The guest recitals at the biennial Oberlin Percussion Institute are eagerly anticipated highlights of the Oberlin Conservatory summer season. The concerts at this year’s institute, held the week of July 7, 2013, fulfilled those lofty expectations with rousing performances by wily veterans Percussion Group Cincinnati and talented up-and-comer Ryan Packard. This savvy pairing by institute director and Oberlin Professor of Percussion Michael Rosen proved that the wisdom of experience and the zest of youth have comparable value at the core of a musical presentation.
Michael Rosen, Oberlin Percussion Institute Director (photo credit: Larry Dunn)
Rosen leads a percussion program that has produced the likes of Matthew Duvall of eighth blackbird, Adam Sliwinski of Sō Percussion, Ross Karre of International Contemporary Ensemble, Bonnie Whiting-Smith of red fish blue fish, and contemporary/jazz/global-music virtuoso Adam Rudolph. When Rosen started the Oberlin Percussion Institute in 1987, it was the first of its kind. Fortunately, he had the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, which had been going strong since 1971, right in his backyard as a model. “We started with the idea that it would be a good recruiting tool, to expose students interested in percussion to the full gamut of percussion instruments and playing styles” Rosen told us. He has found that some students really click with that complex array of elements a percussionist must master, while others realize that percussion is not for them and move on to other fields.
For institute faculty, Rosen has mined his extensive network of fellow percussionists serving in leading American orchestras, such as Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, plus prominent contemporary players like Allen Otte, an Oberlin alumnus and longtime faculty member at College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. So attendees are working with the true masters of the field.
James Culley, Allen Otte, and Russell Burge of Percussion Group Cincinnati (photo credit: Larry Dunn)
Friday, July 12, Percussion Group Cincinnati gave the institute’s grand finale concert. Otte and colleagues James Culley and Russel Burge (also CCM faculty members) formed the group in 1979 and have performed at this institute every year since its inception. They played an eclectic mix of pieces, three of which were written for them. They opened with Lift Off by Russell Peck, each player armed with three bass drums of increasing size. Beginning with soft, rolling sounds, this piece quickly built to a sequence of bold, very loud strikes. They transitioned to a very fast section, alternating between constant loud striking and a circular hocket passed from player to player, striking varying sections of the drums, resulting in shifting sound colors.
The most unorthodox piece of the evening was I Read the News Today, Oh Boy, a work developed by PGC in collaboration with CCM students. The only instruments were locally available newspapers picked up the day of the concert. It opened with the players folding papers as though readying them for bicycle delivery; then they began a rhythmic smacking of the folded papers against their open hands. Next, they sat in a semicircle facing the audience and noisily opened and closed, ruffled, and crumpled the papers in seemingly random sequences. They started reading bits of articles to each other, finally shifting to each reading one word at a time rotating around, resulting in perfectly nonsense sentences.
Another stirring work was from Drama by Guo Wen-jing, an excerpt of a longer piece by the Chinese composer. Six cymbals, two per musician, were clanged against each other and with mallets, sometimes with towels to muffle the sound. The result was a beautiful, melodic piece with lots of long-decaying resonances emanating from the metal discs.
The rest of the evening included Mbira Music by Alonzo Alexander, a wonderfully soft lyrical piece with roots in African folk music; John Cage’s Credo In Us (with Rosen sitting in), a satirical look at daily home life in the US during World War II; and two pieces arranged by PGC – Balinese Ceremonial Music by Colin McPhee and Chilean Songs, derived from Chilean folk tunes of the 1970s, the apex of Chilean folk culture.
Ryan Packard, third from left, with bandmates in Architek Percussion (photo credit: architekpercussion.com)
Earlier in the week, on Tuesday July 8, Ryan Packard presented an impressive solo percussion recital. At each convening of the Oberlin Percussion Institute, Rosen invites a recent Oberlin graduate to give a solo recital and a presentation to the attendees about their repertoire choices and the challenges they are confronting in performance. Packard, this year’s solo performer, has just completed his Masters degree in percussion performance at McGill University in Montreal and is a member of Architek Percussion ensemble, also based in Montreal.
Packard played five diverse compositions, all written by living composers. His final piece, ?Corporel, a section of a larger work by Vinko Globokar, was the most arresting and unusual in that Packard’s body constituted the entire instrument for the piece. After a brief departure from the stage, he returned barefooted and bare-chested. Sitting on the floor, Packard unleashed a barrage of bodily sounds. He began with exaggerated breathing, followed by spurts, gasps, lip sputters, and tongue clicks. Then he switched to rhythmic runs of slapping his arms and legs and beating his chest and abdomen. It was a primal, visceral exploration of the human body’s sound-making capacity, taken to extremes. It ended with a rapid series of slaps all over his body, culminating in a hara-kiri-like collapse upon itself. A deeply committed, stunning performance.
Another provocative piece was Plain Moving Landfill, by Thomas Meadowcroft. In this work, which focuses on the concept of disintegration, many of the instruments were cobbled together with items reclaimed from a landfill. A central element was crunching sounds Packard made by inhaling and exhaling into an empty plastic water bottle, while he rubbed metal objects across the edges of drums and steel bowls and pumped away at a foot-operated harmonium. This cacophony of sound was processed through electronic circuits, giving the whole affair the feeling of a huge industrial waste disposing machine at work.
The balance of Packard’s program, all inventively conceived and expertly performed, included Le Livre des Claviers: Solos de Vibraphone, by Phillipe Manoury; Luke Nickel’s Crossfade Piece After James Tenney; and Hinomi,by Michael Finnissy. Ryan Packard is a percussionist we will definitely be hearing more from.
