Outdoor Interactive Concert with Third Coast Percussion
August 27, 2022 · 6-7pm, Gallery open 7-8pm
Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods
Enjoy a free outdoor performance by Third Coast Percussion featuring Perspective, a seven-movement work by Gary, Indiana-based electronic music producer Jlin. Her unique and evolving electronic sound is rooted in Chicago’s iconic footwork style, with additional influences ranging from Nina Simone to Igor Stravinsky. Jlin’s work assembles evocative and vivid sounds into a musical style that she describes as “clean, precise, and unpredictable.” After the performance, take a tour of our current art exhibition, Abundance, by Dwight White II.
Free, no registration required. Brushwood Center encourages attendees to bring chairs, blankets, and picnic supplies. Chairs will be available if you do not wish to bring your own. The gallery will be open for one hour after the performance for those that wish to view the current exhibition and tour Brushwood Center.
Free, no registration required. Brushwood Center encourages attendees to bring chairs, blankets, and picnic supplies. Chairs will be available if you do not wish to bring your own. The gallery will be open for one hour after the performance for those that wish to view the current exhibition and tour Brushwood Center.
Program Order
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Bulldog (2021) Andrea Venet (b. 1983)
Double Drum Dutch (2022) Ayanna Woods (b. 1992)
Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) Steve Reich (b. 1936)
2+1 (2013) Ivan Treviño (b. 1983)
“Derivative” from Perspective (2020) Jlin (b. 1987)
Matters/Mind (2021) Alexis C. Lamb (b. 1993)
Double Drum Dutch (2022) Ayanna Woods (b. 1992)
Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) Steve Reich (b. 1936)
2+1 (2013) Ivan Treviño (b. 1983)
“Derivative” from Perspective (2020) Jlin (b. 1987)
Matters/Mind (2021) Alexis C. Lamb (b. 1993)
Program Notes
Ayanna Woods is a Grammy-nominated performer, composer and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. A collaborator across genres and forms, her work spans new music, theater, film scoring, arranging, songwriting, and improvisation. She earned her B.A. in music from Yale University.
Woods has been commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, Chanticleer, The Crossing, the Percussive Arts Society, Manual Cinema, Lorelei ensemble, the Chicago Children’s Choir, Boston Children’s Choir, and Chicago Chamber Choir. In 2018, she originated her role as a vocalist in Place, a new oratorio about gentrification and displacement co-conceived by Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearne, director Patricia McGregor and poet/librettist Saul Williams. Her music appears in a range of film and theater projects. Two of her songs are featured in the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. In 2017, she and her sister Jamila Woods co-composed the score for No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, a live film created by writers Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Emmy-winning performance collective Manual Cinema. She continues to tour the U.S. and Canada with Manual Cinema as a bassist and music director. As a gigging musician, she is a sought-after bassist and improvisor. She toured the west coast and performed at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2019 as bassist for TASHA. She’s currently recording a debut album with her own band, Yadda Yadda. Woods is a recipient of a 2017 3Arts Make A Wave grant, and a 2020 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant, and was a participant in Third Coast Percussion’s 2017 Currents Creative Partnership. TCP approached her again recently for a new work, which she titled Double Drum Dutch. “I was inspired by the way drumline tom melodies scramble from place to place, the way kids play together on a playground. Like the best hand-clapping games, there’s a feeling of being chaotic and very coordinated at the same time. The patterns grow and grow until they get too unwieldy; they burst and have to become something else!” – Ayanna Woods Duration: 5 minutes Steve Reich has been named “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times).”the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “America’s greatest living composer” (Village Voice). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces Come Out, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from academic over complexity and towards welcoming back pulsation and tonal attraction in completely new ways. He continues to influence younger composers, musicians, choreographers and even visual artists.
Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and Third Coast Percussion’s album of his percussion works have all earned GRAMMY Awards. He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award in Madrid, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France , and awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School in New York, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, among others. One of most frequently choreographed composers, several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylián, Jerome Robbins, Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor, Benjamin Millepied, and Christopher Wheeldon. Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—opened new directions for music theater and have been performed on four continents. His recent work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians. Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood is a study in economy of means, both in terms of physical and musical materials. Reich specifies an exact pitch for each of the pieces of wood that are the only instruments in this work, and the three sections of the piece are each comprised of a single rhythm, with each player building up his own version of the pattern before blending into the texture. Many of the rhythms that emerge along the way suggest alternative meters or rhythmic inflections that may change the listener’s perception of the whole. Duration: 8 minutes Ivan Trevino is a Mexican-American composer, percussionist, writer and arts advocate. He has shared his music with audiences around the world, from Asia to South America to Madison Square Garden in New York City.
