The Western Percussion Ensemble—a chamber music ensemble composed of UW School of Music students—will be performing a concert tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Concert Hall. Entitled “Percussion Plus,” the program will consist entirely of music composed for various groups of instruments, all of which include percussion. A host of musicians from both the UW School of Music and the community at large will join the ensemble to fill out the various instrument groupings.
Because the percussion ensemble as a classical chamber group has only existed since the early twentieth century, the vast majority of percussion ensemble literature has been written by contemporary composers. This is clearly reflected in the selection of performances, as five of the pieces were written by living composers and the program’s other two pieces were written after 1940. Still, even though the all of the performances are taken from the roughly the same stylistic period, the music on the program is a varied mix of pieces.
For example, the newest piece to be performed tonight is Roger Braun’s “Independent Streams,” written for violin, viola, cello, marimba, vibraphone, darabukka and boombakini. In addition to its contemporary rhythmic and harmonic material and inclusion of two slightly exotic percussion instruments, the work contains many dialogues between percussion and string instruments.
This lies in stark contrast to the oldest piece on the program, “Credo in US” by John Cage. Scored for piano, pre-recorded tape and two percussionists playing an odd assortment of instruments such as tin cans, muted gongs and tenor drums, the piece’s four performers constantly weave in and out of each other’s musical lines. This creates a dense polyphonic texture that sounds quite different than the call and response aesthetic present in Braun’s work.
Other pieces on the program will serve as contrasts to one another due to the pure difference in their instrumentation. A pair of pieces illustrating such variety will be “Cheating, Lying, and Stealing,” composed by David Lang and “Xibala” by Libby Larsen. The former was written for ensemble containing bass clarinet, cello, piano and two percussionists while the latter is scored for a smaller group of performers containing a bassoon and two percussionists—one of which plays tuned water glasses, among other instruments. The extreme difference in instrument groupings and tessituras creates two works that dwell in different timbral worlds, although both pieces are composed in contemporary styles.
Some of the music even draws heavily from non-western music cultures, although they are written in the idiom of western music. An example of such a piece is Alan Hovhaness’s “Koke no Niwa,” one of the composer’s earliest works to show an influence of Japanese music, a trait which would become more apparent in his later works.
At the same time, other works on the program depict of minute western culture using unconventional methods. “Moving Air” by Nigel Westlake and “Pedestrians” by Evan Hause both paint portraits of ordinary events—Westlake incorporates samples of slamming car doors and breaking glass in his piece while Hause uses percussion instruments to simulate the happenings of a busy city street in unique fashion. These techniques vary, such as including pre-recorded sounds that are played forwards as well as backwards or simultaneously mixing two timbres of different instruments to create sounds akin to those one would hear in a downtown metropolitan area. With a mix of music this eclectic and interesting, Percussion Plus will not be a concert to miss.
