The University of Washington Percussion Ensemble (Bonnie Whiting, director) performs early and recent works for percussion ensemble in its Autumn Quarter concert, including all three of John Cage's Constructions, plus brand new works from the Everybody Hits consortium.
Masks are required in all indoor spaces on the UW campus, and patrons must show proof of vaccination or recent (within 72 hours of the performance) negative COVID-19 test for entry to live events at Meany Hall. Enhanced sanitation measures and touchless ticketing are among other safety measures in effect for 2021-22. Details of these policies and procedures are at: https://artsevents.washington.edu/covid-protocols
Program
First Construction in Metal (1939) ........................................................... John Cage (1912-1992)
IHVUSTÚ I (2021) .................................................................................. Finola Merivale (b. 1987)
Recover. (2020) ..................................................................................... Aeryn Santillan (b. 1990)
Second Construction (1940) .................................................................................................. Cage
Super Heavy (2020) ........................................................................... Susanna Hancock (b. 1992)
Third Construction (1941) ..................................................................................................... Cage
UW PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE
Bonnie Whiting, Director
Connor Aksama, Scott Farkas, Brindha Jaeger, Ryan Baker, Daisy Fernandez,
Jonathan Rodriguez, Aaron Michael Butler, Abigail George, Grace Rosing,
Billie Chance, Cyrus Graham, Sophia Schmidt, Simon Harty
Program Note
John Cage’s three Constructions (1939-41) were primarily composed while he was working in
Seattle at the Cornish School, organizing sound and materials into architecture that would
eventually change the world of music and dance. These early experimental works were exceptional
not just in their materials (resonant found objects alongside percussion instruments
from several musical traditions) but also in their rhythmic structures. We present these vintage
Constructions alongside three of our discipline’s newest works for chamber percussion ensemble.
The pieces by emerging composers Finola Merivale, Aeryn Santillan, and Susanna Hancock
were commissioned as part of the 2020/21 “Everybody Hits” consortium, and similarly
point toward new futures for the percussion ensemble.
Many thanks to Scott Farkas, Jonathan Rodriguez, Colin Todd, Joanne De Pue, Adam Groh, and
Director Taricani/the UW School of Music for all the help and support that made tonight’s performance
possible.
Bios
Everybody Hits
Everybody Hits is a commissioning project organized by percussionist Adam Groh to create six new percussion ensemble works by a diverse group of living composers that are accessibly by a wide range of ages and ability levels. Works are by composers Jonathan Bingham, Aeryn Santillan, Susanna Hancock, Finola Merivale, Emma O’Halloran, and Shruthi Rajasekar. Learn more about the consortium.
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.
