Third Coast Percussion - Time Pieces: The New Classical

Program

Danny Clay: “Teeth” from Playbook (2016)

Third Coast Percussion: “Niagara” from Paddle to the Sea (2016)

Clarice Assad/arr. Third Coast Percussion: “The Hero” from Archetypes (2019/2020)

Steve Reich: Music for Pieces of Wood (1973)

Jlin: “Obscure” from Perspective (2020)

Philip Glass/arr. Third Coast Percussion: Metamorphosis No. 1 (1988/1999/2020)

INTERMISSION

Jlin: Please Be Still (2024)

Jessie Montgomery: Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song (2024)

David Mastikosa: Ancient Whisperer (2025)

Tigran Hamasyan: Sonata for Percussion (2024)
      Memories from Childhood
      Hymn
      23 for TCP

20 Years of Impact and Resonance

Since 2005, Third Coast Percussion has forged a unique path in the musical landscape with virtuosic, energetic performances that celebrate the extraordinary depth and breadth of musical possibilities in the world of percussion. This performance marks the passing of time, both in the diverse approaches to rhythm revealed in each work, and in celebrating the 20-year history of championing this music. The program features works that highlight some important moments of this journey, points to different facets of the organization’s work, and shares exciting new pieces commissioned to celebrate this landmark occasion.

Playbook was created by composer and educator Danny Clay as part of Third Coast Percussion’s Currents Creative Partnership, an education and mentorship program that provides an opportunity to compose for TCP through a highly collaborative process, for music creators who are early in their careers or are exploring a new artistic direction. Playbook was inspired by musical games that Clay uses with students of different ages, and like all works in the Currents Creative Partnership, was composed through multiple workshops with TCP during the compositional process. Three years later, Danny Clay worked with TCP again to develop a massive education and community performance piece entitled The Bell Ringers. (“Teeth” duration: 6 minutes)

“Niagara” from Paddle to the Sea was one of the pieces Third Coast Percussion performed as part of its NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2018, a bucket-list performance for any musician. It is a small excerpt of a larger project, Paddle to the Sea, which was one of Third Coast Percussion’s first collaboratively composed works, written together by the four members of the quartet. While pieces written by ensemble members have always been a special part of the TCPs repertoire, co-composing as a group only began about 10 years into the ensemble’s history. Third Coast’s multi-media program Paddle to the Sea, based on the children’s film and book of the same name, was the quartet’s first touring project to feature a collaboratively composed work, and was a staple of the ensemble’s repertoire for years. The film tells the story of a small wooden figure in a canoe, that makes a long journey from the Great Lakes out to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. Paddle also encounters danger in his journey, as in this passage, when he goes over Niagara Falls. (duration: 3 minutes)

The album of TCP’s Archetypes project with Clarice and Sérgio Assad earned the quartet its first GRAMMY nomination as composers (Best Contemporary Classical Composition), and one of its seven nominations as performers to date (Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance). The twelve movements of this suite are each inspired by a universal character concept that appears in stories and myths across cultures, such as the jester, the ruler, the creator, or the caregiver. Each of the performers chose certain archetypes that sparked their imaginations, with Clarice and Sérgio each composing four of the movements, and each member of Third Coast Percussion composing one. With Clarice’s blessing, TCP arranged her composition “The Hero” from this project for percussion quartet alone, as an additional opportunity to share this bold music with audiences. It has now become a common repertoire piece for percussion ensembles at universities and conservatories. (duration: 4 minutes)

When Third Coast Percussion won the GRAMMY Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for their album of Steve Reich’s music for percussion, it marked the first time that a percussion ensemble had won the award in this category. It was TCP’s first time being nominated or attending the awards, and the quartet had the honor of performing at the Premiere Ceremony with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Reich’s intensely minimalist piece Music for Pieces of Wood, which was a part of that album, is a work that the members of TCP first learned as students and which has remained a part of TCP’s performance and education programs for over a decade. 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. TCP released a mobile app for iPhone and iPad alongside the album, which allows users to explore the compositional ideas used in this piece and across Reich’s works. (duration: 10 minutes)

Jlin’s seven-moment work for TCP, Perspective, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. This music also featured prominently in the “Metamorphosis” touring program with Movement Art Is, which TCP brought to Carnegie Hall, as well as other TCP projects, and was recorded on another GRAMMY-nominated album, Perspectives, alongside Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis No. 1 and works by Danny Elfman and Flutronix. The collaborative process for creating Perspective marked an important development in TCP’s work commissioning music from creators of many different genres; after exploring and sampling instruments from TCP’s vast collection of percussion sounds at their studio in Chicago, Jlin created an electronic audio 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 notating this music and determining how to realize these pieces in live performance. Jlin named her piece Perspective as a reference to this unique collaborative process: “When I give an ensemble a piece, I don’t want to hear them play it back exactly as I wrote it. I want to hear it from another perspective.” (“Obscure” duration: 5 minutes)

