REICH: Music for Pieces of Wood

Music for Pieces of Wood (1973)

STEVE REICH (B. 1936)

American composer Steve Reich is widely viewed as one of the most influential composers of the last hundred years. His music is known for steady pulse, repetition, and a fascination with canons, and embraces harmonies and rhythmic concepts from non-Western and American vernacular music (especially jazz). Music for Pieces of Wood is a study in economy of means, both in terms of physical and musical materials. Reich specifies an exact pitch for each of the pieces of wood that are the only instruments in this work, and each of the three sections of the piece comprises a single rhythm, with each player building up his own version of the pattern before blending into the texture. To celebrate Reich’s 80th birthday, in 2016, Third Coast Percussion released a Grammy-winning album of his works on Cedille Records.

HARRISON: Violin Concerto

Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra (1961)

LOU HARRISON (1917-2003)

Lou Harrison holds a special place in the heart of percussionists. Along with his friend and collaborator John Cage, Harrison was one of the first generation of classical composers to begin writing percussion ensemble music, with works dating back to the 1930s. While Cage developed his own vocabulary for percussion music that eschewed any attempts at melody or harmony in favor of timbral variety and rhythmic tension, Harrison’s style creates surprisingly lyrical lines even from “non-pitched” percussion instruments. Flower pots, brake drums, and cowbells truly sing in Harrison’s work, allowing him to create and develop recognizable motives, and blend percussion seamlessly with other instruments.

Harrison was also fascinated with the aesthetics of non-Western musical traditions, and was particularly passionate about Javanese gamelan. The pipes, bell plates, and Thai gongs in the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra create moments of gamelan-like fanfare amongst the fluid asymmetrical dances that mark the concerto’s outer movements. The more plaintive middle movement is a violin soliloquy accompanied with sparse percussive punctuations.

TCP celebrated Lou Harrison’s Centenary in 2017 with performances and an HD video recording of the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra with violinist Todd Reynolds, available online.

MARTIN: BEND

BEND (2016)

PETER MARTIN (B. 1980)

Renowned as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator, Third Coast Percussion’s Peter Martin has composed music for many of the group’s educational and concert projects in recent years. His quartet BEND draws inspiration from the player piano compositions of Bruce Goff, a wonderfully unconventional architect and amateur composer. Many of Goff’s piano rolls were highly stylized geometric designs perforated into the scrolls, resulting in music that created very clear sonic “shapes.” Whereas these shapes would create the pitch and rhythm in a player piano performance, BEND translates these shapes into volume, tone, and gesture. The composer’s experience with the piano rolls — through a blurry, decades-old video — inspired an unconventional sound palette created with alternative techniques on two marimbas.

DILLON: Ordering-instincts

Ordering-instincts (2014)

ROBERT DILLON (B. 1980)

Third Coast Percussion member Robert Dillon has enjoyed a career as an orchestral, solo and chamber musician, as well as an educator for all ages. Since college he has also pursued music composition. Ordering-instincts draws a big sound from a very compact setup of instruments. The four percussionists share eight wooden planks, an octave of loose crotales, and two tom-toms, from which they create a variety of different sonic colors in tightly interwoven rhythms. All musical content arises from the composite of all the players together; no one player’s part forms a complete voice by itself.

PEACOCKE: Death Wish

Death Wish (2017)

GEMMA PEACOCKE (B. 1984)

Gemma Peacocke is a composer from New Zealand who currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Her music works in both acoustic and electronic sound worlds, and she is interested in how music can amplify the voices of under-heard groups of people. Peacocke says, “I wrote Death Wish after watching a short film featuring New Zealand survivors of sexual assault. One of the survivors, Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan, spoke about the out-of-control spiraling of her life for many years and how she developed what she called a ‘death wish.’ In the piece, I thought about the spooling and unspooling of energy and how we are all bound and driven by forces both within and beyond ourselves.”

SKIDMORE: Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities

Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities (2016)

DAVID SKIDMORE (B. 1982)

The compositions of Third Coast Percussion member David Skidmore are performed regularly in concert halls and universities across the country. In 2011, his multi-movement work Common Patterns in Uncommon Time was commissioned to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Taliesin, home of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture; in 2007, his Unknown Kind was premiered at Carnegie Hall. He has also received commissions from the Rush Hour Concert Series in Chicago and several leading percussion soloists and pedagogues. Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities is a cycle of works exploring a common idea: that the same piece of music can move at several different speeds at the same time. An electronic audio track expands and reinforces the live percussion in many of these works, and video artist Xuan was commissioned to create accompanying video. Many of the individual pieces take their cryptic names from memorable Third Coast Percussion touring experiences or inside jokes.

