The UW Percussion Ensemble (Bonnie Whiting, director) presents the world premiere of a new work by doctoral composer Yonatan Ron, as well as works by Aeryn Santillan (commissioned by the UW), alumnus Byron Au Yong, and music by Ivan Trevino and Eugene Novotney.
Program
Watercolor Sun (2023) - Ivan Trevino (b. 1983)
Intentions II: Proposal (1983) - Eugene Novotney (b. 1960)
recover. (2020) - Aeryn Jade Santillan (b. 1990)
The Unvoiced Loom Ghostly (2024) WORLD PREMIERE - Yonatan Ron (b. 1992)
I. A Chamberful of Magnets
II. The Combat of Arsis & Thesis
III. Caves of Abaco
IV. The Murmuration of Starlings
V. Attract, Approach, Refract, Repeat
Stars Whisper 星星低语 Les Murmures des Étoiles (2025) - Byron Au Yong (歐陽良仁) (b. 1971)
The UW Percussion Ensemble
Cyan Duong, Monaka Kakuta, Colin Lehman, Dustin Lie, Alexander McLean, Ivy Moore, Devon Rafanelli, Hazel
Salvaggio, Tyler Smith, Xander Swanson, Nat Yamamoto, Zhibo Zheng,
Dr. Bonnie Whiting, Director
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to: Tyler Smith (our TA), Devon Rafanelli (our grad student worker), the Meany Center staff, Doug Niemela and the School of Music staff, as well as our Director Joël-François Durand.
Program Notes and Composer Bios
Watercolor Sun (2023) was commissioned by the Grammy-winning ensemble, Third Coast Percussion. It was written for the quartet to perform on one single 4.3 octave marimba. I have been friends with the members of Third Coast for many years and have watched them from afar with much admiration. It brings me great joy to write music for them. There are moments in life that create a feeling I can’t quite describe. Like waking up in a sunlit room, or sharing a meal with old friends, or going on a road trip with someone you love. There’s a jovial, euphoric feeling to it. I feel it when I catch the sunrise with my family, and I feel it when I play music too. Maybe
it is gratitude, or peace, or something in between. Whatever this feeling is, it is at the heart of Watercolor Sun. ---Ivan Trevino
Ivan Trevino is a Mexican-American composer, percussionist, teacher, and arts advocate. Recognized around the world for his contributions to percussion literature, Ivan’s music has been performed across five continents in 25 countries. His music distinctly threads indie-pop sounds with a contemporary classical aesthetic, and his body of work spans storytelling, singing marimba players, cello rockers, and an ever-present social consciousness. His newly commissioned works include music for The San Diego Symphony Orchestra, The Juilliard School, and Grammy-winning quartet, Third Coast Percussion. He is a multi-award recipient of the Percussive Arts Society’s International Composition Contest and has been the featured composer and performer on NPR’s Performance Today.
As a percussionist and composer, Eugene Novotney has performed and presented lectures and master classes in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He is recognized internationally as a composer of contemporary percussion music, and his compositions are widely performed as standards of the literature. He is Professor of Music and the Director of Percussion Studies at California State University-Humboldt in Arcata, California, and is the founder and coordinator of the ‘Percussion in World Music’ program for the California State University Summer Arts Program.
Aeryn Jade “AJ” Santillan (she/her) is a composer, guitarist, and bassist whose work draws from the DIY punk scene, blurring the lines between band and ensemble, song and composition. AJ currently performs in forever (bass/vox), Wellness (vox), and this place is actually the worst (guitar/vox), and has toured across the USA, Canada, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan. From 2018–2025, she was the bassist and vocalist for experimental screamo band Massa Nera, and is a co-founder of the post-genre DIY label people | places | records. Her work recover. was commissioned in part by the University of Washington Percussion Ensemble through the
Everybody Hits Consortium in 2021.
In The Unvoiced Looms Ghostly, I aimed to create sound environments that invite listeners into a contemplative and immersive nexperience, where tension and release are achieved by means other than tones. The musical flow is driven by changes in sound quality, dynamics, force, movement, and speed, all contributing to the evocation of spaces that either deepen or contract. Most processes are inspired by the idea of filling the interstices between fundamentally different sound entities, bridging the polarities between granular and "spray-like" sounds, drum rolls, and the shimmering resonance of metallic objects, from triangles, through struck, scratched, or bowed cymbals and gongs. Expansive trajectories compress into brief, capricious gestures and, conversely, fleeting gestures unfold into extended spans; timbres fuse into a single whole or diverge into a spectrum of conflicting tone-colors. -
--Yonatan Ron
Yonatan Ron began his musical journey as a non-classically trained guitarist. He later studied music theory and classical guitar independently under composer and guitarist Ruben Seroussi, head of the composition department and Guitar performance department at Tel-Aviv University. In his music, seemingly ordinary materials develop through gradational transformations, often to the point of unrecognizability. He employs techniques associated with early music and integrates harmonic and rhythmic trajectories to shape anticipation, leading the listener toward expectation only to ultimately deceive it. His approach reflects a deep attraction to gesture, where musical events emerge through calculated methods that balance spontaneity with structural control. Yonatan draws inspiration from fields beyond music, including visual arts, mathematics, and cognitive psychology—areas around which much of his research orbits. His works are published in the ‘Israeli Composers League’ and are frequently commissioned by the Israeli Music Festival. He is a DMA student at the University of Washington.
Stars Whisper 星星低语 Les Murmures des Étoiles
During my first composition lesson with Joël Durand, I shared a sketch for violin and piano, inspired by music from John Cage, whonhad recently passed away. Joël asked me what I wanted to accomplish from this simple score. I replied that I felt stuck with fragments, so he encouraged me to study musical forms as well as non-musical structures. Eight weeks later, I had a 32-page composition called The Moon Embalmed in Phosphorus, inspired by Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, medieval rhythmic modes, and an overall trajectory prompted by the big bang theory. 30 years later, I continue with the modernist dilemma of fragmentation, but with the
knowledge and skills I learned while studying with Joël. Stars Whisper 星星低语 Les Murmures des Étoiles includes 28 sonic moments that are in clusters of seven related to the cardinal directions (north-south-east-west), as well as the seasons (winter, summer, spring, autumn). The ensemble plays together as if reading a star map to create sonic constellations inspired by the 28 Mansions of Chinese cosmology that traces the movement of the moon—and in this offering—through the whispering of the stars. Stars Whisper was
commissioned by Seattle Modern Orchestra in celebration of Joël-François Durand’s 70th Birthday.
Byron Au Yong creates musical works that have been featured at American Conservatory Theater, Hawai'i Opera, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Nashville Opera, and more. Honors include a Creative Capital Award and Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. He holds degrees in theater, dance, and music from NYU, UCLA, and the University of Washington, and currently serves
as an Associate Professor and Director of Arts Leadership at Seattle University.
Director Biography
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.