Unsnared Drum at ASU

Thrilled to present my first recital at ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts next Tuesday at 5pm AZ time, featuring the music from my recently released album "Unsnared Drum," out now on New Focus Recordings.

Excited to share some phenomenal music from Tonia Ko, A.B. Kirsten, Nina C. Young and Hannah Lash live and in-person!

For those who can't attend in person, this event will be live streamed. See here for ticket info

https://asuevents.asu.edu/content/unsnared-drum-michael-compitello

Free for ASU students, faculty, and staff, and be in touch if you need tickets. See you there!

Unsnared Drum Booklet and Unboxing

On the eve of the release of Unsnared Drum, I thought I’d share the booklet essay I wrote for the album:

What does it mean to Unsnare something? To free an instrument from expectation?  The instrument is called the snare drum because of the wires underneath it; the metal, gut, or cable which give the drum a crisp, focused, energetic, and loud snap.  In addition to its militaristic pedigree, the snare drum functions often as a timekeeper, offers coloristic effect, and is a technical proving ground for percussionists. What does a performer do with an instrument which has such a seemingly narrow role? To me, the drum’s repertoire seemed a beautiful courtyard: wondrous and fertile, but ultimately constrained by walls of our own making.  

Unsnared Drum reframes how people think about, perform, and practice the snare drum, freeing the drum from its historical and idiomatic chains.  It asks whether the snare drum can be bold, coy, suave, and elegant: in short, interesting. To that end, over the past four years, Nina Young, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Tonia Ko have patiently collaborated with me on surprising and inventive new works for solo snare drum.  I sent each composer a drum and a collection of sticks, mallets, and other implements, and they investigated my favorite instrument from the ground up. The result is a collection of pieces which highlight the snare drum’s breadth of sonic possibility and depth of expressivity, revealing an instrument of drama, grace, and heart.

Nina Young’s Heart.throb inverts our conception of percussive virtuosity with sly wit. In the piece, the characteristics most associated with percussive skill (quick, crisp, fleet passagework) are largely confined to the rim of the drum rather than the head and muddied by electronic delay.  Nina affixes a transducer to the head of the drum, turning the instrument into a speaker which broadcasts a pulsating and undulating bed of sinusoids.  The performer acts as a filter, altering the pitch and resonance of the instrument by pressing and stirring mallets into the head, striking at various positions on the instrument’s rim, and, in the piece’s emotional center, effecting a stunning duet between a vocalise created by hand pressure on the drum and a stiff metal brush rubbed against the rim.  An electronic swoop signals that adventure awaits, and the back half of Heart.throb is pure dance party, with an increasingly pulsating drum set against faster and faster passagework on the drum’s rim and head. The drum fights back, and by the end, the throbbing, urgent, enveloping texture can only be defeated by a powerful and muscular cadenza.

 Crisp, precise, dynamic, sharp, and uncompromising, Hannah Lash’s Start challenges the performer to begin again constantly.  Start is based on a handful of sharp motives which are continuously, obsessively, monomaniacally, tenaciously, and explosively developed. The performer highlights these themes with (hopefully) dynamic élan, abetted by an array of implements (brushes, hands, metal and wood chopsticks) whose colors delineate formal sections.  For Hannah, the features of the snare drum’s sound which make it so challenging to play—its brutally unforgiving sound, its sharp focus—are also pathways to highlight touch, finesse, and subtlety.  Start never relaxes, and the piece’s jagged silences are gradually eliminated in pursuit of a breathless climax. 

Where Start uses timbre to elucidate motive, Amy Beth Kirsten’s Ghost in the Machine turns to color to reveal the true soul of the instrument. Like a modernist chef mobilizing myriad advanced techniques (and plenty of silverware) in pursuit of the “essence” of a flavor, Ghost in the Machine calls upon the performer to use a number of implements to chase the “pure” sound of the snare drum, that ghost so often caught in the machinery of rigid, militaristic music.  In addition to a triangle set on the head and jangled with finger or mallet to sound like a groaning electric guitar, Amy deploys popping, echoing, clicking, clacking, jangling, buzzing, and dinging sounds in an increasingly dense groove, sautéing, sous vide-ing, and foaming the drum with shot glasses, knitting needles, and a wide assortment of sticks and mallets. The result is a graceful and pure declaration of the snare drum’s inner sound.

Unsnared Drum concludes with Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic, which discovers an all-but-hidden realm of melody, harmony, and resonance by almost completely loosening the drum’s tuning.  After an acclimating ritual which calls to mind an ancient storyteller finding their voice, we hear a meandering conversation between the clattering shell of the drum and the ringing head and a series of melodious sonic waterfalls which emulate the same vertiginous acceleration, transforming from curious to sinister. Directly in the center of the piece, the snares are activated, and the music repeats, buzzing with new life as sharp accents are juxtaposed against a tremulous texture.  By the end, the performer gradually loosens the snares until they are deactivated again, unspooling Negative Magic’s rhythmic process.  The only sound possible is the head itself, scratched by nails. The drum dissolves into air, escaping the beautiful garden’s walls.

