from L. to R. Eric Beach, Jason Treuting, Josh Quillen, Doug Perkins, Todd Meehan, Adam Sliwinski
The Wednesday evening concert of the 2010 Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana featured the So Percussion group. I had not heard So Percussion play a concert in about three years and though their contribution this evening was limited to one work, that work, Pleiades, is a four movement tour de force and arguably a seminal work in percussion repertoire if not in all of contemporary music.
About twenty years ago, Canadian composer and elegant raconteur Harry Somers 1925-99), addressed a Toronto concert audience with a fervent plea for new music. “I hope Canada enters the 20th century before the 21st begins” he said. But Toronto audiences continued pursuing their more traditional carrots, Handel at Christmas time, Bach at Easter and in between, Mozart, Beethoven and a Tchaikovsky ballet or two. Somers died on the cusp of the millennium, his plea unheeded.
Considering Somers’ entreaty, my first contact with the music of Iannis Xenakis (1922-2000) was, ironically, in Toronto. James Levine, then 25 years of age, chose to open his conductorial debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1968, with Xenakis’ work Metastasis, definitely not music of the carrot family.
Levine’s preparation was meticulous and although I could not have foreseen it, his work that week presaged his commitment to new music, particularly after taking over the Boston Symphony where he championed the New York school of composers – Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen etc.
Pleiades was written during 1978–79 for the Strasbourg Percussion Ensemble. It was premiered May 3,1979 with the Ballet du Rhin. My first encounter with Pleiades was in the early 1980s in Walter Hall of the University of Toronto. Xenakis was the featured composer on flutist Bob Aitkin’s New Music Concerts.
I believe our performance in Toronto was the Canadian premiere. The work is 43 minutes in duration and besides drums, marimbas and glockenspiels, Pleiades requires six instruments which Xennakis claimed to have invented, but never built. He called these “imaginary” instruments Sixxen.
If memory serves, Xenakis’ description of Sixxen was vague. Each Sixxen was to consist of 19 slightly out of tune metal bars pitched within a tessitura similar to each, but avoiding unisons. The father of a percussion student at the University of Toronto faculty of music worked in a foundry about 45 miles north of Toronto. He made these instruments free of charge and delivered them to Walter Hall.
They arrived covered with oil, grime and metal filings. By the time they were unloaded and ready to be played, our hands were filthy. We rehearsed and I remember very little about the piece except that it was brutally loud, very difficult to play and its pages black with notes. The late John Wyre would have said, “It doesn’t pass the light meter test”. Wags have suggested that Xenakis’ loud music was the result of his progressive deafness and that seemed confirmed by him asking repeatedly for us to play louder.
Xenakis arrived to coach the last couple rehearsals. As soon as he heard our version of his imaginary Sixxen, he objected, stating that the sound was not at all what he had in mind.1
I remember being struck by the fact that he was ungracious. He didn’t thank us or recognize in any manner our attempt to realize his sometimes fanciful instructions, but still his program note claimed the Sixxen were his invention and the heart of Pleiades. Many years later I learned that Xenakis had objected to the original Sixxen built by the Strasbourg Percussion Ensemble and indeed, to every Sixxen built during his lifetime. And this brings me back to the So Percussion,Meehan/Perkins Duo performance.
With thirty year old memories of foundry oil, grime and metal filings and the deafening clang of Sixxen still in mind, I was more than curious about attending this performance. As I entered the convention concert hall, I felt the same vague sense of unease and anticipation as I had felt before attending my 50th high school graduation reunion.
I need not have worried. So Percussion, Meehan/Perkins Duo were simply astounding. All the difficulties I remembered from the past vanished. The clarity of their performance made the contrapuntal and polyrhythmic complexities of Pleiades vividly clear. Even more impressive was their orchestration. All the drums were audible, their tunings exquisitely prepared. But it was the Sixxen that most impressed me. Next to that sound, the traditional mallet percussion sound was almost a cliché.
“I built the Sixxen for So’s first performance of the full Pleiades back in 2004″, wrote Adam Sliwinski. “Although Xenakis said not to tune unisons among the players, I made each bar quite close – but never the same – so that you can really hear unison textures”.
When I inquired about the computer, which I had not seen from the audience, Adam replied, “We use a click track to perform Pleiades. One of its most important compositional tactics is to oscillate between transparent unison and calculated chaos. The polyrhythms of this chaos are really interesting, so we enjoy playing them exactly right. Of course, it is always important to use good chamber music sense, especially when you have a pulse in your ear.”
