Welcome!
I am a percussionist, music-lover, chamber musician, teacher, curator, writer, and life-long learner.
I’ve moved most frequent updates to my two newsletters:
Older news below:
NEWS
Voyager: Lift Off!
Still on Cloud 9 (pun intended) after KUPG’s performance of Ben Justis’ Voyager at the Spencer Museum of Art last night.
A 2 hour-long piece for percussion octet and fixed media, Voyager depicts the titular satellites’ journey through and out of our solar system.
Sprawling, engrossing and captivating, Ben’s piece alternates between “Encounters,” depictions of the planets Voyager passes on its journey through the solar system, and Approaches. Ben writes about the Approaches:
“To illustrate the vast distances and travel times between the planetary encounters, these [Approach] movements employ slow-moving, ambient backdrops and the performers disperse within the venue. Over time, the degree of musical structure decreases as the precise pitches, rhythms, amount of improvisation, synchronization, and even specificity of the instructions themselves are less and less controlled. This mirrors the drop in transmission strength received from the Voyagers which are so far away (over 13 billion miles) that the signal wattage received here on Earth is less than 20 billionths the power of a watch battery.”
We’ve been working the entire semester on this piece, with Bethany Amundson taking the reins in the Encounters. We were so fortunate to be able to stage this work in the Spencer Museum of Art, the headquarters of KU’s inspiring and amazing Integrated Arts Research Initiative. Adina Duke, Joey Orr, and Celka Straughn were so supportive Ben’s work and our invasion of their space.
This experience was doubly enhanced by the presence of Knowledges, a tremendous new exhibit at the Spencer which argues that “creating art can also be a form of research that contributes to many fields of inquiry.” Amidst works by Assaf Evron, Danielle Roney, Fatimah Tuggar, and Andrew Yang, Voyager was recontextualized as a journey through Deep Time and Deep Space. (By the way, I fortunate enough to take part in the Spencer’s Colloquium and the A2RU conference, both of which made ample use of the gallery space. Check it out if you get a chance, it’s amazing).
Thanks to 2x1 Media, we hope to share some documentation of this project with you soon!
Unsnared Drum takes PASIC
It’s been so long since I penned an update. Too much doing, too little reflecting; too much preparing and not enough publicizing. While I am excited about recent projects (Robert Honstein’s Lost and Found, Matthew Barnson’s new album, Thomas Kotcheff’s new piece for NMC) and upcoming ideations, Unsnared Drum has taken center stage.
This weekend, I’m bringing our little snare drum project to the biggest percussion gathering in the world. PASIC is loud in every sense of the word, and I’m really excited to bring these four fantastically innovative works to our percussion community.
Julia Breitberg has designed a killer program (check out this COVER):
Designed by Julia Breitberg
I wrote a preview article for PAS Rhythm Scene, And I’ve written some program notes, which I’m sharing below. See you there, and stay tuned for more info about upcoming UD shows.
October 2019 Rhythm! Scene
About Unsnared Drum
Unsnared Drum is a project dedicated to pushing the limit of what is possible with the snare drum. Over the past two years, four of America’s most esteemed and dynamic composers—Nina C. Young, Hannah Lash, Tonia Ko, and Amy Beth Kirsten—have collaborated with me on new works for solo snare drum. We chose the title because our mission was to reframe how people think about, perform, and practice the snare drum; to free the drum from its historical and idiomatic chains while challenging the the instrument’s capacity for subtle and refined expression.
The center of my artistic practice is incubating and catalyzing new work, working over extended time frames with composers and artists I admire and whose friendship I value. To a large extent, Unsnared Drum is as much about process and community building (the natural extension of musical collaboration) as it is new music. In addition to loving Amy, Tonia, Nina, and Hannah’s music, I’m fortunate to have worked frequently with them, and had a feeling that our friendship and previous working experience would engender a dynamic and creative collaboration. I sent each composer a drum and a selection of implements, and we spent years workshopping ideas.
Amy, Nina, Hannah, and Tonia certainly have wonderfully unique compositional voices. Their music is united, however, by their craft, curiosity towards sound, theater and space, and willingness to create new practices and techniques to serve dramatic purposes. Although none had written for solo snare drum, they all write boldly and creatively for percussion in other solo, chamber, and large ensemble contexts. While Unsnared Drum’s throughline is our collaborative efforts—workshop sessions, notational experiments, sonic adventures—each of the works explores a unique element of the snare drum’s personality.
Nina Young’s Heart.throb inverts our conception of what constitutes percussive skill in an ear-opening exploration of the snare drum’s unsung melodic and harmonic capacity. Fitting the drum with a transducer and a contact microphone, Nina broadcasts beating sinusoids through the instrument, creating an undulating bed of sound. By pressing into the head and exploring different locations on the rim, the performer filters these tones to create singing melodies and rich harmonies. Throughout the piece, the musical characteristics most associated with percussive virtuosity—fast, fleet stickings—are confined to the rim and re-contextualized as triggers for the work’s harmonic movement.
