Percussion

Visitations (2002) ca. 12′
Solo multi-percussion (Marimba, Vibraphone. Crotales, Cymbal, Tam-tam, Bass Drum)
Commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program
Recorded by Joe Gramley in 2006 (see Discography).

Score and parts available for hard-copy purchase from Steve Weiss Music,
or purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $7.50:

Program Note, taken from Gramley’s CD and written by John Beck:

During Gramley’s days with Ethos, the group performed two of CHARLES GRIFFIN’s percussion quartets, one of them a commission (“The Persistence of Past Chemistries”). In 2001, with the aid of a Meet-the-Composer grant from New Music Marimba, Gramley got ready to begin collaborating with Griffin on a solo piece using multi-keyboard composition. Their first brainstorming session, destined to be rescheduled, was set for the morning of September 11 at Gramley’s studio in Manhattan.

Charles Griffin, a native New Yorker whose choral and instrumental works have been performed throughout the U. S. and Europe, remembers how the 9/11 attacks “colored our moods and thoughts” every time he and Gramley met in the months that followed. During an early work session, while improvising with Gramley’s mallets on the marimba, the composer came up with an opening whose “mood reminded [him] a little of Randall Thompson’s choral work Alleluia,” a reverent request for peace written during the Second World War.

Much of what Griffin wrote next would be marked by fragmentation and violence, but he remembers how, around January of 2002, the first snowfall of the season created one of those cityscapes that make New York “beautiful in a way it isn’t at any other time.” Some of the anger about September 11 was beginning to leave him, and the coda to his new composition came back around to the prayerful opening section in a way that may suggest conciliation to a listener.

Visitations would not be fully finished until early 2004, shortly before Gramley recorded it. Griffin explains that when a composer assembles a unique combination of musical instruments for a single percussionist, “it’s as if he’s creating a brand new instrument.” In the complex Visitations, Griffin wrote for three keyboards: concert marimba, vibraphone and crotales—small, chromatic, antique Turkish bells. At the piece’s climax, a bass drum, cymbals and gongs are also heard. Griffin knew he had “this really amazing, just monster, player” in Joe Gramley, but he also knew, during their months of collaboration, that he was pushing the performer toward—and sometimes even beyond—his limits.

Gramley remembers his own approach to the work becoming much more serious and deeply focused in the post-9/11 atmosphere, but he describes the mental and physical challenges with a kind of athletic relish. While pointing out how the keyboards require three different types of mallets (switched by the performer “when either hand has a moment off”), he also catalogs the different sorts of strokes he’s got to keep alternating: “very hard downstroke; quick upstroke; smooth, full downstroke. And don’t forget the pedal in the vibraphone! Visitations is such a balancing act that in order to perform it, I’ve got to take off my shoes. Otherwise I’ll slip off the pedal.” Memorization of Griffin’s music also proved a must: “There is no physical way for me to look at four different performance environments—and sheet music to boot.”

And yet, what pleases Gramley most—the surest indicator of his successful collaboration with Griffin—is how the emotional beauty of the piece never gets lost in the performing tour de force it requires.

Percussion Ensemble (2005) 7’
7 Players (see full instrumentation below)

Commissioned and premiered by the University of North Texas Percussion Ensemble, Mark Ford, Director.

Listen to an excerpt from the premiere at UNT:

Score and parts available for hard-copy purchase from Steve Weiss Music, or purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $25:

Program Note:

Twisting Magnetic Spins was commissioned by the University of North Texas for Mark Ford, the director of percussion studies there. Ever since I wrote The Persistence of Past Chemistries for Ethos Percussion Group several years before, where I restricted the sonic palette to instruments primarily made from wood or organic materials, I wanted to write another piece with the same restriction, but this time with metals. The main solos are taken by the vibraphone and the timpani, but perhaps the bigger challenge for the ensemble is the necessity for the accompanying metallophones to play very softly part of the time. After the premiere, this piece was featured by ASU’s percussion ensemble (J.B. Smith, director) at the 2006 PASIC conference in Austin, Texas as part of the New Ensemble Literature session.

Instrument list:
Tibetan Bowls (4) – or reasonable substitute, such as mounted hand-bells with medium yarn mallets
Vibraphone
Timpani (4)
Metal Trash Can
Thunder Sheet
Suspended Cymbal
Hi-Hat
Tam-tam
Brake Drums (3)
Nipple Gongs (2)
Wind Gong
Agogo Bells (2)
Triangle

Percussion Quartet (1998) ca. 9+’
Scored for Marimba, Xylophone, Cajon, and various standard mixed percussion (all wood).
Commissioned by Ethos Percussion Group under the auspices of the Jerome Foundation.
Premiered at Weill Recital Hall. Recorded by them in 1999 (see Discography).

Performed by Ethos Percussion Group

Ethos performed this work extensively in the U.S., including at Weill Recital Hall in New York at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Subsequent notable performances include PASIC 2003 by the NIU Percussion Quartet and PASIC 2004 by Ethos. It has been performed at several universities too: Rice, UNT, and Northwestern, among others. It has recently come into the repertoire of Exit 9 Percussion (New Jersey) and Tambuco (Mexico).Here is Ethos playing the last five minutes of the piece live at Symphony Space in New York City.

Program Note:

One of the ways that Professor Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachussets defines life in her book What is Life?, is as “patterns of chemical conservation in a universe tending toward heat loss and disintegration. . . . Death is part of life because even dying matter, once it reproduces, rescues complex chemical systems and budding dissipative structures from thermodynamic equilibrium. . . . Preserving the past, making a difference between past and present, life binds time, expanding complexity and creating new problems for itself.”I hit upon the title for this piece after I had already decided to restrict the sonic palette exclusively to instruments made of wood, a way to acknowledge this uniquely human reconstitution of organic matter. Not only do the instruments give the trees from which they came new life, but the musicians also bring new life to their instruments. Furthermore, my music tends to be the sum of sometimes disparate parts that take on new life through their integration; jazz, latino, and minimalist music all coexist in The Persistence of Past Chemistries.