Percussion Ensemble
Boston Conservatory Percussion Ensemble is joined by other members of the Conservatory community in a concert honoring the memory of the great composer Louis Andriessen, in which his seminal work, Workers Union, will be performed. The concert will also feature works by Giacinto Scelsi, Caroline Shaw, Midori Takada, and Ayanna Woods.
Kyle Brightwell and Samuel Solomon, directors
Please note: This performance is open to Berklee community members and invited guests only; it is not open to the general public.
Program Information
Repertoire
AYANNA WOODS: Triple Point (2018)
Xin Yi Chong, Christian Bartholomew, Harold Rivas, and Davis Nickles
GIACINTO SCELSI: Maknongan (1976)
Chandler Beaugrand and William Shi
GIACINTO SCELSI: I Riti: Ritual March, “The Funeral of Achillies” (1979)
Harold Rivas, Xingyue Xue, Eric Puente, and Ashley Ridenour
CAROLINE SHAW: Taxidermy (2012)
Linus Adler, Alexa Clawson, Christian Wiemer, and Ritvik Yaparpalvi
MIDORI TAKADA (arr. Boston Conservatory Percussion Ensemble): Through the Looking Glass (1983)
James Koo, Kendall Floyd, and April Ong
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN: Workers Union (1975)
Program Notes and About the Composers
AYANNA WOODS: Triple Point (2018)
Ayanna Woods’s Triple Point is a fun groove based romp written for Third Coast Percussion that is demanding of the performers sense of time and sensitivity to sound. You will see a variety of novel instruments used in the piece, and there is a lighthearted sense of fun that flows throughout the five minute ride. The music is pure joy and good vibes—it's the kind of piece that I would have wanted to play when I was in music school.
—Kyle Brightwell
Ayanna Woods (b. 1992) is a composer, performer, and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. A collaborator across genres and forms, her work spans new music, theater, film scoring, arranging, songwriting, and improvisation. She earned her B.A. in music from Yale University.
Woods’ chamber works have been performed by Third Coast Percussion, Wet Ink Ensemble, Fifth House Ensemble, and more. Her work has premiered at Fresh Inc. Festival, Walden CMR, the Loretto Project, and Close to There, and Perto de Lá, a cross-cultural residency in Salvador, Brazil. She is a frequent collaborator with the Chicago Children’s Choir (CCC), of which she is an alum. Her arrangements for the choir have been performed all over Chicago, notably at CCC’s Paint the Town Red in Millenium Park (2016), Chance the Rapper’s Magnificent Coloring Day at Guaranteed Rate Field (2016), and Jamila Woods’ Heavn Here at Harold Washington Cultural Center (2018).
In 2018, Woods originated her role as a vocalist in Place, a new oratorio about gentrification and displacement co-conceived by Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearne, director Patricia McGregor, and poet/librettist Saul Williams. Her music also appears in a range of film and theater projects. Two of her songs are featured in the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. In 2017, she composed the score for No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, a live film created by writers Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Emmy-winning performance collective Manual Cinema.
Woods continues to tour the U.S. and Canada with Manual Cinema as a bassist and music director. As a gigging musician, she is a sought-after bassist and improvisor in Chicago. As the bassist for TASHA, she toured the west coast and performed at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2019. Woods is currently recording a debut solo album with her own band, Yadda Yadda. Woods is a recipient of Third Coast Percussion's 2017 Emerging Composers Partnership, a 2017 3Arts Make A Wave grant, and a 2020 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant.
Kerry O’Brien from the Chicago Reader has observed: "Woods describes her music as 'wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous,' and that’s a fitting overview of her recent Triple Point, a quartet piece she wrote for Third Coast Percussion that fuses her classical training with minimalist pop sensibilities.”