Yvonne Lam, Violin

Violinist Yvonne Lam enjoys challenging, delighting, and disarming audiences worldwide with her thoughtful musicianship, technical prowess, and fearless performance aesthetic. 

As a co-artistic director of Eighth Blackbird, Yvonne performs around 50 concerts a year internationally, and has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Lexington Philharmonic, the New World Symphony, and the Tasmanian Symphony. She has recorded three albums with Eighth Blackbird, including the Grammy-winning album Filament. In 2017, she co-founded the Blackbird Creative Lab, an intensive tuition-free training program for performers and composers in Ojai, California, as a way to inspire future generations of artists to share in Eighth Blackbird’s vision of championing new work and engaging audiences with innovative and dynamic performance. In addition to teaching and mentoring at the Blackbird Creative Lab, Yvonne has given lessons, masterclasses and lectures at universities throughout the US in addition to long-term residency activities at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Chicago, and the University of Richmond. 

Prior to joining Eighth Blackbird, Yvonne served three seasons as Assistant Concertmaster of the Washington National Opera Orchestra and as Associate Concertmaster of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. She has also appeared as soloist with such renowned orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia. Winner of the silver medal at the 2005 Michael Hill World Violin Competition, Yvonne has also garnered top prizes at the Liana Issakadze International Competition and the Holland-America Music Society Competition. She won the grand prize at the Pasadena Instrumental Competition and first prize at the Bronislaw Kaper Awards, the Arts and Talent Recognition Search festival (sponsored by the National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts), and the Donna Reed Foundation Competition. Furthermore, she won prizes for the Best Performance of a Commissioned Work at the Irving M. Klein International String Competition and at the Michael Hill World Violin Competition. 

Yvonne is deeply committed to and inspired by artistic collaboration. An avid chamber musician, she toured the east coast with Musicians From Marlboro, collaborated with her orchestra colleagues regularly, and toured with musica aperta in Puerto Rico. She has performed at Marlboro Music Festival, Music From Angel Fire, Ravinia Music Festival, Twickenham Fest, Taos Music Festival, and Yellow Barn Music Festival, and had the privilege of playing chamber music with such distinguished musicians as Jonathan Biss, Jeremy Denk, Gil Kalish, Paul Katz, Ida Kavafian, Ani Kavafian, Ida Levin, Anthony Marwood, and Roger Tapping.  Yvonne also enjoys an ongoing collaboration with the jazz bassist and composer Matt Ulery, performing with his trio in Chicago and New York, and appearing on two of his albums. Her most recent collaboration with the experimental performance group Every House Has A Door convened emerging visual artists, musicians, writers and directors in performance projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Art Institute.  

A native of Los Angeles, Yvonne began her early studies in violin purely by mistake, thinking it was a guitar. Refusing to admit her mistake, she persisted, studying violin and piano at the Colburn School of Performing Arts. Her violin teachers in Los Angeles included Alexander Treger, Laura Schmieder, Alice Schoenfeld, and Linda Rose; her piano teachers were Dr. Louise Lepley and Yohsuke Suga.  She continued her studies for two years at the Peabody Institute, where she studied violin with Victor Danchenko and piano with Boris Slutsky and Brian Ganz. She earned her Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music, and her Master of Music from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Robert Mann. She still has not learned to play the guitar, even though there are at least two in her basement. 

Yvonne has lived in every major city on the east coast except Boston. She now lives with her husband and two sons near Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois, and spends every Chicago winter missing the weather in Los Angeles


Photo credit: Stephanie Bassos

Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble

Third Coast Percussion is a Grammy-winning, artist-run quartet of classically-trained percussionists hailing from the great city of Chicago. For over ten years, the ensemble has forged a unique path in the musical landscape with virtuosic, energetic performances that celebrate the extraordinary depth and breadth of musical possibilities in the world of percussion. The ensemble has been praised for “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) performances, the “rare power” (Washington Post) of their recordings, and “an inspirational sense of fun and curiosity” (Minnesota Star-Tribune). The four members of Third Coast are also accomplished teachers, and since 2013, have served as ensemble-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. 