As a composer and songwriter, Ivan’s music has been performed on five continents in over 25 countries. He is a multi-award winning recipient of the Percussive Arts Society’s International Composition Contest and has over 70 compositions and songs to his name. Most recently, he was the featured composer on American Public Media’s Performance Today. An active educator, Ivan currently serves as Lecturer in Percussion at University of Texas at Austin. He is also co-director of the Eastman Percussion Festival, a biennial summer festival hosted by Eastman School of Music. He is an artist and clinician for Innovative Percussion, Black Swamp Percussion, Zildjian Cymbals, Evans Drumheads, Pearl / Adams, Meinl, and Beetle Percussion. Ivan is also well-known for his work as a drummer with Break of Reality, an international touring cello rock quartet. Break of Reality has released five studio albums and has been featured on PBS, Huffington Post, Yahoo Music and is on regular rotation on National Public Radio. Ivan’s work spans various media including storytelling, poetry, and film scoring. His collection of online writings are regularly circulated throughout the arts community, including “My Pretend Music School”, a blog post that has sparked debate about music school curriculum and has become required reading for collegiate courses around the U.S. Ivan currently lives in Austin, TX with his wife, Amanda, and their children, Henry and Oscar. 2 + 1 is for two players sharing one marimba, with one playing on the opposite side of the instrument. The piece is dedicated to Ivan’s wife Amanda, and was written when they rescued a puppy named Sadie, the first “addition” to their family; hence the name 2+1. Duration: 6 minutes Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) is a producer based in Gary, Indiana. Her unique and evolving electronic sound is rooted in Chicago’s iconic footwork style, with additional influences ranging from Nina Simone to Igor Stravinsky. Jlin’s work assembles evocative and vivid sounds into a musical style that she describes as “clean, precise, and unpredictable.” Her debut album Dark Energy was released to critical acclaim in 2015, and her second album Black Origami in 2017 to rave reviews from NPR Music and Pitchfork. She has written music for Kronos Quartet and choreographer Wayne McGregor, and has recently performed at the Big Ears Festival, Whitney Museum of Art, and Toledo Museum of Art, among others.
Her seven-movement work Perspective was written for Third Coast Percussion through a highly collaborative process. After exploring and sampling instruments from TCP’s vast collection of percussion sounds at their studio in Chicago, she created an electronic version of each of the work’s seven movements using these samples and other sounds from her own library. The members of Third Coast Percussion then set about determining how to realize these pieces in live performance. Diving into each of the audio tracks, the percussionists found dozens of sonic layers, patterns that never seem to repeat when one would expect them to, and outrageous sounds that are hard to imagine recreating acoustically. Even typical percussion sounds like snare drum, hi-hat, or kick drum exist in multiple variations, subtle timbral shades in counterpoint or composite sounds. In pursuit of the broad expressive range of Jlin’s original tracks, TCP’s live version of this piece incorporates mixing bowls filled with water, bird calls, and a variety of gongs and tambourines, as well as many variations of drum set-like sounds: instruments that are like a hi-hat but not a hi-hat, or serve the function of a snare drum but are not a snare drum. Jlin named her piece Perspective as a reference to this unique collaborative process, that this work would exist in two forms, the same music as interpreted through different artists and their modes of expression. In addition to concert performances, Third Coast Percussion will feature the full 7-movement Perspective in its Carnegie Hall debut in January 2023, as part of a collaboration with Movement Art Is. That project features choreography by MAI founders Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, and new music by Tyondai Braxton in addition to Jlin’s work and TCP’s arrangements of music by Philip Glass. Perspective by Jlin was commissioned for Third Coast Percussion by the Boulanger Initiative, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Lester & Hope Abelson Fund for the Performing Arts at the Chicago Community Foundation, the DEW Foundation, and Third Coast Percussion’s New Works Fund. Duration: 5 minutes Alexis C. Lamb (b. 1993) is a composer, percussionist, and educator whose work seeks to cultivate a connectedness to natural, historical, and societal relationships. Her recent commissions and collaborations include Third Coast Percussion, Albany (NY) Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, Opera Omaha, Contemporaneous, and Vera Quartet. She is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Michigan and has previously earned degrees from the Yale School of Music and Northern Illinois University. Lamb’s compositions can be found on Innova Recordings, National Sawdust Tracks, and Evan Chapman’s self-published record, Caustics. Her works are self-published and available at https://alexislamb.com/ .
“Do you ever feel like your mind overthinks and gets in the way of what truly matters? …Yes, I do too.” – Alexis C. Lamb Duration: 5 minutes |
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About Third Coast Percussion
Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) is a GRAMMY® Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet and GRAMMY®-nominated composer collective. For over fifteen years, the ensemble has created exciting and unexpected performances that constantly redefine the classical music experience. The ensemble has been praised for “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) performances, the “rare power” (Washington Post) of their recordings, and “an inspirational sense of fun and curiosity” (Minnesota Star-Tribune). A commission for a new work from composer Augusta Read Thomas in 2012 led to the realization that commissioning new musical works can be—and should be—as collaborative as any other artistic partnership. Through extensive workshopping and close contact with composers, Third Coast Percussion has commissioned and premiered new works by Philip Glass, Missy Mazzoli, Clarice Assad, Gemma Peacocke, Flutronix, Jlin, Tyondai Braxton, Augusta Read Thomas, Devonté Hynes, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Glenn Kotche, Christopher Cerrone, and David T. Little, among others, in addition to many of today’s leading up-and-coming composers through their Currents Creative Partnership program. Third Coast Percussion currently serves as ensemble-in-residence at Denison University.