GIACINTO SCELSI: Maknongan (1976)
Except for a revision of an older work in 1988 to commemorate the death of his great friend Henri Michaux, Giacinto Scelsi mostly stopped composing in 1976. Maknongan—written that year—is therefore one of his last works, if not his very last, entirely original piece. Its title, although it has a somewhat Celtic feel, is probably a mere fancy of Scelsi's. On an immediate level, the music is as simple as possible, being aimed only at bringing listeners into a much-sharpened awareness of the overtone richness of bass sound.
A glance at his catalog shows that Maknongan is the third in a series of works investigating the darker registers. Only four minutes long, Maknongan is also possibly the most focused and abstract work Scelsi ever composed. It's not scored for any specific instrument, so long as the instrument used can express the deepest bass range of its own instrumental family. Tuba, contrabassoon, string bass, bass saxophone, contrabass saxophone, bass flute, bass voice—any of these is suitable.
As the part is very easy to play, what Scelsi asks is the inverted virtuosity of supreme tonal control. The piece rumbles to life in the depths of the instrument's range, on a G sharp, which forms the absolute, paradoxically receding/expanding center of our focus. From there, it branches out cautiously and fleetingly into nearby notes. The effect, after each toe-deep excursion into the pond of another tone, is to make the principal note perceptually clearer and clearer. It seems to simultaneously expand and slowly implode in the mind's ear. There's a constantly shifting dynamic (the score shows hairpins under literally every note) and many quarter-tone inflections. A solemnly chewing, controlled vibrato sneaks in as well. These timbral embellishments displace and situate the central note at the same time, drawing a huge field of energy around it. Occasional leaps upwards of an octave fill out the outer overtonal regions like yellow flares cast upwards into darkness. By the end, when the G sharp has unnoticeably shifted downwards to a G, a strange and luminous sonic envelope has ballooned around the instrumental sound.
—Donato Mancini, All Music Guide
GIACINTO SCELSI: I Riti: Ritual March, “The Funeral of Achillies” (1979)
Agamemnon’s ghost tells of the funeral of Achilles:
"At his words the brave Achaeans checked their flight. The daughters of the Old Man of the Sea stood around your corpse lamenting bitterly. They wrapped your body in an imperishable shroud. And the nine Muses chanted your dirge, responding each to each in their sweet voices. There was not a single Argive to be seen without tears in his eyes, so moving was the clear song of the Muse. Immortal gods and mortal men, we mourned for you, seventeen days and nights, and on the eighteenth we delivered you to the flames, sacrificing herds of fatted sheep and spiral-horned cattle round you. You were burnt clothed as a god, drowned in unguents and sweet honey, and a host of Achaean heroes streamed past your pyre as you burned, warriors and charioteers, making a vast noise. And at dawn, Achilles, when Hephaestus’ fires had eaten you, we gathered up your whitened ash and bone, and steeped them in oil and unmixed wine. Your mother gave us a gold two-handled urn, saying it was the gift of Dionysus, and crafted by far-famed Hephaestus himself. There your ashes lie, my glorious Achilles, mixed with the bones of the dead Patroclus, Menoetius’ son, but separated from those of Antilochus, who next to dead Patroclus you loved most among your comrades. And on a headland thrusting into the wide Hellespont we, the great host of Argive spearmen, heaped a vast flawless mound above them, so it might be seen far out to sea by men who live now and those to come."
—Homer's The Odyssey; Book XXIV: 57–97
Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988), a long ignored eccentric and outsider of the new music world who never wanted his photograph to appear in connection with his music, is an Italian composer and poet who gained considerable recognition in the mid-1980s, just as his creative powers began to slacken. Hence he is often called the Charles Ives of Italy. While it took music publishers nearly 50 years to take on and promulgate his works, three collections of his poetry were published in French in Paris in 1949, 1954, and 1962.