So Percussion, Meehan/Perlins Duo’s fluidly precise performance belied the use of click tracks and Pleiades in their hands was the best performance of any single work I’ve heard at a Percussive Arts Society International Convention.2
Sixxen
Pleiades music
Pleiades, drums & computer
Foot notes:
1. “SIXXEN is a specially constructed instrument named from Six (Strasbourg) and Xenakis. But the SIXXEN is not yet fully satisfactory. It would be desirable to construct a new one. This is its description: each one of the six percussionists use 19 metal pieces (made of brass, steel, etc) of approximately the same timbre. It is highly desirable that the timbre be a really interesting metallic one. By interesting I mean astounding, strange, full, resounding, and without too much reverberation, so that the minute rhythmical patterns be clear for the audience. These 19 metal pieces should be tuned to produce 19 pitches but which should absolutely not form an equally tempered scale. The whole range of the 19 pitches is arbitrary and should depend on the available pieces. However, this range should be nearly the same for all the six percussionists and placed within the same extremes of pitch. This means that for a given pitch out of the 19, and for any of the six SIXXEN, the other 5 corresponding ones must not form unisons. The deviation could be slight but should still be noticeable.” – Iannis Xenakis
2. Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins were founding members of So Percussion and also perform as the Meehan/Perkins Duo.
Robin Engelman 
Milwaukee, Chicago and Franks Drum Shop
In 1965 I was playing percussion in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra with Bob Ayers and John Wyre. The orchestra was new and I was on its first Player’s Committee. The president of the orchestra’s board of directors and its manager were doing everything they could to discourage our committee from writing a master contract: a document binding the players, the local musician’s union and orchestra management in a legal relationship that would enhance the musician’s working conditions and cost management more money.
At that time, the Chicago Symphony was playing ten concerts a year in Milwaukee’s old Pabst Theater, and occasionally, I’d meet their cymbal player, Sam Denov, in the boiler room just before his concert, for a lesson. Sam had authored a book on cymbal playing, but he was also something of a legal expert and had helped write his orchestra’s Master Contract, the first such document to be ratified in the United States.
After our lessons together, Sam and I would sometimes talk shop, and on one occasion, I told him about our struggles with management. He offered to give me a copy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Master Contract. This was a big deal. A volatile atmosphere had for years, permeated the lives of symphony players. Unhappy with being ignored by the American Federation of Musician’s (A. F. of M.), representatives from orchestras met and formed their own organization. At first, the A. F. of M. actively worked to subvert this quasi union. When they finally realized the vast sums of money they could get by collecting work dues from well paid symphony musicians, they quickly absorbed the player’s fledgling organization.
Sam had experienced all of this, and more. Though I was an orchestral player during this period, my only involvement in the player’s movement was a subscription to their news letter. Now ‘the troubles’ had come to Milwaukee.
Troubles, is not an overstatement. The Milwaukee Symphony was an orchestra in transition. Young professionals had been hired to beef up the local talent and a couple of highly paid ringers from Chicago were brought in to keep watch on everyone and everything, including the young, very inexperienced, and malleable conductor. The orchestra’s board of director’s and manager were controlled by their president. In retrospect, I’m sure he thought he had the perfect balance of temperaments to control events for years to come: a local union president, susceptible to flattery and experienced mainly in dealing with an elderly membership of friends who played week-end polka gigs; a personally appointed chain smoking personnel manager, whose vocabulary was limited mostly to grunts; a young svelte conductor, with a pair of pure white Samoyed dogs to charm Milwaukee Gold Coast residents out of their money; local musicians whose main concern was the extra money earned playing in the orchestra; the two hand picked old pros mentioned earlier; and his own ruthlessness.
Most of the young pros were ambitious and wanted change. Hence, the formation of our player’s committee. The need for change was not shared by everyone. There were a few pros who feared they’d be rocked overboard. They saw Milwaukee in their future, and wanted the committee to wait, even when we learned the local union President was reporting our ‘secret’ discussions to management. (He innocently believed he was doing everyone a favor by smoothing the path ahead of us.) We also discovered spies on our committee, and they too, were regularly reporting our discussions to management. With the help of Chicago’s master contract, pro bono advice from a Milwaukee labor lawyer and an A. F. of M. representative who flew in from New York City, we wrote, negotiated and ratified our orchestra’s first master contract. Then, almost all of the youngest and brightest resigned from the orchestra and went forth into the world to better jobs.
Many years later, Nexus played with the Milwaukee Symphony. The moment I walked on stage, a veteran from those days stepped forward, shook my hand, and said simply, “You were right”. Where was he when he was needed?
One good break from Milwaukee was a trip to Franks Drum Shop with my Daughter, Dorothy Anne. Its late, great owner, Maurie Lishon, sold me a fine sounding Ludwig snare drum that someone had jerry rigged into a Super Sensitive look alike. During that visit Maurie excitedly showed me Ludwig’s latest marvel, the Keylon xylophone. He told me it was indestructible, and to prove his point, thrust a brass headed glockenspiel mallet into my hand and said, “Go ahead. Hit it as hard as you can. Nothing can hurt it”. I aimed for one of the bars and creamed it dead center. A chip the size of the beater flew off leaving a cream colored hole where a brown plastic coating had been. There was silence for a while and then Maurie, bless him, gave a bemused shrug and said, “Hmm”. His wife Jan took the Polaroid photo below.1 A cherished treasure from an otherwise irksome era.
1. See: http://www.pas.org/News/memoriam/Lishon_IM.cfm
Posted by robinengelman on August 23, 2009 in Articles, Commentaries & Critiques, Contemporary Music