Virtuosic, rhythmically alive, and uncompromising, Hannah Lash’s music draws upon a rich harmonic palette and a clarity of form, blending melodic nuance with relentless rhythmicity. Start is based on a handful of sharp, polythmic motives which are continuously, obsessively, tenaciously, and explosively developed. Interested in how the timbre might elucidate a monomaniacal, motivically-oriented piece, Hannah uses many implements (brushes, hands, chopsticks, and metal beaters in addition to sticks) to help delineate formal guideposts amid a steady barrage attacks.
Amy Kirsten’s work is full of melodic invention, otherworldly sounds and hypnotic rhythms. A composer, director, singer, writer, and visual artist who highlights the theater present in music performance, she uses percussion with stunning creativity, often used as integral parts of large-scale staged works. For her Ghost in the Machine, Amy and I found a ghosty language of sounds—a hidden snare language—manipulating the tautness of the snare head, preparing the drum with a variety of accessories, and striking the instrument using different kinds of sticks and mallets. When Amy deploys these colors in an alluring, colorful groove.
Tonia Ko’s music has an incredible ability to create inventive and deeply expressive moments which link inspiration, form, content, and performance practice. She invents new techniques which emerge organically from the physical gestures and textures associated with playing instruments. In her Negative Magic, Tonia reimagines the snare drum, revealing a world of harmonic and timbral complexity on the drum by loosening control—literally. By tuning each tension rod of the drum to a slightly different (but very low) pitch, Tonia is able to create chords, or multiplicities of pitches within different areas of the drumhead. After gradually becomes attenuated to the complexity of the drum’s sound through a series of seamless, hyper-nuanced sonic adventures: a ritualistic introduction which explores the drum’s pitch range; a quirky conversation between the head and a combination of dryer sounds from the rim, lug casings, and shell; a series of sonic waterfalls, where pitch descents are coupled with transitions from dry to wet timbre; and a series of explosions where extraordinarily loose snare wires jangle amidst a burst of accents.
I started this project with the goal of reinventing the snare drum, and I couldn’t have asked for more interesting and inspiring results. Interesting is too weak a word, because these works stretch my musicianship, challenge my assumptions, and drive me to open my ears and develop my technique in ways I could have never imagined. Each work treats the drum as a valid medium of musical expression, worthy of our time and energy. These pieces are full of wit, sass, vitality, and gravity: they expand the melodic and harmonic profile of this instrument, and they do so with a grace and honesty that belies their rigor. I’m honored to present them.
-Michael Compitello
Summer Recording Vibes
Back for the last few days of Avaloch after a few recording projects.
First, we hit Rocking Horse Studio to track Susan Kander’s Eavesdropping, a setting of Michelle Boisseau poems for soprano, violin, and percussion. Victoria, Jacob and I premiered this piece in Kansas City at the beginning of the year, and it was nice to spend some time getting closer to the piece.
Almglocken and saw blade
Then it was down to Oktaven Audio with energy-bomb Thomas Kotcheff to lay down his “then and then and then this” for cello & percussion. Thomas’ piece is explosive, full of life, and incredibly virtuosic. For most the piece, I play a wooden salad bowl, subjecting it to the most chops-infused playing I can muster. We also devised a setup of wooden planks, tiny woodblocks, glass bottles, and junk metal objects. Oh, and a Squirrel Buster.
Inspecting the chaos
Thomas came to Avaloch last year to work on the piece with us, and it’s been really fun to see how it developed. This was a true collaboration, and both Hannah and I made many suggestions on our parts to ensure that they are idiomatic, soundful, and fun.
In both cases, we spent a few days at Avaloch in intense rehearsal. I can’t wait to share the results with the world soon.
Thomas shows off his marimba chops
St. Louis Snare Drum
Had a great time in St. Louis for Nina and Scott Andrews’ Missouri Chamber Music Festival. This concert was a Hannah Lash focus show, and it was a delight to hear so much of her amazing music and witness her phenomenal harp playing on the Debussy Trio and her version of the Schumann Fantasy (whoah…).
Be still my heart
I was honored they let me share Hannah Lash’s Start, her contribution to Unsnared Drum. It was my first time playing a snare drum solo for a chamber music festival audience, and I hope I didn’t scare anyone away. It was NOT my first time eating cookies at Comet Coffee and otherwise stuffing my face in St. Louis’s amazing food scene. I was honored to play Hannah’s Folk Songs with her at the harp.
Looking forward to more performances of Start alongside the other Unsnared Drum works. Next up—PASIC 2019.
Cleveland
Back at Avaloch after a great few days in Cleveland for Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project’s Re:Sound Festival. Congrats to Noa and Sophie for all their work organizing the events.
NMC presented George Lam’s The Emigrants and Christopher Stark’s The Language of Landscapes, two amazing pieces about important issues facing our society. We also premiered Andrew Lucia’s stunning new video for The Language of Landscapes. It was also great to share a bill with andPlay, our NYC-based nemesis duo (just kidding).
pc Emanuel Wallace
Friends!
Next up, the music of Hannah Lash in St. Louis, for which I’ll be busting out my trusty cheat sheets: