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.
Program
2025 Percussion Bash
University of Washington Percussion Ensemble
Bonnie Whiting, Director
Oxbow (2020) - Greg Stuart (b. 1979)
Jupiter from “The Planets” (c.a.1914-16) - Gustav Holst (1874-1934). arr. Nathan Daughtrey
Life is (__) (2018) - Jason Treuting (b. 1972)
Toccata (1990) - Anders Koppel (b. 1947)
Almaty (2015) - Ivan Trevino (b. 1983)
Bon Temps (2018) - Joe W. Moore III (b. 1986)
Iomramh (2019) -Tim Feeney (b. 1975)
The UW Percussion Ensemble
Kaisho Barnhill, Cyan Duong, Momoka Fukushima, Abigail George, Simon Harty, Colin Lehman, Taryn Marks,
Alexander McLean, Rose Martin, Ivy Moore, Luigi Salvaggio, Tyler Smith, Nat Yamamoto
Bonnie Whiting, Director
INTERMISSION
UW Steelband
Gary Gibson, Director
Pan Rising - B. Sharpe arr. Shannon Dudley
Brazil - A. Barroso arr. Gibson
Iron Love - N. Blackman arr. Kimani Bishop
Downtown - T. Hatch arr. Gibson
El Manicero- M. Simons arr. Dudley
The Hammer - D. Rudder Arr. Gibson
The UW Steel Band
Kimani Bishop, Calder Broadhead, Damon Chan, Yuna Dodobara, Shannon Dudley, Marques Nathan Locke, Hannah Parke, Joey Schafer, Jacob Schultz, Nicole Setiwan, Elena Shafner, with Simon Harty, glockenspiel
Gary Gibson, Guest Director
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to: Rose Martin (our TA and grad student worker), Tyler Smith (our student worker), the Meany Center staff, Doug Niemela and the School of Music staff, as well as our Director Joël-François Durand
Program Notes
Oxbow (2020): Greg Stuart
to Bonnie Whiting and the University of Washington Percussion Ensemble
for ensemble
An oxbow lake is a U-shaped lake that forms when a wide meander of a river is cut off, creating a freestanding
body of water. This landform is so named for its distinctive curved shape, which resembles the bow pin of an oxbow.
In this piece the performers create a trajectory, in discrete stages, from continuously sustained noises (i.e., constant, but variable, “white noise” like sounds) to sounds that have more resonance, sustain, and are discontinuous (i.e., have gaps, either in amplitude, or spacing). This trajectory, in each player’s part, has three distinct stages:
A) sustained noise B) a combination of sustained noise and resonance and C) resonance.
At the beginning of the piece the players should sound as a single, but composite, timbral river (i.e., a sonic “mass” with little differentiation). As time passes, and the river begins to meander, a segment of its “flow” will be cut off from the main channel. An “oxbow lake” will start to form when players combine their initial noise sound with their resonance sound. The emerging oxbow will exhibit an entirely new set of relationships from the continuous flow of the river. Eventually, only the oxbow sound will remain. The oxbow sound should be full of resonance but should also be porous (i.e., players will not play all of the
time). The overall feeling of the piece should be like going from sustained noise to a shifting group of ringing harmonic clouds, from constant white-noise to a “field” or ringing harmonies and deep rumbles.
Life is ( ) was written for So Percussion shortly after Amid the Noise was released on Cantaloupe Music. Since then, it has often been included in performances of that work. Like all of Amid the Noise, it has flexible instrumentation, and though it is most often performed as a percussion quartet, it can be played by any instruments and can even be played by larger groups.
The piece is constructed by asking the performers to agree on sections of newspaper and mining those sections for words to use in building the structure. In this way, not only is each performance unique in its instrumentation, but it is also unique in the rhythms and (subsequently) the melodies that arise from these words. -Jason Treuting
Almaty (2015) is a percussion octet written for the 2015 PASIC All-Star Percussion Ensemble. The piece is scored for one 5.0 octave marimba, one 4.3 octave marimba, vibraphone, and five crotale parts utilizing a muffling technique throughout the piece.
In March, 2015, I performed in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The city and its people left a lasting impression on me, and inspired me to write this music, along with this short poem:
I found a place that appreciates music
for what it is…not what it appears to be.
I found a place where art prevails over money,
where art prevails over subscribers and followers.
I found a place that is cold in temperature, but warm in humanity,
where people love to be enlightened.
I found a place where people dress like hipsters,
and hug like parents.
I found a place that feels pure. -Ivan Trevino
Bon Temps was written for my good friend Gustavo Miranda and his students at Nicholls State University. The title Bon Temps comes from the Louisiana saying, "Laissez les bon temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." NSU premiered this piece on their percussion ensemble the fall semester of 2018. I hope you have a good time learning and performing this piece! -Joe W. Moore
Folk tradition in the Blasket Islands of western Ireland held that a person who takes to the water in a fishing currach might find the skin hull of the boat vibrating with a strange music given by the faeries. A sharp listener might be able to catch a bit of it by fiddling along and could then bring the music back to the land of the living. The Pórt na bPúcaí is an example of music of this origin, different from the body of traditional song. More recent and more scientific reasoning suggests that the story describes the songs of humpback whales reverberating up through the water to people rowing out to sea on what is essentially a giant drumhead. There are great recordings of the tune by Tommy Peoples, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, and Liam O’Flynn,
among many others, and Seamus Heaney writes wonderfully in the world of the myth in the poem The Given Note.
-Tim Feeney, on his Iomramh (2019)
Biographies
Gary Gibson
Gary Gibson is a percussionist with a long and diverse local performance history, including section percussion on film soundtracks with musicians of the Seattle Symphony, working in the pit at Seattle’s 5th Avenue and Paramount theaters, drumming with almost every big band in town, playing vibraphone in numerous local jazz groups, and, of course, playing steel pan at hundreds of engagements both public and private.
He has recorded four critically acclaimed albums of original progressive music featuring the steel pan, is the winner of two out of three categories of Trinidad’s “Symphony & Steel” composition contest, and is a winner of Trinidad’s “Panorama National Steel Band Championship.” He is known internationally as a clinician and concert/recording artist, and makes numerous trips each year to adjudicate at steel band festivals or be a guest concert artist with college and high school steel band groups around the country. In 2024, he was the keynote presenter and performer at the National Society of Steel Band Educators (NSSBE) national conference in Austin, TX.Gibson’s current position is Executive and Artistic Director at Steel Magic Northwest, a non-profit he founded in 2014 that provides after-school steelband for kids in the Edmonds and Kent communities, as well as an adult community band.
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.