The Loops and Variations concert series at Chicago's Millennium Park unites electronica with contemporary classical music, resulting in a unique hybrid concert designed to appeal to fans of both genres. Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion will perform Thursday evening, on the same program with grit pop band Ghost Beach.
Third Coast Percussion's June 12 program features new music of Chicago composers, including Augusta Read Thomas' Resounding Earth, Owen Clayton Condon's Fractalia and Marc Mellits' Gravity.
TCP will also play a work written by one of its own members, David Skidmore. The work's prosaic title, Percussion Quartet, gives no hint of the inspiration behind it: the music of Meshuggah, a heavy metal band from Sweden.
I recently spoke with Skidmore about the piece. "It may seem like a strange inspiration for concert music," Skidmore acknowledged, " ...but the thing that really caught my ear about this particular band, they have an unbelievably complicated and intricate rhythmic language in the music they write."
He described passages in the music of Meshuggah that intrigued him: "...patterns of seven notes will layer on top of patterns of 13 notes, and that will layer on top of patterns of six notes, and the way these [patterns] sort of interact with each other is really incredible.
"You put the record on, and start trying to tap your foot to it, or feel where the groove is, and it's really slippery... that sort of idea finds its way into a lot of percussion music, and the way that this particular band was doing it, I was just totally blown away."
In Percussion Quartet, Skidmore decided to create his own version of the complex rhythms of Meshuggah. His work is scored for two marimbas, two drums and other assorted percussion instruments.
"The exciting part for me as a composer was just messing around with the rhythmic language and the intricate rhythmic games that make up the piece," he said.
I also asked Skidmore about Resounding Earth, a work that Augusta Read Thomas wrote for the percussion quartet.
Skidmore described the work's astonishing variety of "Tibetan bells, gongs from Thailand, bells called Khadki from northern India, and Burmese spinning bells, which are these flat plates of metal that are triangular, and they're traditionally played by striking the bell on one edge as it spins, so it creates this natural sort of vibrato effect.
"We also have three octaves of chromatically tuned prayer bowls," he continued. "One whole movement of Augusta's piece is for those instruments, and it's gorgeous. We strike them with mallets, but we also create friction along the outside of the bowl and it makes the bowl sing. It's an incredible effect.
"It's literally a gigantic stage full of ringing metal; probably 500 pounds of metal that we play throughout the four movements of the piece."
It will be interesting to see how TCP's esoteric instruments pair with the electronica duo, Ghost Beach.
Chris Chalupsky, lead curator of Loops & Variations, said "David and Rob from Third Coast Percussion really understand this series, and are pretty open to being paired with a band like Ghost Beach, who is not an artist that they would normally share a stage with, but they have that understanding of how [such a pairing] can work."
You can hear for yourself at this free concert on Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m., when Ghost Beach will open for Third Coast Percussion at Millennium Park.
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