Bonnie Whiting leads students from the UW Percussion Studio and Shannon Dudley directs the UW Steelband in a celebration of percussion and the environment. This end-of-the-year program including music by American composers John Cage, Caroline Shaw, Christopher Deane, John Luther Adams, Steve Reich, and Mark Applebaum, as well as Caribbean dance music--calypso, soca and salsa--and “Coffee Street,” composed and arranged by steel pan virtuoso Andy Narell.
PROGRAM
UW PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE
Bonnie Whiting, director
But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of
"Papiers froissés" or tearing up paper to make "Papiers déchirés?" Arp was stimulated by
water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests (1985) ............. John Cage (1912-1992)
from COYOTE BUILDS NORTH AMERICA:
Consecration (1990) ............................................................... John Luther Adams (b. 1953)
Vespertine Formations (2001) ........................................................ Christopher Deane (b. 1957)
from PLAYBOOK:
Look Up (2015, revised 2018).............................................................. Danny Clay (b. 1989)
Illusions of Water ................................................................................. Michiaki Inoma (b. 1964)
Catfish (1997) ................................................................................... Mark Applebaum (b. 1967)
Taxidermy (2012)................................................................................... Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
from PLAYBOOK:
Pulse Pass ...................................................................................................................D. Clay
Nagoya Marimbas (1994) ........................................................................... Steve Reich (b. 1936)
from PLAYBOOK: ................................................................................................................D. Clay
Interrupters
Teeth
Double Mantra
Edward Cunneen, Courtney James, David Norgaard
David Gaskey, Rhane Mallory, Lynn Park
Aidan Gold, Isaac McDonald, Emerson Wahl
UW STEELBAND
Shannon Dudley, director
Charlotte Street ......................................................................................................... Ray Holman
Guantanamera ............................................................................................................. Jose Martí
Leave Me Alone............................................................................ Calypso Rose, arr. Anita Kumar
Yesterday ................................................................................................. Lennon and McCartney
Coffee Street .............................................................................................................. Andy Narell
Bonnie and Clyde ...................................................................... Destra Garcia, arr. Kristen Jones
Jessica Calderon, Thomas Campbell, Evan Cartotto
Michael Hart, Emily Iversen, Aidan Jackson
Janella Kang, Kelsey Kua, Lucas Lindberg,
T. J. OrgovanColton Rothaus, Andy Varness
Marisol Berríos-Miranda, guest percussionist
Shannon Dudley, director & arranger
Bonnie Whiting and the UW Percussion Ensemble
The Percussion Ensemble's program features music by Steve Reich and Mark Applebaum as well as music made with found objects and sounds that are open to the natural world. Works include John Cage's ". . . but what about the noise of crumpling paper," Caroline Shaw's "Taxidermy," Christopher Deane's "Vespertine Formations" (patterned after the murmurations of starlings), and John Luther Adams' "Consecration," from his work "Coyote Builds North America."
Bonnie Whiting joined the School of Music faculty in Fall 2016 as Chair of Percussion Studies. She performs and commissions new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, improvisation, and the speaking percussionist. Recent work includes a series of concerts at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington DC, and performance as a soloist in Tan Dun's Water Passion under the baton of the composer himself. In 2011, she joined red fish blue fish percussion group in premiering the staged version of George Crumb’s Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars and featuring Dawn Upshaw for Ojai Festival.
Shannon Dudley and UW Steelband
The UW Steelband (Shannon Dudley, director) performs a repertoire of Caribbean dance music including calypso, soca and salsa. Program selections include “Coffee Street,” composed and arranged by steel pan virtuoso Andy Narell, who worked with the band on a recent visit to Seattle.
Shannon Dudley is associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has published his research on steelbands in a number of articles and books, including Carnival Music in Trinidad (Oxford University Press 2004), and Music From Behind the Bridge: Steelband Spirit and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (Oxford 2008). He has also performed with steelbands in Trinidad and Tobago, including Pandemonium, Phase II Pan Groove, Bird Song, Hummingbird Pan Groove, and Our Boys. In Seattle he performs on steel pan regularly with his trio, Dingolay, and with Gary Gibson’s Panduo.
In 1998 Dudley brought Trinidadian steelband arranger Ray Holman to the University of Washington as a Visiting Artist in Ethnomusicology. The University of Washington Steelband was created through this residency, and Dudley has continued to direct it as a School of Music ensemble since Holman’s departure. The UW steelband’s repertoire emphasizes Caribbean dance styles, including calypso, soca and salsa, and performs at a variety of community events as well as concerts.
