Percussionists have become a staple in recent NOVA Chamber Music Series seasons and the forthcoming American Gamelan season closer will illuminate the fact that while percussion orchestras might not be commonly found in Western music it is the quintessential practice in many world music cultures.
Two works will drive home the point. One is Lou Harrison’s Violin Concerto with Percussion Orchestra (1959), featuring Madeline Adkins, Utah Symphony’s concertmaster, and members of the Symphony’s percussion section. The other will be the Utah premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s Don’t Look Down for Prepared Piano and Percussion Quartet (2020).
“I wasn’t aware of the Harrison piece until Kimi [Kawashima, NOVA’s music director] asked me if I would be interested in playing it,” Adkins said in an interview with The Utah Review. “I was struck by how unusual it was for a classical violinist that I signed up for it immediately.”
When Harrison, who died in 2003, was interviewed by Heidi Von Gunden for her 1995 book about the composer’s music, he explained how he came to love art in the East: “I was surrounded by a household of very fine Asian art and as I grew up, I wanted to reproduce that. My problem has been, could I recover the lost treasures of childhood? Well, I discovered that if I couldn’t make enough money to buy them at least I could make some.”
Harrison’s musical mentors are giants of the modern era: Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, Carl Ruggles, Charles Ives and John Cage. In his late teens, he was impressed by the use of percussion in Edgard Varèse’s Ionization as well as Cowell’s score for a theatrical piece Fanati, which included partially improvised percussion pieces using non-traditional instruments.
By 1940, when Harrison was working with Cage and Cowell in San Francisco, he had already sketched out the first two movements of the 20-minute concerto but did not complete the work until shortly before its 1959 premiere at Carnegie Hall with Anahid Ajemian as the soloist. In The Koncerto por la Violono kun Perkuta Orkestra (the title was originally in Esperanto), Harrison incorporates a good deal of his San Francisco experiences as a foundation for writing this piece, including Mills College, where he handled music duties for dance students.
There are five players in the percussion ensemble who handle 20 instruments sorted into categories of producing a dry sound and sustained (or rolled) sound. The melodic impetus for the concerto came to Harrison, when he was still in his early twenties, thanks to one of the first recordings of Alban Berg’s violin concerto. Harrison’s experimentation with serialism led him to the practice of ‘interval control’ and this violin concerto features the minor second, major third, and major sixth intervals. Joining Adkins will be percussionists Keith Carrick, Eric Hopkins, Michael Pape, Shane Jones and Micah Harrow as well as conductor Michael Sammons.
Adkins said that she has been impressed by Harrison’s solid integrity to the structure of the interval relationships that form the concerto, which Harrison allows to flex by incorporating inversions inversions and octave transpositions. She added that everything felt organically right in the first rehearsal with the percussion. Many years ago, Harrison said, “The model is, of course, world-wide. This is the standard usage in India, in Islam, in Sindhi folk (if not in the cultivated) music, in Africa – and where not else? The use of a modern European instrument as a soloist, the mixture of ‘junk’ instruments with standard ones in the percussion section, and the employment of romantic concerto form constitute the only novelties, from the world point of view.”
Thanks to a commission by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for pianist Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion, Cerrone had already begun working on Don’t Look Down in the weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic ground stop took hold around the world. While the provenance of its title might have seemed acutely appropriate for the zeitgeist of the moment, Cerrone said in an interview with The Utah Review that it was really accidental because he and the members of Sandbox Percussion had conceived the project long before the events of 2020. Of course, no one knew how long the disruption would last, whether it might be a few weeks or months. The Utah premiere will feature pianist Kimi Kawashima and percussionists Keith Carrick, Eric Hopkins, Shane Jones and Michael Sammons.
“It struck a different chord for me so I decided to tap into the autobiographical mood and time in writing the piece,” he explained. For example, in the third and final movement of the 18-minute composition, Caton Flats refers to a construction site in his Brooklyn neighborhood. As Cerrone explains in a note about the piece, “When I was working on this movement in my studio, my partner, Carrie, walked into the room and remarked that the music ‘sounds like the construction going on outside’! I loved the idea so much that I had to include it in the piece. I also loved the idea that the things that most drive us crazy—like noisy construction on our street—could become a thing of nostalgia when it’s gone.”
Originally, the piece was slated to premiere at a summer festival in upstate New York but Cerrone said he was happy to hear that Sandbox Percussion decided to proceed with a livestream premiere in 2020. “It keep my spirit alive and gave me a glimmer of hope.”th work finally received its in-person premiere in 2022 at the Gilmore Piano Festival in Kalamazoo. The live performances of Don’t Look Down have been emotionally satisfying, described as ecstatic and euphoric, according to Cerrone. To wit: the esteemed Anthony Tommasini, the now-retired New York Times music critic who is a fan of Sandbox Percussion, wrote approvingly of the work. Labeling its premiere as the highlight, Tommasini explained, “The piano is prepared similarly to John Cage’s innovative techniques, but with fewer screws and pieces of metal inserted between the piano strings, and more materials like putty — which dampens and distorts sounds — and fishing wire, which allows the strings to be bowed to create eerie, whining tones.” The piece also is on a recently released album under the Pentatone label featuring Cerrone’s works as performed by Sandbox Percussion.
Two works by French composers on the NOVA concert feature harpist Louise Vickerman: Fauré’s Sicilienne for Flute and Harp, with flutist Mercedes Smith, and Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, with Smith and violist Brant Bayless.
For tickets and more information, see the NOVA Chamber Music Series website.