Left Edge Percussion, directed by Terry Longshore, will present “Stress & Flow,” an evening of new percussion music, livestreamed from the Southern Oregon University Music Recital Hall on the Oregon Center for the Arts YouTube Channel.
The concert will open with Josh Gottry’s Quintic, the winning composition from the 2020 Left Edge Percussion Composition Competition, selected from 83 competition entries, coming from 18 countries on five continents! Quintic, meaning “of the fifth degree”, is an exploration of the number five within a percussion chamber ensemble.
Composer Molly Joyce’s Uniformity explores a desire for such through a pitch to non-pitch process, seeking to realize its complexities, opportunities, and impossibilities. The motive to explore “uniformity” comes from the composer’s personal experiences and explorations into the social model of disability, which states that disability is caused by the way society is organized rather than by a person’s impairment or difference, and in Joyce’s opinion illustrates how human uniformity is perhaps an impossible and flawed undertaking.
Left Edge Percussion members Jade Hails and Bobby Odle will perform their arrangement of the third movement of Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, Nightclub 1960. Piazzolla described the piece thusly: “This is a time of rapidly expanding international exchange, and the tango evolves again as Brazil and Argentina come together in Buenos Aires. The bossa nova and the new tango are moving to the same beat. Audiences rush to the night clubs to listen earnestly to the new tango. This marks a revolution and a profound alteration in some of the original tango forms.”
Next on the concert will be Metal for Pieces of Wood by Ivan Trevino, featuring drum set soloist Delaney Jai along with four marimbas played by the other members of the ensemble. Trevino writes: “Metal for Pieces of Wood places the metal world into the concert music space, and I think the name of the piece is indicative of this. I also think it's interesting that metal fans really enjoy classical music. Virtuosity and technique are often emphasized in metal, and metalheads see those traits in classical musicians as well. I'm not sure the feeling is always mutual, but I for one think metal can be a genre of amazing depth and musicianship.”
Also featured will be Left Edge Percussion’s 2020 video-recorded performance of BEND, a captivating quartet played on two marimbas composed by Third Coast Percussion member Peter Martin. The composition features many unusual sounds including playing with the mallet handles, scraping the ends of the bars with knurled sticks, and bowing the bars. Recorded at the Jefferson Public Radio Studio by Eric Teel, and video recorded by SOU Alumna Audrey Sliger, the featured performers are Mitchell Carlstrom, Jade Hails, Emily Lindley, and Gabriel Nordquist-Palmer.
The concert will close with a performance of Alejandro Viñao’s virtuosic work in three movements, STRESS & FLOW, for percussion quartet and electronics. According to the composer, “Stress and flow, bright and dark, and light and shadow are all descriptions of the juxtapositions and contrasts that characterize this work and are arrived at through various rhythmic processes and the use of electronic means to produce new sound worlds. These sound worlds are not meaningful in themselves but work as an extension of the sound of the percussion instruments featured in this composition.”