THE SCHOOL OF MUSIC, THEATRE, AND DANCE PRESENTS
C O LO R A D O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y
PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE NOVEMBER 6, 2022 GRIFFIN CONCERT HALL
CSU PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE CONCERT SUNDAY, NOV. 6, 6 PM GRIFFIN, ERIC HOLLENBECK, SHILO STROMAN, DIRECTORS
Chameleon Music (1996) - Dan Welcher Shell (2020)– Emma O’Halloran Perfectly Voiceless (2021) - Devonte Hynes Perspective (2022) - Jlin Derivative Duality Bulldog (2022) - Andrea Venet PERSONNEL: Cecilia Andersen Hannah Engholt Colin Ferry Zayne Clappe Quinn Harlow Isaiah Kim Thomas Landewee Paige Lincoln-Rohlfing Daniel Martinez Jarred Premo Maya Reno Noah Roppe Brant Shettron Taylor Smith Derek Summers Jalen Thompson Brian Tremper Brendon Williams-Ransdell
PROGRAM NOTES Chameleon Music (1996) Dan Welcher (b. 1948) Born in Rochester, New York, Dan Welcher is a bassoonist, pianist, and composer of works across all genres of music. Many of Welcher’s early works were written for a soloist with accompaniment from piano or orchestra. Around the time he became composer-in-residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra in 1990, he began composing larger works, such as his first opera, Della’s Gift, and his first symphony. Welcher’s career in music has been supported and funded by numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for his scholarship in the field of music composition in 1997. The composer has been praised for his ability to manipulate tone color and harmony without alienating listeners, expertly conveying emotion through virtuosic writing. Inspired by Truman Capote’s 1980 book Music for Chameleons, Welcher’s Chameleon Music follows a scene from the story in a colorful manner, particularly through his quotation of multiple Mozart piano sonatas. In Capote’s book, the protagonist encounters a woman playing piano in her home in the Martinique jungle. As she performs a series of Mozart sonatas, the music begins to attract lizards from across the jungle. The chameleons in particular take a liking to her playing. Each time she stops, she scares the chameleons away, although they inevitably return when she continues. Welcher outlines each part of this story, breaking his score into four sections: “The Jungle at Night,” “The Chameleon Circle,” “The Spell,” and “The Retreat.” Mozart sonatas are separated by a repeated four-note theme, signifying the chameleons and their energy, as the piece builds and relaxes. While the chameleon theme is played on dull, vaguely-pitched brake drums, the Mozart themes make a clear departure from the forest sounds with clear, structured tonality, culminating in “The Spell,” in which all four sonatas are quoted until the chameleons are scared away. Throughout the composition, listen for the repeated four-note theme amidst a jungle ambiance, and the intrigue, enchantment, and retreat of the chameleons from the Martinique home.
S H E L L (2020) Emma O’Halloran (b. 1985) Hailing from Dublin, Ireland, Emma O’Halloran’s works have been featured across Europe and the United States. Her compositions are highly praised and have received many awards. O’Halloran currently works as a freelance composer, and is a founder of the organization Creative Lab alongside fellow composer Amanda Feery, with support from the Irish National Concert Hall. Through this group, O’Halloran participates in a unique mentorship program, focusing primarily on minority composers and groups who have been underrepresented in
the modern repertoire. O’Halloran describes her style as “freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music” and her music bears this out, in works for folk and chamber ensembles to turntables and laptop orchestra, and even a few forays into theatrical arts. Written for what the composer describes as a “reverb-drenched marimba quartet,” O’Halloran’s 2020 work S H E L L was commissioned by the X4 Percussion Quartet. The inspiration for the composition came from the work of photographer Seph Lawless, who focuses his art on capturing images of shopping malls, once full of life and commerce, but now abandoned and empty. Through her piece, O’Halloran aims to capture the “shells” that these buildings have become, stripped of the color and joy that they once held inside their walls after new internet shopping methods made them obsolete. Aided by thick reverb effects to emulate the echo of such a large, empty space, the continuous use of ostinatos—short repeated themes—draw continued attention. As the reverb builds, it evokes the feeling of the repeated, deafening sounds of footsteps as one walks through these architectural corpses, or the inevitable awareness of breathing that comes with the immense loneliness in buildings that have been left purposeless for years as they wither away. — Notes by Brianna Dene Bulldog (2021) Andrea Venet (b. 1983) Have you ever paid attention to how your dog drinks water? Have you noticed that they drink in similar rhythms every time? Have you written those rhythms into a piece for four percussionists? That is exactly what Andrea Venet did when writing Bulldog, dedicated to her English Bulldog Shosti. Throughout the piece, different grooves and voicings present themselves, based upon a single pattern orchestrated throughout the ensemble. By utilizing a simple sticking pattern and separating the hands on different instruments, a variety of different grooves and sounds are created! This piece features mostly drum sounds, such as tom-toms, a snare drum, and bongos, and also features four wooden slats. Dr. Andrea Venet is an educator, soloist, and composer based in northern Florida. She is an Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of North Florida who consistently performs nationally with her percussion duo, Escape Ten.
Perfectly Voiceless (2019) Devonte Hynes (b. 1985) / arr. Third Coast Percussion Devonte Hynes is a musician, producer, and author who produced five studio albums under the name “Blood Orange.” He has also produced music for other big-name artists around
the United States. His piece Perfectly Voiceless is part of a larger work for live musicians and dance that was composed for Third Coast Percussion Quartet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. The piece was meant to be used as an interlude between choreographed dance pieces during a feature-length program. Hynes created the music with audio samples and synthesizer sounds and sent them to Third Coast Percussion to be arranged for live performance for his program. All of the works are found on Third Coast Percussion’s album Fields, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2021. Perfectly Voiceless is a pattern-based piece that relies on contrasting melodies to create a cohesive groove. Throughout the composition, melodic patterns are traded between players on vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, and crotales, to create multiple colors of the same sound, while relying on different accent patterns to synthesize the groove.
Perspective (2020) Jlin (b. 1987) Jlin (born Jerrilynn Patton) is a music producer from Gary, Indiana who has released two albums (Dark Energy and Black Origami) in which you can hear electronically sampled beats and melodies that follow the sound of Chicago’s famous footwork or juke style of music. This style relies on fast-paced beats meant for dance, with quick motions of the feet and twists of the body. Jlin’s music has been highly praised in reviews by NPR Music and her works have been performed at art museums and music festivals across the United States. “Derivative” and “Duality” are part of Jlin’s seven-movement work called Perspective, which was commissioned for Third Coast Percussion in 2020. She met with the ensemble in their studio, took sample recordings of a variety of their instruments, pieced together the samples in FL Studio (A Digital Audio Workstation), and programmed all of the sounds into one collective composition. She then sent the tracks to Third Coast Percussion to determine how the songs could be prepared for a live performance, and they wrote out parts for the music. Atypical instruments can be heard, such as mixing bowls filled with water to create a certain pitch, multiple gongs, bird calls, tambourines, spring coils, and many drum set-like sounds. Perspective was named after its unique composition process and is based on the idea that this music exists in multiple forms, an electronic version and a live performance arrangement. — Notes by Taylor Smith
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