Category: percussion

blog, life, percussion

Music for 18 Musicians

christinahopgood

(Photo from the 2004 version)

For the past few months, our ANU Percussion Ensemble (DRUMatiX) and some other ANU instrumentalists have been rehearsing Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.  We finally performed it today at the Fitters Workshop as the grand finale of the Canberra International Music Festival.

I personally have fond memories associated with Music for 18 Musicians.  It was performed by the DRUMatiX back in 2004 when Charles was in first year and I was still in year 11 (See above photo from GaryFrance.com).  It was in a concert with lots of pieces, and I went to see Charles perform mostly.  He wasn’t in 18 Musicians so we could sit and watch it together.  It blew my mind!  That was my first Reich exposure.

It’s a piece with lots of instruments: 3 marimbas, 2 xylophones, vibraphone, 4 pianos, 4 singers, 2 bass clarinets, a violin and a cello.  It’s a minimalist piece with not much in the way of melody, so I would call it a sound work rather than a regular instrumental piece.  It’s exploring the different sounds that the combinations of instruments and harmonies can create, in a very repetitive and mesmerising way.

I was the Xylophone 1 player – that meant I had the easy part of playing on the beat while my friend the Xylo 2 player had to play off the beats.  Difficult for her!

Today it was kind of cold in the venue so I wore my cardigan – but that turned out to be a huge mistake!  I got extremely hot playing and almost died.  I managed to take off my cardigan in a resting part and felt better.  The piece itself went very well indeed!  All the wonky bits went very smoothly.  We got a standing ovation and each got a flower.

The performance was in the Fitters Workshop in Kingston.  There has been a lot of fuss recently in Canberra about that venue, because it is going to be scrapped as a music venue and turned into a gallery or something.  Musicians from all around are throwing hissy fits because they claim that it’s a wonderful venue for music, acoustically and visually.  There have been petitions and letters to the paper and blogs and speeches.  I agree that it’s okay acoustically (if you’re a singer or a solo guitarist or something) but the problems associated with performing there outweigh the benefits.  Charles wrote a great blog about it recently, and I have some thoughts to add to his.

(Fitters Workshop, Kingston.  Basically a barn.)

I’ve been rehearsing and performing there on and off for over two weeks now.  And I have to say it’s one of the more unpleasant places to play in Canberra.  During the day, the sun shines in the giant windows and blinds everyone – players, audience – and also is really hot on whoever it hits.  At night, it becomes super cold and the drums all tighten up. 
All the venue is, is a hall.  Everything else has to be provided – toilets, seating, heating, lighting, ushers, even the stage needs to be brought.  There’s no backstage area and no foyer. No toilets, you guys!!

Why do people like it so much?  It’s trendy because it’s in Kingston, the venue has an arty sort of history, it’s next to the Glassworks and the Markets (two very fashionable places to be seen), it’s nice to look at, it has free parking, and it’s cheap to hire.  Oh, and apparently it has a nice acoustic.  When rehearsing 18 Musicians in the venue, we’ve been having enormous trouble hearing each other from just metres away.  The sound is good out in the audience, but it’s extremely difficult to stay in time.

So in short: today they had a petition to save the Fitter’s Workshop and I didn’t sign it.


Me before I took my cardigan off!  I had a hot flush!  But I played very well nevertheless!
craft, life, percussion

Photo from the radio peeps!

christinahopgood
Last Thursday, some lovely chaps from ABC Canberra’s local radio station came and did some interviewing, recording, and photographing of a rehearsal for the Harrison Organ Concerto.
They took a great photo of me playing my boxes (and a bass drum): 
These are boxes that my dad hand crafted according to instructions in the score.  They took him ages and ages to make!  They are cubes, 21″, 16″ and 11″ (not that I usually use Imperial, but that was the specification).  The striking surface of each cube is a thinner gauge plywood.  It took a lot of calculations and measurements and tricky pre-drilling of holes, but we made them and then my mum varnished them.  Aren’t they good?
My dad is the best.
Yay craft!
life, percussion

2 Concerts on Friday!

christinahopgood
It was a dark and stormy night… on Friday the 13th…
On Friday the percussion ensemble met at uni at 9am to begin our giant day of concerts.  We had two to perform in the one day – one in the High Court, and one in Albert Hall.
Each concert was to use a giant percussion setup, none of which overlapped at all.  We hired a truck and started packing for the first concert, which needed lots of cymbals, two marimbas, two vibraphones, and a giant tam tam, amongst other things.  We played that first concert with Synergy Percussion, which was fun.  They played a great piece called Good Medicine which I really liked.
After that concert, we packed up all our stuff and shoved on over to Albert Hall.  Gary took some boys in the truck back to uni to get the rest of the gear (sooooo much stuff…) and left us girls to set up what was left.  Eventually everything was there and we set up for the concert.
It sounds so easy when I write it down!  It was super exhausting.
Then we played the concert, with a huge re-set in the middle.  Photos:
 This is the first piece we did, you can juuuust see me in the back there.  This was the Lou Harrison Organ Concerto we played with the amazing organist Calvin Bowman.  It says on the website it was with Synergy, but it was NOT.  Every time it says “DRUMatiX”, that’s us!
 Next piece: Carmen, as arranged for small string orchestra and percussion ensemble.  More gear!
After the concert, the organiser said “We need to have the stage clear in 20 minutes… there’s another concert on” so we had to run around like hairy goats trying to pack everything down.  Then it was back to uni to put everything back!  Two truck trips!
So we eventually got to leave at about 10:30pm after starting at 9am that day.  Long day!  But it was good fun to be with my percussion friends all day!
life, percussion

Canberra International Music Festival – Concert 1!

christinahopgood
Today I played in the first concert of the Canberra International Music Festival.  It was mostly a choral concert, but one piece had 4 percussion as well.  It was the three first-year boys and me.  My teacher wanted me to be principal percussionist as a learning experience.  I felt like I was their mother.

The piece we were in was Requiem by Peter Sculthorpe, a renowned Australian composer.  It was for a large SATB choir, timpani, 3 percussionists, organ, and didgeridoo.  The choral parts were fairly straightforward – lots of “kyrie eleison” and “sanctus” and stuff.  Percussion parts were nice and easy and we worked them up well in only one rehearsal.

The composer, Peter Sculthorpe, was there for the concert and made a little speech too.  He’s a really old lovely man, and quite famous.  My workplace, the ANU Music Library, has so many Sculthorpe scores.  People love it.

As Principal Percussionist (or maybe just as the one with a car) I was the driver for the boys – that meant a lot of driving over the last few days.  I also made sandwiches for them today.  Once, I made a musical suggestion to one of them.  And that’s how you be a section leader!

Lots more concerts coming up for the festival too.  On Friday we have 2 big concerts on the same day and then we have another in a couple of weeks.  It means lots of rehearsals and lots of packing and unpacking trucks full of percussion!