Percussionist as “Humble Servant” of Five Composers

Percussionist Andy Meyerson (from the Web page for this performance)

Last night at Z Below, The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, began its 2019–20 San Francisco season with a solo recital by Meyerson, who now serves as the group’s Artistic Director. The title of the program was “Humble Servant,” which was also the title of the first selection on the program, a piece composed by Adrian Knight, which also served as the opening track on Meyerson’s solo album, “My Side of the Story.” The program as a whole lasted about an hour and consisted of five pieces composed for Meyerson by five different composers, of which Knight was the first.

While Knight’s composition was memorial in nature, commemorating the death of a close friend, the sense of the program as a whole suggested that Meyerson saw himself as a “humble servant” of the five composers whose works were performed. Each composition imposed its own set of demands on the skills of a percussionist, and Meyerson rose to the challenges of each of those demands with the consistent connotation that the performer was there simply to “give voice” to the creations of the composers. Those demands, in turn, often involved some experimentation on the part of the composer, exploring new ways to approach the semantics of the phrase “making music,” often by engaging extramusical factors.

Thus Knight’s “Humble Servant” could be approached as a study in meditative stillness. That sense of stillness was established though the soft dynamics of a vibraphone gently punctuating a “wash” of colored noise in the background. The tempo was such that the listener was aware of every stroke, including those for which Meyerson applied a harder mallet to press down on the metal bar, bending it enough to evoke a vibrato sound.

“Humble Servant” was followed by Sarah Hennies’ “Kisses.” This piece involved a driving compound rhythm played on a drum kit and inspired by the Prince song “Kiss.” However, the precision of this performance was coupled with the difficulty of tossing objects into a bucket at a great distance from the percussionist. In other words the score as a whole was basically “programmed for failure;” and, whenever an object actually did land in the bucket, there was a passing sense of satisfaction. (It was almost impossible to avoid thinking of how much Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry prepares for three-point shots, only to see much of that preparation evaporate in the heat of the basketball game itself.)

Samuel Adams has been composing for TLES since their first round of public concerts; and his “Percussion Music for Robert and Andy,” composed in 2015, can be found on Meyerson’s solo album. “Surface” is his latest composition for Meyerson, and it involves considerable rhythmic intricacy. As a result, this was a performance in which the movement patterns of the performer had as much to do with the listening experience as the auditory experience of the performance itself.

The same could be said of Amadeus Regucera’s “IMY/ILY” but with entirely different connotations. Instrumentation consists only of bass drum, but the performance has as much to do with the confrontational stance that the percussionist must take as it does with the instrument itself. Indeed, the composition is as much choreography as it is musical performance; and the choreography is uncompromisingly brutal, often requiring masochistic acts by the percussionist. As a result, the imagery that accompanies the sonorities of the bass drum have strong connotations of a self-flagellating penitent, leaving the members of the audience wondering whether or not the overall experience is one of voyeurism, rather than a percussion recital.

Thus, when the program concluded with Christopher Cerrone’s “A Natural History of Vacant Lots,” the score’s combination of more subdued percussion and electronic sonorities came as a welcome relief. On the other hand, while Cerrone’s drew the listener away from Regucera’s brutality, “A Natural History of Vacant Lots” still had to contend with how deeply “IMY/ILY” rooted itself in the memories of the listeners. The subtleties of Cerrone’s “landscape” approach to composition probably would have registered more effectively had the piece’s performance followed a less disquieting selection.

In other words, by choosing to play the five compositions on the program without interruption, Meyerson established his entire recital as a unified journey. In that context, every composition reverberated both as reflection on the past and as projection into the future. (Given the rich extent of Edmund Husserl’s studies on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, the philosopher would probably have nodded in approval at the conception of this program.) During the final selection, the relationship between present and past became more confrontational, perhaps to the point that attention to the present was put in jeopardy.