August 19, 2019

  • New Music for Percussion Ensemble & Soloists

     

    Soli for Tuba, Zheng, Horn, With Percussion
    Joseph Alvarez, tuba. Haiqiong Deng, zheng.
    Jay Hunsberger, tuba. Eric Hawkins, horn.
    Yin Long, piano.
    McCormick Percussion Group/Robert McCormick
    Ravello Records 8014
    Total Time: 75:09
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    The McCormick Percussion Group brings together some unique concerti from four different composers on this new release.  The album pulls together three works for tuba, plus a couple that feature an ancient Chinese zither, the zheng.  The recordings here were made between 2013 and 2018 apparently closer to the work’s premieres.

    Tyler Kline’s Loam (2017) is a four-movement concerto for tuba and percussion ensemble commissioned by the McCormick ensemble.  The inspiration for the work was a set of essays by the noted environmentalist Wendell Berry.  A rhythmic motif appears in the tuba in both a low and higher register.  This idea then begins to slowly merge with percussion parallels of different sounds.  The pitched percussion match tonally the information presented in the tuba while the unpitched percussion latch on to the rhythms and then proceed to evolve from there.  Kline’s conceptual work focuses on the way one might think of soil and how it is tilled and shaped.  This comes out in a highly textural work.  Though there are some nice lyrical moments for the tuba to explore that provide nice contrast.  Mallets help create a rather fascinating texture bubbling under the surface especially in the second movement.  The piano moves to its own dark registers as we move into the third movement with the tuba focusing on specific pitches that swell against the mysterious, darkness.

    The two works which include the zheng are by the Taiwenese-American composer Chihchun Chi-Sun Lee.  They are the earliest works in this compilation.  First is a Double Concerto for Tuba and Zheng (2015).  Cast in three movements.  Explorations of color and timbre inform the first movement of the work.  Intriguing techniques of breathing and articulation also become important.  This lends the music a sense of the background music for a Chinese drama.  More lyrical moments appear in the central movement, slowing things down a touch and also referencing a folk song between two lovers.  Unnatural pairing here leads us to the final movement where each instrument eventually becomes an unwitting percussion instrument in its own right.  The album also concludes with Zusammenflusses (2013) for zheng and percussion.  Here Lee explores the unique bent pitches of Asian music through bowing on the vibraphone that imitates what one can do on the zheng as well.

    Michael Standard’s Stamina (2018) provides an opportunity for color variation it being a concerto for horn and percussion.  The musical language here comes from the dodecaphonic style and in this case Standard sets up the first movement around two hexachords as a structural and unifying element.  The central movement, “Rehabilitation”, takes this material and uses glissandi to further explore the pitch material.  The final movement shifts some of the unpitched percussion for more specific pitch assignments, building on the way these materials were explored in the central movement still further.

    In Pursuit of Ghosts (2018) by Matthew Kennedy is composed for tuba with percussion and piano.  The three movements explore concepts of self and perception both our own, and that of others.  “Heartland” is somewhat self-referential in its references to marching bands and religion from the composer’s experience.  At the center is a deeply-personal movement, “Cat’s Cradle”.  Here the composer explores his artistic response to his father’s attempted suicide.  It also features self-quotes from an earlier work.  Finally, “Spirits” invites us to reflect upon the memories of those who have died and how we might continue to remember them.

    Each of these works are experimental in their approaches, part of this is the use of the percussion ensemble itself, but at another level it is also the way the other solo instruments are integrated and placed in the textures of each work coupled with an advanced contemporary compositional musical language.  Intriguing pieces all the same in a collection of innovative works using percussion.