Director Bios
Bonnie Whiting (she/her) performs, commissions, and composes new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving the speaking percussionist, non-traditional notation, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554” for a percussionist, was released by Mode Records in April 2017. Her sophomore album Perishable Structures, launched by New Focus Recordings in 2020, places the speaking percussionist in the context of storytelling and features her own music as well as works by Vinko Globokar, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Logan-Greene, and Susan Parenti.
Her recent season highlights include onstage work in the multimedia chamber opera The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, featuring productions at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City, at The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, and at Stanford Live; a reprise of composer Wang Lu’s Stages for solo speaking/singing percussionist at New York’s Performance Spaces for the 21st Century (PS21); and four performances of a new concerto written for her by Jonathan Bingham with the National Symphony Orchestra for the family pops series at the Kennedy Center alongside renowned children’s book author Mo Willems. Whiting also creates original, improvised music with clarinetist James Falzone and pianist Lisa Cay Miller; their first album was released on Allos Documents in 2024, and the trio performs this season in Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland.
In 2022 she premiered Through the Eyes(s): an extractable cycle of nine pieces for speaking/singing percussionist collaboratively developed with composer Eliza Brown and ten artists and writers incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison. The project was featured on NPR’s nationally-syndicated Slingshot, and locally via Seattle’s ClassicalKING radio station. Whiting has an ongoing relationship as a soloist with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan via the U.S. Embassy Cultural Affairs Office, playing concerti in Ashgabat in 2017 and 2018. She performs frequently with percussionist Jennifer Torrence, giving concerts of new experimental work for speaking percussionists throughout Norway and the US. Her collaboration with multimedia artist Afroditi Psarra generated the album <null_abc>, released on the Zero Moon label in 2018, and their project with designer Audrey Desjardins on transcoding data from IoT devices as performance received a 2019/20 Mellon Creative Fellowship. The project was explored in a workshop at the 2020 Transmediale Festival in Berlin, and currently lives as an interactive net art installation. She spent four years performing music for voice and percussion with the Harry Partch Ensemble on the composer’s original instrumentarium while the instruments were in residence at the UW. Whiting has presented solo and small ensemble shows at The Stone in New York, the Brackish Series in Brooklyn, The Lilypad in Boston, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, at Hallwalls in Buffalo, the Tiny Park Gallery in Austin, The Wulf in LA, the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, The Grove Haus in Indianapolis, on the Wayward Music Series in Seattle, on tour throughout New Zealand, and at colleges and universities around the country.
Whiting is the Co-Artistic Director and core percussionist of the Seattle Modern Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest’s only large ensemble solely dedicated to music of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and she plays vibraphone with the Torch Quartet. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with many of today's leading new music groups, including red fish blue fish percussion group, (George Crumb's Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars and featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw for the Ojai Festival), eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory), the International Contemporary Ensemble (on-stage featured percussionist/mover in Andriessen's epic Die Materie at the Park Avenue Armory, and the American premiere of James Dillon's Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Talea Ensemble (Time of Music Festival in Finland), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series) and Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard.) She attended Oberlin Conservatory (BM), the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (MM), and the University of California San Diego (DMA). She is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington, where she has been Chair of Percussion Studies since 2016.
Shannon Dudley, professor of Ethnomusicology, holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He teaches courses that include music of Latin America and the Caribbean, American popular music, Music and Community, Comparative Musicianship and Analysis, and graduate seminars in Ethnomusicology. He also directs the UW steeelband.
Dudley has conducted research in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on the history and music of steelbands. More recent research interests include the musical geography of Santurce, Puerto Rico, as well as Latino contributions to American popular music. His theoretical interests include nationalism, transculturation, and participatory music practices.
His publications include Carnival Music in Trinidad (Oxford University Press, 2004), as well as Music From Behind the Bridge (Oxford University Press, 2008), a history of Trinidad steelband music, and numerous other articles on Caribbean music, including and "Judging by the Beat: Calypso vs. Soca," Ethnomusicology (1996), and “El Gran Combo, Cortijo, and the Musical Geography of Cangrejos/Santurce, Puerto Rico,” Journal of Caribbean Studies (2008).
Dudley is one of the curators (along with Marisol Berríos-Miranda, and Michelle Habell-Pallan) for American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, a bilingual museum exhibit that opened at the Experience Music Project in Seattle in 2008. Between 2008 and 2015 American Sabor was exhibited in 18 cities in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, first in its original version and later in a smaller version prepared in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Service. Published as a book with University of Washington Press in 2018 (americansabor.music.washington.edu), American Sabor won the ARSC's 2019 prize for Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music.
In Seattle Dudley performs on steel pan with Dingolay, and participates in the Seattle Fandango Project (SFP), a community music group that practices son jarocho. He helps to run the Ethnomusicology division's Visiting Artist program, which includes Community Artists in Residence from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere who participate in collaborations between local arts organizations and university programs.