READER: PERCUSSION STUDIO
26.07.2025
Participants of the Darmstadt Summer Course
Håkon Stene & Jennifer Torrence (Musical Direction)
Gym hall:
Cathy van Eck: words, words, words (2022) – 9′
Javier Verduras Las Heras
Thomas Li
Keith Ng
Rubén Bañuelos
Bartłomiej Sutt
Natacha Diels: here is the promise (2018) – 7′
Beatriz Santos
Barbara Ribeiro
Jonas Evenstad
Thomas Meadowcroft: cradles (2013) – 8′
Gian Marco Medda (Synthesizer)
Bernardo Cruz
Nolan Ehlers
David Bird: FM Life (2024) – 7′
Hernán Camilo Zamudio Romero
Leon Neudert
Daichi Kutsuna
Eliot Britton: Metatron – I. Gatsbytron (1920) (1st movement) (2014) – 8′
Yi-chen Tsai
Noah Colosio
Jieru Ma
Jeonghyun Hwang
Zoi Argyriou
In classrooms as parcours with audience in 4 groups of max 35 people:
Hanna Hartman: Shadowbox (2011) – 12′
Rita Sousa e Castro Couto Soares
Madalena Santos de Matos Moreira Rato
Kristýna Švihálková
Aditya Bhat
Simon Steen-Andersen: Rerendered (2003/04) – 9′
Paulo Amendoeira
Alberto Anhaus
Yue Zou (Piano)
2 rooms of free improvisation – 10′ each
Bernardo Cruz
Beatriz Santos
Jonas Evenstad
Barbara Ribeiro
Noah Colosio
Jeonghyun Hwang
Gian Marco Medda
Thomas Li
Bartłomiej Sutt
Hernán Camilo Zamudio Romero
Leon Neudert
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
In Words, Words, Words no words will be heard. I am looking for sounds and movements that give us a very minimal impression of someone speaking, someone trying to say something. I try to find borders of sounds and movements that are very remotely related to speech and singing. The piece looks for these small moments of phonetic communication, often falling back to moments during which our (body) language is silent again.
In this piece five performers stand side by side. All have a microphone in one hand and a (small, not too heavy and portable) loudspeaker in the other hand. A white cardboard is glued to the speaker. The sounds from the loudspeaker replace the words you would normally produce with your mouth. The mouth is – so to speak – detached from its usual place on the body and can now be held in one’s hand. Only a minimal gesture of speaking remains: the microphone goes to the loudspeaker-mask and back again, and the microphone controls all the sounds coming from the loudspeaker with only this movement. The sounds themselves are as remote as possible from language: they are long and monotonous. Some variation slowly emerges throughout the piece, but most sounds are very remote of what would not normally come through a microphone for speech.
Cathy van Eck
HERE IS THE PROMISE FROM THE WILD PSYCHE TO ALL OF US
Here is the promise from the wild psyche to all of us: commencing with an introspective meditation on the beauties of corporate leadership, followed by a Glorious Mallet Front Ensemble dictating “HOW DO I” – a Google Autofill archive of unhelpful self-help, self-accompanied by paradiddle-diddle-rara-diddles – and culminating in hums and shuffles: a low-key-evil dance party.
Natacha Diels
Natacha Diels
CRADLES
Cradles is a lullaby that helps put treasured analogue musical equipment to bed. The work takes its inspiration from the sensuous, tactile relationship between performer and their instrument. The piece is dedicated to ‘Speak Percussion’ for whom it was written, and to Julian Burnside, whose generous financial support made the commissioning of the work possible.
Thomas Meadowcroft
FM LIFE
FM Life is composed for three MIDI drums and electronics. The work draws its main inspiration from concepts in FM (Frequency Modulation) Synthesis, a signal processing technique capable of generating complex tones from two simple oscillators. Popularized in the 70s and 80s, FM Synthesis allowed sound designers to digitally craft an array of sounds ranging from the recognizable to the unimaginable.
In FM Life performers both contribute to and at times deconstruct aspects of this signal processing technique. In several sections, the performers’ sounds depend on each other, with each performer completing a task as part of this mode of synthesis: one generates the carrier frequency, another the modulator, and the last the modulation amount. Additionally, a key aspect of the piece is its engagement with arbitrariness. In the piece, performers follow a defined score, yet the sounds and effects they produce are wildly randomized, so they never know exactly what will come out of the drum when they strike it. A performance practice like this asks performers to relinquish traditional modes of performative autonomy and operate within an unpredictable system that is both fragmented and wholly balanced. The strange logic of this system is depicted in the piece as both a utopian sanctuary and a bureaucratic nightmare, hence the subtle pun in the title, FM Life (FML).
David Bird
METATRON 1 (1920). GATSBYTRON
After the Second World War my grandparents dragged a used 1902 upright piano down the road and installed it in their living room. This is the first instrument I can remember. My grandmother’s collection of yellowing song sheets sat in the piano bench my entire life with watercolour illustrations of well-dressed couples dance across each page, beaming out at the reader, overflowing with sentimentality for a dance culture that was slipping away. A beautiful memory, but eventually the piano had to go, and it would go by chainsaw.
When she died, I inherited my grandmother’s musical materials. Beloved music cuts a path through format, technology, and time, an idea that planted the seeds for Metatron. A more fully formed concept came from my 95 year old grandfather. During one visit I was greeted in the garage by a dull chainsaw and a stripped down piano. “Finish the job,” he said. With grim determination and a dull tool, I dismembered my first musical experiences, thinking of the strange place technology holds in our lives.
Eliot Britton
SHADOW BOX
“sting like a bee float like a butterfly”, Muhammad Ali
RERENDERED
for pianist and two assistants
“Chamber music – abstract togetherness made concrete by narrowing the common denominator from room to instrument. Unities are fragmented, opposites are brought together, and mutual dependence is built through cooperation around individual sounds.”
Simon Steen-Andersen