Scelsi was mainly a self-taught composer, but received some instruction from Giacinto Sallustio in Rome and Egon Koehler in Geneva who acquainted him with Scriabin's work. He also studied with Walter Klein, a music theorist and friend of the Schoenberg circle who introduced him in 1936 to the music and theory of the "Second Viennese School." Shortly thereafter, Scelsi made extended visits to Asia and became interested in Eastern philosophy, theosophy, yoga, and Buddhism, all of which affected his compositional approach as did his musical studies in Geneva and Vienna. Eventually settling in Rome, Scelsi once remarked: "Rome is the boundary between East and West. South of Rome, the East starts, north of Rome, the West starts. The borderline runs exactly through the Roman Forum. There is my house: This explains my life and my music."
Thus it is not surprising that Scelsi's artistic ideas and compositional procedures, thwarted Western concepts of composition, improvisation, interpretation, and performance. He did not consider himself a composer, but rather a medium or vessel who transcendentally received musical messages while meditating and improvising at the piano or on the guitar and percussion instruments. Such "intuitive" or "real time" compositions were taped and transcribed and edited by others since the 1940s. (After Scelsi's death, some of his assistants, whom Scelsi had merely viewed as interpreters of his sonic messages, publicly and provocatively claimed to be his ghostwriters.) The resulting scores, however, did not allow for flexibility or improvisation. Like Scelsi and his assistants, the performer assumes the role of a medium, who merely conveys the sounds to the audience.
For Scelsi, sound was cosmic energy and three-dimensional: "The sound is round like a sphere, yet when one hears it, it seems to have only two dimensions: register and duration-of the third [dimension] we know that it exists, but it escapes us in some way. The high and low overtones sometimes give the impression of a more comprehensive, manifold sound beyond duration and register, but it is difficult to comprehend its complexity."
Searching for the "third dimension" or "depth" of sound, Scelsi attempted to expand the tonal realm and focused more and more on one or two single pitches. These were treated like focal points and were reiterated or embroidered while subjected to very subtle modifications in intensity, timbre, dynamics and pitch. This approach, however, led Scelsi to embrace microtonality and write music primarily for winds, strings and voice from the mid-1950s on. Such works as Tre pezzi (1956) for trombone, Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959) for chamber orchestra, or his last three string quartets (1963–1985) are based on single notes and their iridescent microtonal nuances.
—Mode Records
CAROLINE SHAW: Taxidermy (2012)
Why “Taxidermy”? I just find the word strangely compelling, and it evokes something grand, awkward, epic, silent, funny, and just a bit creepy—all characteristics of this piece, in a way. The repeated phrase toward the end (“the detail of the pattern is movement”) is a little concept I love trying (and failing) to imagine. It comes from T.S. Eliot’s beautiful and perplexing "Burnt Norton" (from Four Quartets), and I’ve used it before in other work as a kind of whimsical existentialist mantra.
—Caroline Shaw
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) is a New York-based musician (vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer) who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque, the LA Philharmonic, Juilliard 415, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, the Baltimore Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry.
Shaw’s film scores include Erica Fae’s To Keep the Light and Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, as well as the upcoming short 8th Year of the Emergency by Maureen Towey. She has produced for Kanye West (The Life of Pablo; Ye) and Nas (NASIR), and has contributed to records by The National, and by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. She once sang in a three-part harmony with Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center.
Shaw has studied at Rice, Yale, and Princeton, and currently teaches at New York University. She is a creative associate at the Juilliard School and has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.
MIDORI TAKADA (arr. Boston Conservatory Percussion Ensemble): Through the Looking Glass (1983)
I discovered Midori Takada’s music when rummaging through the minimalist music section of Deep Thoughts record store in Jamaica Plain. At the time, I had no idea who she was, but the cover art to Through the Looking Glass intrigued me. It was lumped between albums of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno, all of whom I am intimately familiar with and great admiration for their music. Who was this Japanese mystery woman amongst the titans of minimalist and ambient music? When I got home and put on the record, I couldn’t believe how beautiful, haunting, and complex the music was. It was clearly the work of someone with a variety of musical influences and working with a large sonic palate and taste that was used with nuance and emotion. It is a gorgeous record that gets deep into your bones the more time you spend with it.