 “The drum reveals the drummer.”  Nina’s program note for Heart.throb could aptly describe all of Unsnared Drum.  Each of these works subverts our expectations of what the snare drum can do. More importantly, our workshop sessions, notational experiments, and sonic adventures challenged me to rethink what a percussionist can be, asking me to develop and refine new expressive pathways and percussive techniques while freeing me from rigid expectation and dogma. In the end, it is the performer—not the instrument—who is freed.

-Michael Compitello

I also took some time to do a little unboxing of the amazing physical CDs, wonderfully designed by Laura Grey and Molly Haig. Looking forward to sharing this with the world!

Unsnared Drum Pre-Release Party

Unsnared Drum is coming August 20 on New Focus Recordings. I’m excited to share an in-person event around the release of the album on August 15th at 5pm at Tenri Cultural Institute.

I’ll perform the music on the album (the pieces’ NY premiere), joined for some special surprises by percussionist Mike Truesdell.

We will have Physical and Digital copies available for sale.

Doors open at 4:30 with music at 5, followed by a reception.

FREE, but registration is highly recommended due to capacity limits. Pre-order a copy with your event registration! All performers and audience members will be asked to wear masks for this performance.

This event is supported, in part, by #CityArtistCorps, and it is how we are able to make attendance to this event FREE! This $5,000 award was created to activate and energize New York City’s artists and engage the public with arts activities this summer and fall. Thanks to @nyfacurrent, @NYCulture, @MadeinNY, and @queenstheatrenyc for the support!

Creative Practicing

Some thoughts on some percussion agnostic practice techniques.  Thanks to the Percussion Conservatory for hosting this post.  Happy to join their team, and excited to create some regularized content to their community, ranging from writing to learning.  Be sure to let me know if there is any topic towards which you’d like me to speak, and let me know how these techniques work for you.

Thanks for reading! 

New Music Listening Club and Context in Art

New Morse Code recently joined Emlyn Johnson and Dan Ketter’s New Music Listening Club.

We each picked a recent recording we found interesting or inspiring, and spent some time chatting—book club style—about what we found exciting, exhilarating, and inspiring. For our episode, we shared works by Samuel Adams, Dai Wei and Carola Bauckholt.

Here’s the listening list

Samuel Adams - Movements (for us and them) (2018)

Performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, released May 2020

Carola Bauckholt - Implicit Knowledge (2020)

Performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Mariano Chiacchiarini, October 2020

Dai Wei - Partial Men (2020)

Performed by Dai Wei and the Aizuri Quartet, released February 2021

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I was inspired by how the context—even fairly vague situating statement—engendered a a more critical listening experience, and how it inspired me to bring my own background and expertise to the listening experience.

Along these lines, I wanted to share a recent experience around feeling empowered to create my own connections in art. While spending some time in Madison, Wisconsin, I visited UW's Chazen Museum of Art (great logo!), where in—between gulps of Babcock Creamery ice cream—I enjoyed The Nature of Things, a retrospective of prints and paintings from Suzanne Caporael.

Most of the art in The Nature of Things alluded to or referenced scientific themes. The exhibition notes that "behind Caporael's exploration of nature is an interest in systems and how information is structured in Western culture in an effort to understand, and perhaps contain, the natural world." Caporael aestheticizes and abstracts these representations, creating works which exude form and structure even as the edges of the prints themselves are blurred.

I’m not a professional photographer

Columns of colored blocks might allude to a data set around shore leads, and, and a series of dots might depict the colors of birds as seen in a field guide. In addition to the birds, I was drawn to the repeating patterns in Caporael's works around the sky, particularly Leonids, where a repeating field of stars rhythmicizes the annual meteor shower.

I liked the way the art's thematic content—depicted both through titles and visual allusion—gave viewers a pathway in and through abstraction. With permission to think analogously, I felt more ownership of my experience, and let myself draw connections between blocks of color and estuaries or birds. I connected parameters of the art to my own memories of these natural phenomena, and found my own narrative through the space.

I was initially drawn to the exhibition because of a long-term project with New Morse Code about highlighting science around the worsening climate crisis. I've been thinking about how music can represent data, or focus attention onto an idea or concept beyond simple mimesis or cohabitation. But within the gallery, the covalent sensations of empowerment and discovery I felt reminded me of how hope to engage audiences at concerts.

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One of the great joys of playing contemporary music is introducing people to music they have never heard before. I've often found, though, that giving listeners a narrowly construed play-by-play of a piece can create disappointment and anxiety. If one does not hear the theme in the appropriate place, does one miss the entire meaning of the work?

As an audience member, I love receiving a gentle nudge towards a new work’s theme, character, or extra-musical inspiration. I feel empowered to read my own story into the work, and find my own connections. Caporael's titles resonated with this impulse, and I felt permission to see a map in a color field, or to make my own associations with the colors of birds.

Along those lines, I look forward to welcoming you into my album Unsnared Drum, which is coming out August 20th on New Focus Recordings. I’m so excited to share some background and contextualize these collaborations as the date approaches.

Stay tuned for more info about our album celebrations, including in-person shows, video streams, and more!

Until then, stay cool!