The UW Percussion Ensemble (Bonnie Whiting, director) and the UW Steelband (Gary Gibson, interim director) present an end-of-year percussion bash. The Percussion Ensemble performs chamber music by Joe Moore, Jason Treuting, Anders Koppel, and Ivan Trevino. The group also presents the world premiere of Greg Stuart's Oxbow (written for UWPE in 2020) and presents Tim Feeney's Iomramh: these pieces feature slowly-shifting timbral landscapes for 12+ percussionists exploring sounds at the threshold of audibility. The ten-member UW Steelband presents a a mixed program of Trinidadian calypso, Brazilian samba, son monutuno (salsa), American pop, and more.
Director Biographies
Gary Gibson
Gary Gibson is an internationally-known percussionist and composer, specializing in steel pan, drumset, and vibraphone, and has visited 200+ steel band programs throughout the United States as guest artist/clinician. He has recorded four critically acclaimed albums of progressive original music for the steel pan (and other instruments), was a winner of Trinidad’s “Panorama National Steelband Championship” with the Exodus Steel Orchestra in 2004, and the 1st Prize winner of two out of three categories of Trinidad’s “Symphony and Steel” composition competition.
A jazz musician at his core, he holds a masters degree in classical music performance, and is regularly commissioned by groups ranging from steel bands to symphony orchestras to choirs to compose original works, often involving the steel pan or steel band in some way.
He has been active in his home area of Seattle, Washington, USA, as a percussionist, including working on film soundtracks with musicians of the Seattle Symphony, drumming in the pit at Seattle’s 5th Avenue and Paramount theaters, and drumming or playing vibraphone in numerous local jazz groups. He was on the faculty at Cornish College of the Arts, was a regular faculty at the Jazz Port Townsend summer jazz camp, and directs the steel band program at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. He also has directed steel bands in the Kent and Edmonds school districts, and the University of Washington steel band.
He established his Seattle-based non-profit steel band program, "Steel Magic Northwest," in 2016. It has grown to almost 100 members, and continues to grow.
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.