When the grand Music Academy of the West’s festival rolls into town each summer, collaborations with local venues and cultural organizations are part of the package. The collab list even includes Home Depot, believe it or not.
Or so we’ve been told by percussion faculty head Michael Werner in the annual and ever-popular “PercussionFest” concerts during the festival schedule. As part of the flexible tool kits and inventive instrumentation of contemporary percussion music, household implements and objects are fair game as ad hoc musical instruments. Home Depot (and Home Improvement), here they come.
Always one of the more creative, unpredictable and crowd-pleasing events of the academy season, PercussionFest is making the bold upward move from its customary home in the intimate on-campus Hahn Hall to the Big House of The Granada Theatre this year, on Thursday, July 3.
Two key pieces of the program should help to bolster the crowd size. Former Police drummer and film composer Stewart Copeland will be in-house as composer for the West Coast debut of his piece The Bells, a 10-minute piece commissioned for the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble to premiere. Copeland, 72, has been expanding into “classical” works in recent years, including orchestral works, the 2021 opera Electric Saint — about Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla — and the recently released album Wild Concerto (link).
Much-lauded percussionist-composer Andy Akiho will perform his new work Sculptures, actually written for quasi-ritualistic sculptures created by noted Japanese-American artist Jun Kaneko. (Listen to Akiho’s “Bronze 1” here.) Akiho’s prickly and retro-futurist artwork has been perched outside of Hahn Hall recently, piquing the curiosity of onlookers. And no, this object is not available at Home Depot.
Akiho, a Grammy winner and Pulitzer finalist whose music has been performed by high-ranking orchestras and musicians, is a special guest at the Academy this summer, and the subject of the program Composers in Context at Hahn Hall on Wednesday, the night before PercussionFest. There, Akiho will have a twin spotlight, on his compositions and his mastery of the steel pans, set into contemporary music frameworks.
Elsewhere on the PercussionFest program, a variety of pieces promises to live up to this event’s tradition for toppling expectations and illustrating the ongoing inventive impulses linked to contemporary percussion music. Marketing sources promise a “multi-sensory adventure” equipped with “theatrical lighting and short films,” along with notable percussionists/drummers Copeland, Akiho, Werner, and percussion department colleague Joseph Pereira, along with percussion fellows known for leading an engaging charge.
Perhaps fittingly, this rock-star-drummer-equipped program closes with Christopher Rouse’s piece Bonham, in tribute to that drummer’s drummer and all-purpose drum hero, the late, great Led Zeppelin beat master John Bonham. (Listen here.)
For further information, see bit.ly/4n2IA4u.
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