The piece/song/movement that Boston Conservatory percussionists and I have arranged seems to pull from African drumming and reminds me of my own limited experiences with Ghanaian drumming. The sound and harmonic movement is also very similar to that of Steve Reich and the American minimalists, but throughout the record, Takada also uses instruments/sounds/textures that are clearly of Japanese influence. The result is a true melting pot of sounds and styles that to me belongs in the pantheon of minimalist and ambient music right alongside the works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno. I hope you all enjoy the music of Midori Takada as much as I do.
—Kyle Brightwell
Midori Takada (b. 1951) is a gifted percussionist and composer, whose ambient, minimalist music combines East Asian and African traditions with jazz and progressive classical sounds. Born in Tokyo, Takada honed her skills studying at Tokyo's University of Arts. After graduating, she made her professional debut performing with the Berlin RIAS Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. Also during this period, she began expanding beyond classical music, exploring various Asian and African musical forms and instrumentation. She then spent several years as a member of the Mkwaju Ensemble, releasing such albums as 1981's Mkwaju alongside keyboardist/composer Joe Hisaishi.
In 1983, Takada released her debut solo album, the highly regarded and innovative Through the Looking Glass. Recorded over two days, the album showcased Takada performing on a variety of instruments like harp, vibraphone, and synthesizers, as well as found objects including reed organs, bells, ocarinas, and glass cola bottles. She then paired with shō player Mayumi Miyata for 1987's Nebula. Takada returned in 1990 with Lunar Cruise, a collaborative project with jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh, as well as Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haruomi Hosono, and Kazutoki Umezu.
Over the years, she has also collaborated on world various world-fusion projects including performances with Ghana's Kakraba Lobi, Burkina Faso's Farafina Band, Korean saxophonist Kang Tae-Hwan, and many more. Takada's third solo album, Tree of Life, followed in 1999. Along with her solo work, she has composed for film and video game soundtracks, contributing to such franchises as Final Fantasy, Haibane-Renmei, and Akira Senju's Tetsujin 28, among others.
In addition, Takada has worked on live theater productions, including collaborating with Tadashi Suzuki and his Suzuki Company of Toga on well-received adaptations of Electra and King Lear. She also taught for many years at the Tokyo National University of Arts. In 2017, Takada toured in support of the reissuing of first two solo albums.
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN: Workers Union (1975)
Workers Union is a "symphonic movement for any loud sounding group of instruments." Pitches are not traditionally notated, but are spaced relative to a single horizontal line, which represents the center of the instrument's register. Much in the same aesthetic as other works of his same period, such as Hoketus, the composer requests that it "sound dissonant, chromatic and often aggressive." Andriessen states that "only in the case that every player plays with such an intention that his part is an essential one, the work will succeed; just as in the political work.”
Louis Andriessen (1939–2021) was among the most celebrated Dutch masters of his generation. His compositions followed trends of the 20th century, from neoclassicism through serialism and American minimalism, before establishing a sound that was his own. Dissatisfaction with the post-war European symphonic scene led Andriessen to mostly abandon the traditional orchestra in favor of mixed ensembles of electric instruments with the more conventional. To that end, he founded the ensembles Orkest de Volharding and Hoketus to perform his music and the music of like-minded composers. His popularity with young listeners and presence on the scene provided an unprecedented boost to the prominence of contemporary Dutch music throughout the world.
Andriessen was born in Utrecht into a musical family headed by his father, Hendrik Andriessen, one of the recognized pioneers of modern Dutch music. His uncle was the pianist and composer Willem Andriessen, and his siblings, Jurriaan and Caecilia, were also composers. Louis Andriessen began his musical studies with his father, and then studied in The Hague with Kees van Baaren, and later in Milan with Luciano Berio. Early Andriessen works are serial, but by 1963, he was working with graphic notation, as in the piano piece Registers, using a combination of fixed and non-fixed elements to facilitate improvisation.
