Author: nicholaspapador

In March 2017, the Noiseborder Ensemble hosted a two week long festival  of events at the University of Windsor including performances by pianist Douglas Finch and the Plumes Ensemble as well as performances by Noiseborder Ensemble and projects by members of the collective.

My main contribution to the festival was the Canadian premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s Memory Palace for percussion and electronics.  It’s a beautiful and tactile work that is around 25 minutes in duration.  One defining features of the piece is that the percussionist builds a majority of the instruments such as tuned slats of wood and tuned metal pipes.

It was great to play with Noiseborder Ensemble again and reprise some of the group’s most enduring/endearing works such as Superstars of Wrestling, (Follow That) Dream (Home), and film/musical works by University of Michigan faculty, Chris McNamara.

I just put the finishing touches on my newest composition, Revolution Summer, which is a percussion quartet performed “in the round” with the players surrounding the audience. It’s about 12 minutes in duration.  Read more below and feel free to peruse the score here:

revolution-summer-score

Program Notes:

Revolution Summer is inspired by Iannis Xenakis’s percussion sextet, Persephassa (1969), that utilizes spatialized placement of the performers to create surround sound projections of Xenakis’ statistical rhythmic and timbral concepts. I performed Persephassa in 2016 and while practicing the music I identified ideas I wanted to explore in Revolution Summer. Persephassa’s use of multiple rhythmic layers, spatial movement of sound, and tremolos on simultaneous instruments yields a number of “technical asymptotes” for the players: there are passages not physically possible to perfect, yet they inspire performers to strive to their best ability to realize Xenakis’ sonic concepts. Revolution Summer is designed to express tactile and sophisticated ideas in a surround concert setting, but also to employ smaller instrumentation and more accessible technical demands so that ensemble aesthetics, that inspired me in Xenakis’ music, can be achieved by a wider range of performers.

The title, Revolution Summer, references the grassroots musical and political movement of the same name that took place during the summer of 1985 in Washington, D.C. While the concept of revolution in this piece involves the circular movement of sound across the performance space, the music and ideas of the artists of the post-hardcore scene and their contemporaries served as formative influences for me and continue to inspire me to this day.

Many thanks to Dr. Miho Takegawa and the PLU Percussion Ensemble for their work on my quartet, Austerity Measures.  The ensemble will perform the piece on November 15, 2016.  I greatly enjoyed meeting the PLU studio during my winter 2016 lecture-recital tour.  I’m honoured that they’re working with my music.

In June 2016, I participated in the 2016 nief norf Summer Festival as a Performance Fellow in Knoxville, Tennessee.   The programming, faculty, staff, performers, and composers have continually impressed me over the last several years and I was happy to be a part of it this year.

Over the course of the Festival, I was involved in seven performances:

• A complete performance of Xenakis’ Pleiades at the IJAMS Nature Centre.

(L to R: NP, Eric Willie, Jon Clancy, Andy Bliss, Colin McCall, Eric Retterer) – These percussionists are amazing and it was an honour finally to play this piece in its entirety with such a great group.

• Pierre Boulez – Derive I

• Charles Wuorinen – Arabia Felix

Both the Wuorinen and Boulez  have some unique ensemble and technical challenges.  All of the performers sounded great and were a blast to play with.  I enjoyed getting to dig deeper into the language of these Modernist master composers.

• Premiere of Jeremy Wexler’s Agitato ed etereo

The festival had 10 Composition Fellows; each had a piece premiered on this concert.  I greatly valued the experience of reading the new piece and working with the composer on edits and new sounds before the performance.  Often when we do composer readings there is very little time to rehearse and both the composer and performer can find themselves disappointed.  Not so at nnSF… the concert was a great success and I look forward to hearing more music by these up and coming composers.

• We closed the nnSF Final Marathon Concert with Xenakis’ Persephassa.

L to R: Jordan Curcuruto, Kevin Zetina, McKayla Phillips, Abby Fisher, and Stephen Downing.  Again, the players were amazing performers and communicators.  We played this piece in-the-round, surrounding the audience, and with no conductor or click track!

Both Xenakis sextets have been on my bucket list of works to play for many years.  I’m still blown away that I had the opportunity to do BOTH in a two-week period of time.

• Lastly, I did play my own piece, A Very Welcome, at one of the noontime recitals and was pleased by the positive feedback and interest in the composition.

One other highlight for me: several of the nnSF performers were in attendance at some of my lecture recitals, when I toured promoting Points of Departure CD, in February.  It was very cool to re-connect with these players and perform along side them for two weeks of great repertoire.

This post does have to end, but I’ll say this: if you enjoy playing or composing contemporary classical repertoire, you should consider going to nnSF2017.  The faculty and staff are wonderful as are the participants, which are a mix of students, graduate students, and professionals.  The University of Tennessee’s music facility is top notch.  The atmosphere was very friendly and positive, which made the preparation of some of this repertoire so enjoyable.  Check it out here: http://www.niefnorf.org.

Many thanks to the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble (Jonathan Ovalle, director) for their excellent performance of Austerity Measures on March 30th.

I don’t often get to travel to performances of my music, so it was a treat to make the short drive to Ann Arbor to hear the concert.

The program was excellent; all of the works had some great theatrics, timbres, and complex interactions among the ensemble.  The students played wonderfully.

The beginning of the month of March saw two great performances of Austerity Measures.

On March 5, EP4 ensemble à percussion gave the Canadian premiere of Austerity Measures at the Espace Hypérion Québec in Québec City.

On March 9, the Portland Percussion Group include the piece on their tour program in Washington State including visits to Pacific Lutheran University and Seattle Pacific University.

To get the score and parts for Austerity Measures for loan or purchase, click here.

Spectral Composition and Percussion PAS Article

New Profile Page on Vic Firth Website

Vic Firth has launched their new website and it is fantastic.  The link above is my artist profile, which looks really nice.

http://vicfirth.com/marimba-literature-library/

I’m particularly impressed with their new Marimba Literature Library.  They are hosting top notch video performances of some of my favorite undergraduate solo literature.

I had an enjoyable time playing timpani and percussion last night on the Celtic Woman show at Caesar’s Windsor.