Five blocks of wood, four thick dowels, and a mallet. If that
sounds like the ingredients for a woodworking project from your 8th-grade shop
class, you were not at Kilbourn Hall Tuesday night with Third Coast Percussion.
The four members of the group — David Skidmore, Peter Martin,
Robert Dillon, and Sean Conners — were joined by Eastman Professor Michael
Burritt for the most minimal of several minimalist pieces sprinkled throughout
the concert. Burritt had mentored all of the group’s members when he was
teaching at Northwestern University and they were clearly delighted to be
sharing the stage with him.
The piece, written by Steve Reich and aptly titled “Music for
Pieces of Wood,” was fascinating in its deceptive simplicity. The wood blocks,
thick or thin and probably from various trees, had different timbres. The
percussionists coaxed an amazing variety of sound (some of it quite melodic)
from them.
This work, stripping the elements of percussion down to their
most basic level, was emblematic of Third Coast Percussion’s allure. All of the
Chicago-based group’s members are virtuoso musicians but it’s their expansive
view of percussion’s possibilities that sets them apart. They certainly
delighted the two-thirds-full audience last night at Kilbourn.
The following piece, “Apple Blossom” by Peter Garland,
showcased another sort of minimalism. Each of the four musicians played with
four mallets but instead of striking the two marimbas they shared, they touched
the bars quickly but softly, forming one gigantic chord that metamorphosed
gradually through the piece. The visual element of the soft white
heads of the mallets hovering over the bars was as beautiful as the music.    Â
For a group so enamored of minimalism, Third Coast Percussion
sure brought a lot of stuff onto the stage. Aside from the two marimbas in a V
formation, some standard drums, and a couple of small xylophone variations,
there were, at different times, four large tables filled with objects that never would have suspected they were percussion instruments.
The simplest of these were three shallow wooden box-like
structures used to play “Table Music” by Thierry De Mey. All manner of tapping,
clapping, and scrapping created a rhythmic tour de force on the most basic of
“instruments.” Because of the graceful (and sometimes synchronized) movements
of the percussionists, this piece, and much of the rest of the concert, became
a ballet of sorts, involving intricate choreography.
The most complicated tableful of “instruments” was used to
play “Shi” by Alexandre Lunsqui. In search of new sounds when composing the
piece, Lunsqui had visited Chinatown and purchased an array of objects ranging
from bamboo mats to barbeque grates. In keeping with the inventive nature of
the group, the work was played mostly with chop sticks. But one of the piece’s
most vibrant sections consisted of group members sawing away on metal-rod
violins with smaller rods of metal. This work contained no shortage of
absurdity and bordered on a Marx Brothers routine.
The most beautiful composition of the night featured a table
full of “prayer bowls,” metal bowls varying in size. “Resounding Earth,
Movement II: Prayer,” by Augusta Read Thomas, written with Third Coast
Percussion in mind, had a kind of ancient variation on the contemporary electronic
loop pedal that is now commonly used to build multiple harmonies by musicians
during performances.
The bowls could be struck like bells, but they had another
more powerful property. When the head of a mallet was gently rolled along the
top-edge, a haunting drone would gradually build. Several times in the piece
these gorgeous sounds were summoned from the bowls and while they were
resonating, subtly beautiful melodies were tapped out above them until they
gradually faded away.
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2015.
