RBC Percussion
RBC Stage Management
Tuesday 7 February 2023
Centrala
PROGRAMME
RBC Percussion
RBC Stage Management
Produced by Sam Wilson and Toby Kearney
James Tenney
Having Never Written a Note for Percussion
Anna Meredith
Shill
Tiago Sousa
Psycho Stadium
Jagoda Szmytka
sky-me, type-me
Olivia Kieffer
He Said She Said Drawing Game
INTERVAL
Wayne Siegel
East L.A. Phase
Holly Gowland Modulo
Moondog
Marimba Mondo 2 clipping.
CLPPNG
Intro
Taking Off
Dream Inside Out
Story 2
Performers
Sehyogue Aulakh
Jordan Ashman
Kai-Shin Chang
Kai Cooper
Daisy Davis
Aidan Hammond
Eva Laverty
Meng-Hua Lin
PROGRAMME NOTES
James Tenney
Having Never Written a Note for Percussion
In Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, the only instructions are that the performer must roll a single note from quadruple pianissimo through to quadruple fortissimo and that it should be “very long”. The point of this seemingly simple act is to train the ears on the sounding process itself - on the instrument’s overtones and the room’s sympathetic resonances.
James TenneyAnna Meredith arr. Sam Wilson Shill (world première version)
Shill used to be called Thrush before it was called Shill. But like the bird, I could never understand how a tune named after a bird could be so incredibly hardcore. The opening electronic phrase is in 11/16. As more parts get added, and we move through the form, you lose one semiquaver off the front of the passage. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 etc… to the point where the phrase is only the last little nub of itself and it’s about to implode. Then it all happens again.
Sam WilsonTiago Sousa
Psycho Stadium (world première)
resemblances of human speech, the unstable flow of a connection, and the simplification of sentiment when emoticons are more convenient than words. Written in 2011 it’s all the more relevant in the covid era.
Jagoda Szmytka
Olivia Kieffer
He Said She Said Drawing Game (UK première)
This minimalist piece leaves it up the performer to create their own home-made backing track using found sounds and any instruments they have lying around.
Olivia Kieffer
Wayne Siegel
East L.A. Phase
East L.A. Phase was composed in 1975 and can be performed on two pianos, four marimbas or four guitars. The work is based on two ostinato figures, one of which was borrowed from the British rock pianist Keith Emerson. East L.A. is a slum area of Los Angeles inhabited mainly by MexicanAmericans. The piece combines rock music, Mexican folk music and minimal music. The title refers to Steve Reich’s 1968 work Piano Phase
Wayne Siegel
Poppy Ormrod
Paynor Tsate
Diego Villarreal
Alex Walton
Andrew Woolcock
Chuling Ye
Yufei Zhu
Psycho Stadium is a short piece mainly influenced by two musical moments I experienced recently. One was the soundtrack used to complement a very normal and casual conversation in a scene from the Japanese web manga series Mob Psycho 100, and the other one was the music from a cheering squad supporting FC Porto during a football match I was also attending. After knowing that, the title for the piece might become a bit too obvious but it managed to grow on me. In terms of the composition process for the piece, I simply used the two contrasting inspirations to start and guide my work in a very intuitive way, all the way through.
Tiago Sousa
Jagoda Szmytka
sky-me, type-me
sky-me, type-me is inspired by modern forms of communication and the replacement of faceto-face relationships by email, massaging and Skype. Four megaphone-wielding vocalists bring to life the rhythms of typing, the glitch-ridden
Holly Gowland
Modulo (world première)
Modulo is based on different interpretations of the word “module”. For example, in the construction industry, a module is a stackable and transportable building. Whether as, in coding, the modulo rule will group a specific number and the odd group will be the number produced (if it is trying to find groups of four in the word 11, the number three will be shown on the screen). Altogether, the one subject matter that interlinks different types of modules is a square. Therefore, as well as the tape part including exclusively modular synthesizer audio, the structure of this part is based upon a square. It is split into four sections (each two minutes each) and are variations of each other.
Holly Gowland
Moondog arr. Alex Henshaw
Marimba Mondo 2 (world première)
Marimba Mondo 2 (Seascape of the Whales) is recreated from Moondog’s 1991 album Elpmas This set of triple canons is largely a protest against our treatment of aboriginal people, against our treatment of nature, plants and animals, also against the idea that “we discovered the New World”, when it is as old or older than ours.
Alex
Henshawclipping.
CLPPNG (world première)
Jonathan Snipes/William Hutson/Daveed
Diggs arr. Sam Wilson
Videos by Alex Henshaw
CLPPNG is the second album released by experimental hip hop trio clipping. The title (the band’s name in all caps with the “i”s deleted) reflects the album’s intentional lack of first-person perspective in its lyrics - a stylistic choice that seems to challenge the first-person focus of much hip-hop music. In an interview with the New York Times, rapper Daveed Diggs also described this lack of autobiographical narrative, as allowing him to “...bring in things from my life that I have seen and have been privy to that I don’t have to take ownership of participating in,” with Hutson adding that “He’s not gonna rap as himself on something scary - you’d never believe Daveed is a stone-cold killer.”
This reimagination of five tracks has been created by Sam Wilson and Alex Henshaw especially for this gig.