A direct connection with the audience is at the core of all of Third Coast Percussion’s work, whether the musicians are speaking from the stage about a new piece of music, inviting the audience to play along in a concert or educational performance, or inviting their fans around the world to create new music using one of their free mobile apps. 

Third Coast Percussion maintains a busy touring schedule, with past performances in 33 of the 50 states plus Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, and venues ranging from concert halls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and De Doelen to clubs and alternative performance spaces such as New York’s Le Poisson Rouge and the National Gallery’s West Garden Court. 

The quartet’s curiosity and eclectic taste have led to a series of unlikely collaborations that have produced exciting new art. The ensemble has worked with engineers at the University of Notre Dame, architects at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, dancers at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and musicians from traditions ranging from the mbira music of Zimbabwe’s Shona people, to indie rockers, to some of the world’s leading concert musicians. 

A commission for a new work from composer Augusta Read Thomas in 2012 led to the realization that commissioning new musical works can be – and should be – as collaborative as any other artistic partnership. Through extensive workshopping and close contact with composers, Third Coast Percussion has commissioned and premiered new works from Philip Glass, Devonté Hynes, Donnacha Dennehy, Glenn Kotche, Lei Liang, Gavin Bryars, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, and today’s leading up-and-coming composers through their Emerging Composers Partnership Program. These works have become part of the ensemble’s core repertoire and seen hundreds of performances across North America and throughout Europe. 

Third Coast Percussion’s recordings include five full-length albums, three EPs, and a number of appearances on other releases. The quartet has put its stamp on iconic percussion works by John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philippe Manoury, and Third Coast has also created first recordings of commissioned works by Augusta Read Thomas, David T. Little, and Ted Hearne, in addition to recordings of the ensemble’s own compositions. In 2017 the ensemble won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance for their recording of Steve Reich’s works for percussion. 

Third Coast Percussion has always maintained strong ties to the vibrant artistic community in their hometown of Chicago. They have collaborated with Chicago institutions such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the Chicago Philharmonic, and the Adler Planetarium, performed at the grand opening of Maggie Daley Children’s Park, conducted residencies at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, created multi-year collaborative projects with Chicago-based composers Augusta Read Thomas, Glenn Kotche, and chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and taught tens of thousands of students through partnerships with The People’s Music School, Urban Gateways, the Chicago Park District, Rush Hour Concerts, and others. 

The four members of Third Coast Percussion met while studying percussion music at Northwestern University. Members of Third Coast also hold degrees from the Eastman School of Music, Rutgers University, the New England Conservatory, and the Yale School of Music. Stay up-to-date and go behind-the-scenes by following Third Coast on Twitter (@ThirdCoastPerc), Facebook (@Third Coast Percussion), and Instagram (@ThirdCoastPercussion). 

*Third Coast Percussion is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. 

Third Coast Percussion performs exclusively with Pearl/Adams Musical Instruments, Zildjian Cymbals, Remo Drumheads, and Vic Firth sticks and mallets. 

John Corkill, Percussion

John Corkill is currently serving as the Instructor of Percussion Studies at the Merit School of Music and Loyola University Chicago.  John’s musical curiosity is guided by his passion between the primal relationship of sound and gesture.  As a founding member of the Wanmu Percussion Trio, John has mesmerized audiences across the country with a wide variety of theatrical percussion repertoire ranging from stages of Carnegie Hall in New York City to the Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon.  The trio has also held a yearlong residency for young composers at the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, as well as provided master classes to high school students throughout New England. 

As a chamber musician, John has held residencies at the Chamber Music Northwest, Norfolk, and Yellow Barn Festivals.  He has also garnered awards at the Yale Chamber Music Competition and the Percussive Arts Society International Percussion Ensemble Competition.  Originally trained as an orchestral musician, John is currently a member of the NOVUS Orchestra in New York City and frequently substitutes with orchestras throughout the Chicago area.  He has also had the privilege of working with many of today’s leading orchestral conductors and composers such Marin Alsop, Peter Oundjian, Reinbert de Leeuw, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, Oliver Knussen, and Krzysztof Penderecki. 

John received his Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University where he graduated cum laude and Master of Music Degree from the Yale University School of Music.  His teachers include Robert van Sice, Michael Burritt, and James Ross. 

Degrees 

Bachelor of Music, Northwestern University 

Master of Music, Yale University School of Music