Repertoire

Donor Acknowledgement

This event is made possible by the David and Irmgard Dobrow Fund. Classical music was a passion of the Dobrows, who established a generous endowment at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music to make programs like this possible. We are proud to celebrate this program as part of the 2023 – 24 Dobrow Series.

Program Notes

Streamline by Gene Koshinski

Streamline is an ethnic instrument septet written for conga, djembe, woodblock, dundun (low African drum), a wooden box, bongos, piccolo woodblocks, caxixi (basket shakers), a pair of Chinese opera cymbals, bending gong, and African double cowbell. These instruments come from many different folk traditions across the globe; many of the instruments are African, but through migration, are now often associated with Cuba and Brazil. Some of the instruments, like the woodblocks, cymbals, and gongs, come from the Chinese folk opera tradition.

The piece is written in a ternary, or ABA form. Fanfare-like at the outset, the first section, in a very rapid tempo, makes use of both simple and complex compound meters like 5/8 and 7/8. The second section is softer in dynamics, slower in tempo, and is based on the traditional Afro-Cuban 9/8 rhythm. Both duple and triple metric patterns are layered simultaneously on top of each other during the B section, by various factions in the ensemble. The piece eventually speeds up and returns to the A rhythmic motive before ending chaotically in a very loud and fast coda.

Gene Koshinski has delighted audiences worldwide with decades of dynamic performances and creative compositions. Best known for his extraordinary versatility as a percussionist and composer, Koshinski serves as Professor of Percussion at the University of Delaware. He has performed in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and throughout the United States; including over 200 guest performances and lectures at the most prestigious institutions of the world. As a composer, his works have been used in television, film, art museums, and ballets. In the concert hall, his works have been performed in more than 40 countries, on five continents, with hundreds of performances each year. He has played on CBS, PBS, ESPN, TBS, and the TNT television networks, on Netflix, as well as NPR, and he has recorded on the Naxos, Innova, Centaur, MSR Classics, and Equilibrium record labels. He endorses Pearl/Adams, Sabian, Vic Firth, and Remo percussion manufacturers.

Madeira River from Àguas da Amazônia by Philip Glass

The Third Coast Percussion Ensemble provides the following program notes:

“The repetitive structures and meditative harmonies of Glass’s music have allowed it to exist in many versions for different musical instruments. Selections from his piano etudes and the solo piano piece, Metamorphosis were arranged in the late 1990’s for a project with Brazilian musical group, Uakti. This version, for Uakti’s unique gamut of custom-made instruments, was part of a project called Àguas da Amazônia, in which all but one movement was renamed for the Amazon River and its tributaries.

Long-time fans of Glass’s work, hoping to someday commission the iconic composer for his first percussion ensemble piece, the members of Third Coast Percussion arranged a handful of these pieces for a 2016 multi-media project. Drawing on both the Uakti arrangement and the original piano music, Third Coast Percussion reimagined these works using mallet percussion instruments and other unique instrumental colors, such as melodica, desk bells, and almglocken (tuned Swiss cowbells). In 2020, Third Coast Percussion completed their arrangements of all movements of the Àguas da Amazônia, premiering the full cycle at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2021.”

Philip Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and at the Aspen Music Festival with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with contemporary trends in modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with the virtuosic sitar performer and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a keyboard and woodwind septet for the purpose of touring with, and performing his compositions.

The new musical style that Glass helped evolve was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself instead as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of a slowly moving harmonic progression and aural tapestry. Minimalism has become, arguably, one of the most dominant and enduring genres in contemporary music.

Marimba Spiritual by Minoru Miki

Marimba Spiritual by Minoru Miki was written in 1983-84 and was dedicated to Japanese marimba virtuoso, Keiko Abe. The piece was written in reaction to the great starvation and famine centered in Ethiopia in the early 1980’s. According to the composer, the piece unfolds organically, with the first half of the piece imagined as a static Requiem, and the last part, as a lively Resurrection. The first section begins with the marimbist playing solo. The accompanying trio adds both unspecified ethereal metallic sounds, followed by unspecified wooden sounds to the Requiem section. After a cadenza, these sonic events build to the fast tempo of the second half of the piece with the three percussionists switching to drums. The rhythm patterns for the Resurrection part of the piece are taken, according to Miki, from the festival folk drumming of the Chichibu area northwest of Tokyo.

