Wooden Music
Masakazu Natsuda
 
Forests are homes to primates including mankind, therefore trees and human beings have always been inextricably linked. The hitting sounds that came from pieces of wood in one’s hands (perhaps rocks or bones . . .) would have been some of the first sounds that mankind produced besides their spoken words. The scene comes clearly to my mind as I live in a country (Japan) where most of the islands are covered in forests.
 
–Masakazu Natsuda
 
 
Le témoignage des lumières
George Lewis
 
The sound of Le témoignage des lumières (The Testimony of Lights) situates itself within the classic American trope of depiction, among such forebears as Charles Ives, Amy Beach, Duke Ellington, Elliott Carter, and Blind Tom. From the opening moments, listeners find themselves virtually on board a négrier, where we hear not only the sonic testimony of the ship, but also the appalling violence and objectification of human beings that financially supported the Age of Enlightenment–in French, Le siècle des Lumières, the century of lights. Confronting this staggering moral contradiction in music and scholarship is part of my exploration of what decolonization might sound like, as classical music develops an expanded notion of its history and identity, a new “we” that could be the field’s greatest promise.
 
–George Lewis
 
 
Thaw
Ted Hearne
 
Thaw was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion Quartet and premiered in April 2009. This piece imagines what it might sound like to be immersed in a block of ice, still and cold with only the faintest beat of the outside world. Thaw begins with the sound of two glockenspiels and a large drum. As the ice starts to thaw, solid rhythms and pulse streams break apart. One solid structure is transformed into countless frigid tributaries, which, in time, evaporate completely.
 
–Ted Hearne
 
 
Fishbones
Ondřej Adámek
 
The sounds that slip, carry a certain nostalgia, solitude, anxiety… they resemble the human voice! The percussion instruments plunged into the water drown us in an aquatic sound that will gradually turn into a metallic scream. The cynical idea of the life cycle of fish came to me during the elaboration of this piece, a life that begins with hatching freely in the ocean and ends in the pressure of cans.
 
–Ondřej Adámek