By Alex Barnett
Third Coast Percussion gave Chicagoan music lovers a treat when they stopped by DePaul University’s Holtschneider Performance Center this December.
The GRAMMY nominated musicians (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) are known for unexpected collaborations with indie rockers, engineers, and architects, but their engagement with the audience during “Rituals and Meditations” felt most unusual. These musicians do not present themselves with fanfare, nor does their performance represent a phlegmatic, gussied-up approach to contemporary classical music. The musicianship and compositional skill of Third Coast Percussion is obvious, and their compassionate showmanship is equally so. My companion and I, even on the balcony, felt as though we were watching the group in a grade school classroom, or at an NPR Tiny Desk show—a feeling that only the excellent acoustics of DePaul’s facility denied.
Third Coast Percussion treated us to Ayanna Woods’ Triple Point alongside three world premieres: Third Coasts’ very own In Practice, Mark Appelbaum’s Gauntlet, and as a stunning finale, Missy Mazzoli’s Millennium Canticles.
Gauntlet especially stood out. Many scholastic music programs ask students to consider or even improvise music making with the material objects that populate their world. Of course, the piano and timpani are instruments, but what about the safety scissors? Or that box of tissues, or those dry erase markers? Does red sound different than blue? The stage was already a mess of drum kits, timpanis, and xylophones. Gauntlet required the clutter to double, as stagehands during intermission flew in four tables covered in something like 200 individual objects and instruments, oriented horizontally downstage. The auditorium became filled with the music of duct tape, tin foil, baby rattles, slide whistles, triangles, and electric toothbrushes, said instruments only scratching the surface. The four players of Third Coast journeyed across the tables from stage left to right in a seemingly extemporaneous flurry of buzzing, whistling, and snapping that in reality was hilariously and meticulously rehearsed. Gauntlet amounted, in a sense, to a geographically linear and sonically roundabout journey through our material world, especially that of school children, testing the skill of the musicians and the assumptions the audience may carry with them about classical instrumentation.
As for the other pieces, Woods’ Triple Point sounded like an extension of the thoughtful and gloom-tinged tranquility of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, evoking the state of a substance when at an equilibrium between three states of matter. In Practice, an original composition by the group and written as a sort of autobiographical depiction of each group member’s “understandings of the practice of rituals,” also reminded me of Glass—and yet, perhaps because the percussion joins with the harmonic underpinning of a synthesizer, I also heard inklings of electronic musicians like Aphex Twin, Four Tet, and Kelly Lee Owens. Mazzoli’s Millennium Canticles concluded the concert with post-apocalyptic gusto. Over the course of five brief acts, the musicians, roleplaying as survivors of a rapture a thousand years in the future, grunt and shout to the beat of their drumming as they loop back and forth, companions who are together, scatter off in fright, and eventually reunite in the closing act.
Third Coast Percussion puts on a strange and wonderful show, and you can follow their website to track their myriad performances across the United States and the whole world.
Photos are courtesy of the Third Coast Percussion
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