Third Coast Percussions’s Delightful Return

Third Coast Percussion players David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon, and Sean Connors (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) closed out its Here Now and Then Series with a recital solidly committed to the “now” side of the opposition. The Third Coast Percussion quartet of Chicago-based percussionists Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore returned to SFP, making their second appearance after their debut during the inaugural season of the PIVOT series in March of 2016. This group has done an impressive job of providing its own repertoire, presenting compositions by Martin, Dillon, and Skidmore and opening with a piece composed jointly by the entire group. However, the highlight of the evening was the West Coast premiere of “Perpetulum,” a piece written for them by Philip Glass for which SFP served to co-commission the work.

Those who have followed Glass over the many decades of his career know that his primary focus has always been the keyboard, albeit in a variety of manifestations. As a result, writing for percussion instruments entailed moving away from many of his instincts as a player. There are, of course, instruments based on the keyboard layout, such as the marimba and glockenspiel; but, from a performance point of view, they are definitely not well served by the physical habits one brings to the piano. Thus, to some extend, Glass had to learn about Third Coast’s music-making practices; and the result emerged as a highly effective symbiotic relationship between composer and performer.

This is not to say that Glass had to learn an entirely new language based on a new repertoire of physical processes. It was not hard to detect familiar Glass tropes when they emerged, but they emerged in a context that the attentive listener would not have encountered in previous Glass compositions. For that matter, the context also distinguished itself from the works of other percussion composers contemporary with Glass, such as Steve Reich. Even Glass’ fundamental approach to a process “based on repetition and change” found itself in a new framework in which instruments in the percussion family offer new affordances to the very nature of change. The result was the delightful observation that Glass, now in his eighties, is as inventive as ever, allowing new approaches to instrumentation to inspire new approaches to structure and rhetoric.

The most provocative of the works on the program was Mark Applebaum’s “Aphasia.” Back in the days when I was doing computer science research, I had a work colleague who had been a percussionist. One day I came to work and launched into telling him all about John Adams’ “Grand Pianola Music” and the elaborate demands it placed on the members of the percussion section. My friend replied, “Playing percussion is all about choreography.”

Applebaum’s “Aphasia” now stands as the reductio ad absurdum of that precept. All of the audio comes from a tape recording of an electronic composition involving processing of a solo voice. The four Third Coast players sat on chairs at the edge of the stage facing the audience. As different sounds emerged from Applebaum’s tape, they responded with synchronized movements. In other words, Applebaum had them performing choreography without the presence of any of their instruments. As could be guessed, all four of the players had just the right physical instincts to respond properly (and with rhetorical flourish) to the sounds on Applebaum’s tape; and the result was as technically awe-inspiring as it was comical.

Ironically, another work on the program, Devonté Hynes’ “Perfectly Voiceless,” was originally composed for a 75-minute dance piece. Last night’s performance presented an excerpt from the full score through which one could appreciate the overall choreographic context. However, like the efforts of other composers that have taken innovative approaches providing music for choreography (Igor Stravinsky quickly comes to mind), this was music that stood securely on its own in the absence of any dancers.

While much of the program involved working with the basic chromatic scale afforded by either wood (marimba) or metal (glockenspiel), the selection by Augusta Read Thomas, the “Prayer” movement from Resounding Earth was based entirely on a diversity of bell-like sounds. The skeptical listener might have worried that this would entail some kind of “granola rhetoric;” but Thomas knew how to seize and hold listener attention in a setting of stillness in which sound is little more than punctuation. It was clear from watching the four players that such “punctuation” required considerable precision; but that sense of precision made the listening experience thoroughly absorbing.

The darkest portion of the program came with Gemma Peacocke’s “Death Wish,” basically a musical reflection on sexual assault. This piece stood out in the context of the energetic optimism encountered in the compositions by the Third Coast players. Nevertheless, where Peacocke was concerned, they players knew how to handle her score with care, never belaboring her points but still making sure they would register in the mind of any seriously attentive listener.

Having performed music co-commissioned by SFP, Third Coast ended the evening with an encore by a local composer. They presented Danny Clay’s “Teeth.” The title refers to the tines of a plastic comb, and all four players had begun plucking those tines while the piece was being announced. All but one of them then ventured towards other instruments, providing a context for those “teeth” sounds. Like many Clay compositions, the piece had a quiet wit; and the Third Coast players definitely knew how to establish that wit.