Metamorphosis No. 1 is one of many works by iconic composer Philip Glass that TCP has arranged over the years. This particular piece was part of an important TCP project, “Metamorphosis,” which was a collaboration with Movement Art Is (choreographers Lil Buck and Jon Boogz) and which TCP performed at its Carnegie Hall debut in 2023. TCP’s performance of Metamorphosis No. 1 was also featured as part of “Philip Glass: Three Cities,” a video performance series celebrating Glass’s 85th birthday in 2022. As part of the ensemble’s ongoing relationship with the influential composer, Third Coast Percussion also commissioned Glass’s first work for percussion ensemble, Perpetulum, in 2018. (duration: 10 minutes)

To celebrate Third Coast Percussion’s 20th Anniversary, the quartet commissioned a series of new works from favorite partners from past projects and new musical collaborators, including four works on this program:

TCP approached Jlin to compose another work for the occasion, this time adding another layer to the musical chain, by asking her to create a new work that would be a remix or reworking of music by another composer that inspires her. Please Be Still reimagines materials from “Kyrie Elieson” from J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. A lover of Bach’s music since childhood, Jlin focused in on Bach’s rhythmic vocabulary. The creative process with TCP was an extension of the collaboration that yielded Perspective. (duration: 6 minutes)

Third Coast Percussion built an artistic kinship with composer Jessie Montgomery during her time as Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, arranging some of her existing music and serving as a sort of “percussion laboratory” as she composed her first percussion ensemble piece, Study No. 1. Her new work, commissioned for TCP’s 20th Anniversary, Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song expands the techniques she developed in Study No. 1, particularly methods of pitch-bending metal and drum sounds. This new work is inspired by the artwork of Ori G. Carino and his painting “Black Justice” (2020-2022), which is a rendering of a Romanesque statue of the symbolic sword- and scale-bearing figure of Lady Justice, depicted as a Black woman. The image is airbrushed upon several layers of silk, stretched in staggered alignment across a life-sized canvas to create a holographic effect that reveals the figure’s timelessness and multiple hues. The image is staggering, aspirational, and technically virtuosic. (duration: 12 minutes)

Bosnian composer David Mastikosa turned to the world of birds for his new work, Ancient Whisperer. For the great tit (Parus major), song is a call, a warning, a means of connection, and a tool for survival; for Mastikosa, it became a source of inspiration. Through attentive listening and analysis of this bird’s vocalisations, he identified three essential musical parameters, which then served as the foundation for this composition: The calls have a clearly defined tempo with rhythmic syncopation, a recognizable melodic motion descending and ascending within the interval of a perfect fifth (the space between C and G on a piano), and a particularly distinctive natural multiphonic, with every note sounding as two simultaneous notes a minor second apart (two notes immediately next each other on a piano, like F and F#). It is particularly intriguing that in northwestern Bosnia, where the composer lives, the interval of a minor second appears in older forms of traditional singing and, according to ethnomusicologists, is perceived as a consonant interval, whereas thought of as a dissonance to most listeners. (duration: 7 minutes)

Pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan has long been a musician that the members of Third Coast Percussion have admired and appreciated. While he has built a career as a performer of his own music — known to his fans as a sort of prog rock version of the modern jazz musician — his work seems a natural choice for composing for a contemporary percussion ensemble. Within an extremely complex rhythmic landscape exists compelling counterpoint, and expressive melodic lines that transcend the mathematics of their complex metric skeletons. His Sonata for Percussion is very classical in some ways, with three distinct movements that echo the classical sonata (fast-slow-fast), lilting dance feels, arpeggiated harmonies, and ornamented melodies. Hamasyan’s distinct voice is present throughout, with the moments of hard-grooving energy or ghostly lyricism winding their way through an asymmetrical rhythmic jigsaw puzzle. The outer movements both explore different subdivisions of 23-beat rhythmic cycles, while the middle movement is in a (relatively) tame seven. (duration: 22 minutes)

Please Be Still by Jlin and Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion are both included on Third Coast Percussion’s album Standard Stoppages, released on Cedille Records in 2025, which was nominated for GRAMMY® Awards for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance” and “Best Engineered Album, Classical.”

Please Be Still was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th Anniversary, with support by Carnegie Hall, the Zell Family Foundation, and the Robert and Isabelle Bass Foundation.

Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th Anniversary, with support from the Zell Family Foundation, Carnegie Hall, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, Stanford Live, Stanford University, The Robert and Isabelle Bass Foundation, and Third Coast Percussion’s New Works Fund.

Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th Anniversary, with support from Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting and the Zell Family Foundation.

About the Program