Although the piece was commissioned by the Japanese broadcast corporation NHK, it was premiering marimbist Keiko Abe who requested this particular quartet arrangement from Miki for marimba soloist and percussion trio. The first performance was on March 18, 1984, in Amsterdam performed by Abe and the percussion ensemble, Nieuwe Slagwek Groep Amsterdam. Considered a rite of passage and standard literature for marimba soloists, Marimba Spiritual is often played without accompaniment.

Japanese composer Minoru Miki was born in Fukushima, Japan. From an early age, he experienced only the traditional folk music of the small Northeastern Honshu region he grew up in; Miki had very little Western European musical training until attending high school. It is not entirely surprising then that his mature compositional style combined Japanese instruments, folk songs, and folktales into a Western contemporary classical compositional style. Traditional instruments like the shakuhachi, pipa and koto were often central to his work, usually accompanied by a traditional Western European ensemble like orchestra or chamber ensemble. He wrote in all classical genres including concerti, operas, orchestral and film music. Like Philip Glass, Miki founded an ensemble to highlight his works, the Nihon Ongaku Shudan, also known as Ensemble Nipponia. Later in life, his style changed to embrace a type of Pan-Asian compositional language that aided collaborations with composers and performers from Korea, China, and other parts of Asia.

Intermezzo from Die Nase by Dmitri Shostakovich

Die Nase was Soviet-Russian composer Shostakovich’s first opera, written during the height of avant-garde experimentalism in the years following Civil War in the emerging Soviet Union. Loosely based on a short story by Gogol, the Shostakovich written libretto is a patchwork of disparate scenes connected by instrumental intermezzi. The intermezzo between Scenes II and III is probably the first composition exclusively for percussion ensemble, although it is not considered the first percussion ensemble because of its inclusion in this larger theatrical work. It is scored entirely for non-pitched percussion which includes castanets, tam-tam, snare drum, tambourine, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, triangle, bass drum, tom-tom and police whistle. This version was edited and arranged by famed Canadian percussionist and Nexus member, William L. Cahn.

Although first premiered in Leningrad in 1929, the work has never garnered many performances. This is primarily because it is very hard to stage with the need for a singing disembodied nose, over seventy singing characters, and difficult orchestral writing. Die Nase saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1970’s in Russia but has never really found a following abroad.

Radioactive Octopus by Steven Simpson

Radioactive Octopus was inspired by the earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster that occurred in Fukushima, Japan on March 11, 2011. Each player represents two of the arms of the octopus. The piece uses the motion of the physical imitation used in performing fugal lines, with entrances scattered at a rhythmic value of an eighth or quarter note, to represent the visual movement of the octopus. Additionally, changing textures, harmonic shifts, and sudden dynamic contrasts work to aurally portray the ambiguous movements of the ocean environment.

Steven Simpson was born in 1967 in Waldorf, Maryland. He earned a DMA in Composition at the University of Michigan, an MM at Bowling Green University, and a BM from the D’Angelo School of Music in Erie, Pennsylvania. His principal composition teachers include Albert Glinsky, William Bolcolm, Bright Sheng, and William Albright. In 2012, Simpson collaborated with Matthew Coley, percussionist, and the contemporary ensemble, Sonic Inertia on a tour which included the premier performances of Radioactive Octopus for marimba quartet.

Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin

Since its first performance 100 years ago, much has been said and written about Rhapsody in Blue. It was originally panned by critics, but obviously loved by audiences. It has become ubiquitous in our culture. As performed this evening, this remarkable arrangement, by Stephen Primatic, transcribes every note of the Ferde Grofe orchestral version, into a remarkable percussion arrangement.

Please join us for a reception in the Green Room after the concert.