In 1969, Andriessen participated in his first large-scale theatrical "happening," Reconstructie, at the Holland Festival in collaboration with Ton de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, Peter Schat, and Jan van Vlijmen. In 1970, Andriessen swore off writing music for standard symphonic ensembles for good, a decision that was to profoundly impact his development; in later life, he did write for the orchestra again. For a time, he worked in electronic music and had his first venture into theater on his own with Il Principe. Andriessen experienced a creative breakthrough in 1976, with De Staat, a large choral work based on Plato's Republic that was sung in the original Greek, combining ancient Greek scales, Stravinskyian rhythms, repetition, and hocket. De Staat earned Andriessen the coveted Kees van Baaren Prize, and following that, he garnered numerous awards, citations, and commissions.
Andriessen often used rock instruments, such as electric guitar, bass, and synthesizer, to augment his ensembles. Andriessen also composed music designed to challenge the talents of specific performers; Forget-Me-Not requires an oboist to also play piano, and in TAO, there is a part for a pianist who speaks and also plays the koto.
Andriessen was regarded, to some extent, as an ensemble builder; Orkest de Volharding was formed to play the same-named Andriessen work, and the ensemble came together afterward to program and commission other repertoire. In the United States, performing groups such as the California EAR Unit and Bang on a Can eagerly programmed and recorded Andriessen works such as Workers Union and Hoketus. Younger composers view the work of Andriessen as an alternative to academic serialism and American minimalism, and aspiring composers from many nations visited Holland to study with him at the Royal Conservatory at The Hague.
After De Staat, Andriessen's major works included De Tijd, Facing Death for the Kronos Quartet, and Trilogy of the Last Day. He collaborated with stage director Robert Wilson on the four-part De Materie in 1989. In the 1990s, a fruitful collaboration with film director Peter Greenaway led to several works, including the films M is for Man, Music, Mozart; Rosa: The Death of a Composer; and the opera Writing to Vermeer, which premiered in 1999.
Sometimes didactic in his defense of his progressive political views, Andriessen was nevertheless far from humorless. His penetrating insight as an essayist on topics such as Stravinsky may be read in his book The Apollonian Clockwork, published in 1989. Andriessen continued publishing music into the late 2010s, and his later works include La Commedia (2008), an opera retelling the story of Dante's Divine Comedy, his final opera, Theatre of the World (2015), and a song cycle dedicated to Nora Fischer titled The Only One (2018). Andriessen died in Weesp, Netherlands, on July 1, 2021.
Ensemble
Linus Adler
Christian Bartholomew
Chandler Beaugrand
Matthew Carey
Xin Yi Chong
Alexa Clawson
Kendall Floyd
Wesley Fowler
Yun Hao (James) Koo
Patrick McCaffrey
Davis Nickles
Chu Wen (April) Ong
Eric Puente
Ashley Ridenour
Harold Rivas
YueYang (William) Shi
David Wang
Christian Wiemer
Xingyue Xue
Ritvik Yaparpalvi
Music Division and Concert Staff
MUSIC DIVISION
Dean of Music
– Michael Shinn
Chair of Voice – Patty Thom
Chair of Instrumental Studies – Matthew Marsit
Chair of Composition, Contemporary Music, and Core Studies – Jonathan Bailey Holland
Chief Ensemble Operations Coordinator – Ryan Fossier
Ensembles Coordinator – Victoria Garcia
Administrative Coordinator – Chantel O'Brien
PERFORMANCE SERVICES
Director of Performance Services – Liz Keller-Tripp
Director of Audio/Visual Services – Richard Malcolm
Audio/Visual Specialist – Phil Roberson
Associate Director of Concert Services – Ryland Bennett
BOX OFFICE
Associate Director of Event Management and Audience Services, Berklee – Nicole Kindred
Ticket Operations and Patron Services Manager, Boston Conservatory at Berklee – Erin Conors
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