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NAU Percussion Ensemble Concert

Tamborim and beater

Tamborim and beater

Sedona AZ (November 1, 2014) – The NAU School of Music presents the NAU Percussion Ensemble under the direction of Dr. Steve Hemphill, in concert at 7:30 p.m., Friday, November 14, 2014, in NAU Ardrey Memorial Auditorium. The concert is a free, non-ticketed event. 

This concert features seven percussion works, four of which have not been heard on the NAU campus, including a world premiere of Venn Diagram, by composer and NAU alumnus Josh Gottry.

Joseph Tompkins’ Blue Burn quintet (2011) opens the concert featuring five bass drums (in table-style set-up) and a peculiar combination of five caxixi (Brazilian basket shakers), three tamborins (a small Brazilian hand-held drum), and roto-toms. Following will be Carlos Chávez’s 1942 landmark percussion sextet Toccata for Percussion, originally written for John Cage’s percussion ensemble in Chicago and a staple in the percussion genre.

Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich is another percussive milestone (1973), this time a quintet for pairs of wooden claves performed in a minimalistic compositional style. Moving from sticks to the repertoire of the string quartet, the ensemble will perform a marimba adaptation of Joseph Haydn’s Quartet No. 66 in G major, movement I (ca. 1799).

The program will continue with a 2013 quintet, Denkyem (the West African Adinkra symbol for the crocodile), by Joe W. Moore, which merges common African, Cuban, and South American drums and hand-held instruments in a high-powered harvesting of mixed meter.  Following Gottry’s Venn Diagram, the concert will conclude with a vibrant new work (a re-working of a commission by the West Point Academy), Michael Burritt’s Fandango 13, showcasing a dense mosaic of four marimbas, two vibraphones, xylophone, crotales, bongos, darabuka, djembe, and tom-toms.

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