Dan Danch, Matthew Hayes, Kevin Rabold, Bob Young

Once Removed is based on a simple premise: two marimbists play the same or related music at a fairly fast tempo, but they almost never play together. Individually, each performer must execute fairly simple patterns with great rhythmic precision and to help, each listens to a click track (not heard by the audience) over separate left and right stereo channels. Though both click tracks proceed at the same tempo, one track stays at a fixed distance behind the other, which means that one performer is always slightly “behind” the other. When their patterns are combined, the resulting mosaic is both very fast and quite complex. Musicians are trained to communicate and to play together, yet in some ways this work demands that the performers not listen to each other. Though the technology of multiple click tracks creates new possibilities of texture and ensemble precision, the trade-off in Once Removed is that each player remains somewhat isolated from the instruments he or she plays, and more importantly, musically separated from the other performer, like two people trying to reach one another from opposite sides of a thin glass pane. Notes by John Fitz Rogers

In late 16th-century Europe, a dragoon was a mounted soldier who fought as a light cavalryman on attack and as a dismounted infantryman on defense. The term derived from his weapon, a species of carbine or short musket called the dragoon. Glassock’s Dragoon is scored for a percussion octet using four marimbas, various blocks of wood, tambourines, snare drums, bongos, congas, maracas, log drums, tom toms, and shekere. Throughout, Glassock juxtaposes traditional tribal and contemporary musical practices including numerous tribal-like rhythms, various ethnic percussion instruments, complex tempo modulations, and the marimbas to create dense and dissonant polyphonic textures within driving rhythmic grooves. Notes by Glenn Schaft

1.     Prelude (Aria I)

2.     Recitative I

3.     Chorus I

4.     Aria II

5.     Recitative II

6.     Chorus II

7.     Aria III

8.     Recitative III

9.     Chorus III

10. Choral Prelude (Aria IV)

Threads, written for So Percussion in 2005, is a half-hour-long “cantata” for percussion quartet in ten short movements. There are three “threads” that are interwoven in the piece: Arias and Preludes that focus on the metallic pitched sounds of vibraphones, glockenspiel, and metallic pipes; Choruses in which drumming predominates; and Recitatives made largely from Cage-like “noise” instruments, bottles, flowerpots, crotales, etc. The aims of the different threads are to highlight the wide range of qualities that percussion instruments are capable of, from lyrical and tender to forceful and aggressive, and weave them into one continuous texture. The movements are performed without interruption. Notes by Paul Lansky

I.               Meccanico

II.             Contemplativo

III.           Molto energico

The outer movements have some similarities in manner and appear as if they would present a perfection of wildness in an archaic ritual cult. The second movement has its own special lyric and contemplative mood and serves as an isle of quietness between two volcanoes, in both atmosphere and instrumentation. This music expresses the principle: three bodies – one soul. Notes by Zivkovic