrases populated symmetrical sections featuring two marimbas playing four bars figures followed by two vibraphones playing 16 bars, the entire form repeated several times. There was something of a music box texture in the vibes as their chords rang out above large structures in the bass register of the marimba, the latter sounding like strummed guitar chords. On the surface, Third Construction by Cage has a number of features that mark it as a precedent to groups like Stomp and Blue Man Group, whose bread and butter stems largely from creating compelling rhythmic constructions from unorthodox sources. The wide variety of instruments used here (including conch shell) have for the most part made their way into the “mainstream” of new concert music (okay, maybe not the conch), but the visual impact of watching a performer keen away on the shell as the other members of the group perform complex, driving, interlocking rhythms has at least some connection with BMG doing their PVC pipe bit. The couple sitting to my right looked to be straight out of an AARP commercial with the notable exception that they both grooved for the duration of the piece, heads bobbing like bizarre extras in a hip hop video. TCP’s performance of the piece was energetic and thoroughly engaging and the reaction of the audience would not have been out of place at the Mother Falcon show, whoops and hollers and all. The second half of the concert was devoted to David Skidmore’s Common Patterns in Uncommon Time. Consisting of six movements played without pause, the work appeared seamlessly at the end of the intermission by way of a prerecorded track. This quiet, sparse material served as a foundation for vibes and marimba figures rising and falling dynamically and building eventually to nearly painful heights, especially with hard mallets on the vibes at fff. The work moved through a variety of moods and textures, and at times had the audience looking around and behind to find other performers on wind chimes and other atmospheric instruments. Though contemplative in tone over all, Common Patterns in Uncommon Time was in like a lion and out like a lamb.

Steve Reich’s 75th marked in youthfully energetic style August 23, 2011 by Wynne Delacoma The occasion may have been a 75th birthday celebration for American composer Steve Reich, but the atmosphere Monday night at the Pritzker Pavilion was remarkably youthful. With its relentless pulse and short, obsessively repeated melodies, Reich’s music bristles with energy, and two young Chicago-based groups — eighth blackbird and Third Coast Percussion — along with some talented friends, plunged into its flow with high-octane drive.


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The large audience was eager to be swept away, cheering every work on the program that opened with Reich’s Mallet Quartet and Double Sextet and closed with the luminous Music for 18 Musicians. Buoyed by their immersion in that hour-long piece, some of audience literally danced out of the park, echoes of Reich’s infectious rhythms and spiky melodies lingering in their ears. The program was an exhilarating close to Millennium Park’s third annual Dusk Variations, a weekly series of fre concerts that mix classical music with pop and alternative forms. Balancing classical music’s need for high polish and pop music’s emphasis on spontaneous exuberance can be tricky. But everybody involved with Monday’s concert got it just right. Fred Child, a radio program host with American Public Media, offered unpretentious but informed commentary. The raw, rasping sound of Reich’s early, spoken-word tape loops, including the ground-breaking Gonna Rain, ricocheted through the park as a kind of prelude and postlude to the musical selections. They reminded us that Reich was one of the first composers to exploit sample and scratch, techniques later employed by rap and hip-hop musicians. Music for 18 Musicians is one of Reich’s best-known pieces, and its sound is often ethereal, washing over us in glowing, sonic waves that seem to be wafting in from some distant, mysterious universe. On Monday night, the players from eighth blackbird, Third Coast and a few fearsomely intense friends offered a different take. From the first, brisk clangs of Clay Condon’s vibraphone, this was something more urgent. With a metallic edge and minimal resonance, Reich’s syncopated rhythms and jagged melodic fragments came at us with full force. All of Reich’s magical effects were still there. The gentle roar of the bass clarinets repeatedly swelled and faded, re-emerging again and again like the revolving beam of a lighthouse. The four pianists pounded out their chords and octaves with relentless power, providing a steady, unceasing pulse that drove the music forward. But, as was the case in Mallet Quartet and Double Sextet, Reich’s densely layered phrases were sharp edged and full of sinew. Sometimes his music resembles a warm bath. On Monday night, it was more of a bracing shower.

East meets West in bracing style at Chinese Fine Arts Society concert August 1, 2011 by Michael Cameron Zhou Long may be the first Chinese-American composer honored with a Pulitzer, but predecessors of his heritage have achieved great prominence on the concert stage. One of the most acclaimed is Tan Dun, the only composer represented who has flirted with the Western avant-garde. His Elegy: Snow in June is a haunting work for solo cello and percussion quartet that, like most of the others, finds inspiration in ancient legends. This set of free variations begins and ends with clear Chinese melodic influences, while the remainder explores a dizzying array of colors that includes loud percussive snaps and barely audible tearing of paper strips. Cellist Chris Wild and Third Coast Percussion gave the piece a dramatic and expressively nuanced performance.

June 21, 2012 Loops and Variations by Mia Clarke Millennium Park’s newest music series is a hit. From the eclectic double bill of art-rock outfit Deerhoof and contemporary music champ Dal Niente to Third Coast Percussion’s explosive live show, Loops and Variations has achieved its aim of infusing new music with indie cool.

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