1955 - 1960 More is More
The percussion instruments of Luciano Berio’s Circles (1960), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1958-60), Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques (1955), and Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître (1955) have been a point of fascination for my musical practice since I first performed the works in the early 2000s. The impact of those pieces on future generations of percussion-hungry composers was irreversible. In that era, more was more: instruments were added to orchestration manuals - taxonomies of timbral identities - their histories removed, their stories erased.

[Berio’s Circles, 1960]
Wood blocks
Guiro
Mexican bean rattle
Log drum
Wood chimes
Sandpaper blocks
Marimba
Bongos
Tom toms
Timpani
Triangles
Hihat
Cymbals
Tam Tams
Cowbells
Lujon
Chimes
Clave
Finger cymbals
Glass chimes
Vibraphone
Chinese gongs
Tambourine
Snare drum
Congas
Kick drum
Temple blocks
Xylophone

1960 - 1965: More in Less
Pauline Oliveros and Ashley Fure offer a different approach: there is more in less. Unlike Berio, Stockhausen, et al, neither engage the extensive percussion collections acquired through suspect means. Instead, they (along with John Cage in his Cartridge Music [1965]) look to the internal essence of a small number of objects for expressive potential.

Pauline Oliveros discovered tools to investigate the materials of sound. Applebox Double nudges percussion toward a model which looks inward; one in which the onus is on the performer to examine sounds for the sake of their inherent characteristics rather than looking outward in order to collect, colonize, and exploit.

2015 - 2017: The Essentials
When Ashley Fure and I began our research for her opera “The Force of Things,” very few specific sounds were predetermined. We began with a desire to find an essential, sonic life-force within everyday objects. In so doing, objects took on new identities and meaning. It’s difficult to perform Berio’s Circles after a process like this. Though I find the piece beautiful, the act of assembling those instruments only to dutifully strike them (further tokenizing and typecasting their timbres) feels like cultural tourism.

In Shiver Lung 2 the power of the percussionist to strike the instruments is suppressed. Instead, two subwoofer speaker cones (oscillating at the inaudible frequency of 10.67 cycles per second) liberate the essential voice within simple objects. The percussionist is merely an advocate for these voices.

Fure and Oliveros allow us to see and hear combs, socket wrenches, bouncy balls, paper, beads, and the entire hardware store completely differently. These are not disposable, purpose-driven materials and tools. They are partners in an ever-evolving collaboration of sonic expression. Oliveros and Fure foster respect for the inanimate so that the history within each of these objects can be acknowledged. They have so many stories to tell.