future mini-project + ensemble xii

I am one of those concert junkies who holds onto ticket stubs and/or concert programs as a souvenir from notable shows/ concerts/ performances I see. I used to be really good of keeping track of the concerts I saw back in high school... but, regrettably, did not continue the practice once I started college.

So, I've decided: once I have some free time (when summer school is over), I will go through all of the loose programs and stubs that have accumulated in my "concert ticket collection" over the past four years, and make a record (+ reviews?) of the performances I have seen during my time as an undergraduate student here at UCSD; I predict that most of these events will have been hosted by the school in some way or another (Associated Students, individual college concert committees, the Music Department, etc.), so there will be a drastic difference between the acts I used to watch/listen to 4+ years ago and the ones that I now follow.

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In other news, I attended a concert last Saturday at school, which was kind of fun because summer/off-season concerts are a rarity at UCSD. Saturday night's performance featured a twelve-piece international percussion ensemble called Ensemble XII (formerly the Lucerne Festival Percussion Group), conducted by Steve Schick, who is a Distinguished Professor at UCSD, the founder and director of the university's very own [red fish blue fish], and conductor and director of the La Jolla Symphony. The night's concert included pieces by Yann Robin, Johannes Fischer, Philippe Schoeller, Liza Lim, and Yan Maresz; the ensemble had spent the previous week tediously recording the pieces at a studio on campus (my Recording & Production class got to sit in on a couple of these sessions!). There was a pre-concert talk by Schick and the founder of Ensemble XII (grad student/teacher Ross Karre) at 7:15pm, where the two spoke a little about role of percussion in Western music over the last two centuries, and how experimentation with percussion styles and techniques have greatly expanded following the rise of Serialism and atonality in the 1920s and 30s and eventually evolved into what we would hear in the night's show. 

The concert began promptly at 8pm and lasted for about two hours; I had been expecting for the music to sound close to what [red fish blue fish] usually performs, but instead, the night's music was a little more "conventional" by UCSD's standards, for the lack of a better word.  (Not bad.  Just a little surprising.)  Still, it was great to finally hear an entire concert devoted to just percussion instruments-- there are so many interesting sounds and timbres of these instruments that usually go unexplored in most "classical" music settings!  More than 100 percussion instruments were used by the ensemble during the concert, which only made the music seem like even more of a trip; additionally, the performers were interesting to watch because there is so much movement and personality involved in percussion performance (one of the reasons I picked it up myself, actually).  A couple of my favorite sounds from the night included the pitch bowls and the use of cello bows along the edges of the marimbas, cymbals, and xylophones. 

Following the night's show, the ensemble held a post-concert "instrument petting zoo," where a handful of the instruments were brought out into the performance hall's lobby, for audience members to tinker around with.  I got to hit 4-foot tam tam with a gigantic mallet.  As I wandered through the mass of people huddled around the instruments, a random person walked up behind me and began stroking the back of my hair.  I turned around and gave the stranger a (genuinely) perplexed look; the person's response: "It's a petting zoo, right?"