Amazon River from "Philip Glass: Aguas da Amazonia" Third Coast Percussion + Constance Volk

Описание: Composer: Philip Glass, arr. Third Coast Percussion and Constance Volk
Title: "Amazon River"
Album: "Aguas da Amazonia by Philip Glass" on Rockwell Records
Performed by: Third Coast Percussion and Constance Volk
Sean Connors: organ
Peter Martin: PVC tube bass
Robert Dillon: glass marimba
David Skidmore: synth, djembe
Constance Volk: flute

Vinyl Album available on Rockwell Records: https://shop.thirdcoastpercussion.com...

Recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago August 2024
Producer: Colin Campbell
Engineer: Taylor Hales
Original Artwork: Constance Volk
Videography: four ten media

Third Coast Percussion has been fortunate to have a close association with Philip Glass and his music for several years now. We commissioned Glass’s first original work for percussion ensemble, entitled Perpetulum, in 2018. But the first music by Glass that we performed were our arrangements of Aguas da Amazonia.

This suite of pieces was commissioned by contemporary Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo and performed by singular Brazilian musical group Uakti. The set of pieces was initially composed on piano, with themes appearing in some of Glass’s later works including his opera La Belle et la Bête, the Piano Etudes, and Echorus for 2 Violins and String Orchestra. Uakti performed and recorded the pieces using a unique collection of custom-made musical instruments. Uakti’s album of this music from 1999 included nine pieces named after rivers in the Amazon basin, as well as the first movement of Glass’s “Metamorphosis.”

We were all big fans of this album, and we felt that these arrangements, made by Uakti’s founder Marco Antônio Guimarães, made a very compelling case for adapting Glass’s music to different instrumentations. Uakti’s unique sonic palette shone through very clearly on these recordings, without obscuring Glass’s musical identity in the process. The clarity of the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and the repetitive structures of the music, in the hands of masterful musicians with a deep understanding of their timbral universe, allowed both the musical material and the performers to be themselves.

So in 2016, we began arranging these pieces for our own collection of percussion instruments — marimba, vibraphone, synthesizer, glockenspiel, melodica, almglocken, and more. Four of the pieces were included on our 2018 album “Paddle to the Sea,” and a few years later, we arranged the remaining pieces from the set. We’ve now performed the full suite of these arrangements, as well as selections from the suite, all over the world.

In 2023, we were approached by choreographer Twyla Tharp about reimagining this music yet again for a new dance project. Twyla initially fell in love with Aguas thanks to our arrangement of Madeira River and Uakti’s recording. Twyla encouraged us to put our own musical personality into the work as we honed in on a bespoke version of this music that fits Twyla’s vision for her new dance work. TCP’s Production Manager, Colin Campbell, played a crucial role in this project as he designed, built, and sourced new instruments and customized methods of amplifying and recording this peculiar ensemble. The instrumentation includes a marimba made of glass and another made of red oak planks, a set of chromatically tuned PVC pipes, a sun drum (tunable tongue drum), synthesizers, and a djembe. Our friend, flutist Connie Volk, adds a vital layer to these arrangements with playing that includes her own solos over Glass’s musical material. She also contributed a beautiful original artwork which is featured in this album’s graphic design.

All of this has taken our ensemble into new artistic territory, but has also brought us back to our classical music roots: viewing ourselves as the next step in an evolving performance practice of music that different artists before us have put their stamp on; music which we expect others in the future to make their own as well.

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