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UNSNARED DRUM

MICHAEL COMPITELLO

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1. HEART.THROB | 2019 2. START | 2018 3. GHOST IN THE MACHINE | 2019 4. NEGATIVE MAGIC | 2019

Nina C. Young (b. 1984)Hannah Lash (b. 1981)Amy Beth Kirsten (b. 1972)Tonia Ko (b. 1988)

UNSNARED

DRUM

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What does it mean to Unsnare something? To free an instrument from expectation? The instrument is called the snare drum because of the wires underneath it; the metal, gut, or cable which give the drum a crisp, focused, energetic, and loud snap. In addition to its militaristic pedigree, the snare drum functions often as a timekeeper, offers coloristic effect, and is a technical prov-ing ground for percussionists. What does a performer do with an instrument which has such a seemingly narrow role? To me, the drum’s repertoire seemed a beautiful courtyard: wondrous and fertile, but ultimately constrained by walls of our own making. Unsnared Drum reframes how people think about, perform, and practice the snare drum, freeing the drum from its historical and idiomatic chains. It asks whether the snare drum could be bold, coy, suave, and elegant: in short, interesting. To that end, over the past four years, Nina Young, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Tonia Ko have patiently collaborated with me on surprising and inventive new works for solo snare drum. I sent each composer a drum and a collection of sticks, mallets, and other implements, and they investigated my favorite instrument from the ground up. The result is a collection of pieces which highlight the snare drum’s breadth of sonic possibility and depth of expressivity, revealing an instrument of drama, grace, and heart. Nina Young’s Heart.throb inverts our conception of percussive virtuosity with sly wit. In the piece, the characteristics most asso-ciated with percussive skill (quick, crisp, fleet passagework) are largely confined to the rim of the drum rather than the head and

NOTES

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muddied by electronic delay. Nina affixes a transducer to the head of the drum, turning the instrument into a speaker which broad-casts a pulsating and undulating bed of sinusoids. The performer acts as a filter, altering the pitch and resonance of the instrument by pressing and stirring mallets into the head, striking at various positions on the instrument’s rim, and, in the piece’s emotional center, effecting a stunning duet between a vocalise created by hand pressure on the drum and a stiff metal brush rubbed against the rim. An electronic swoop signals that adventure awaits, and the back half of Heart.throb is pure dance party, with an increas-ingly pulsating drum set against faster and faster passagework on the drum’s rim and head. The drum fights back, and by the end, the throbbing, urgent, enveloping texture can only be defeated by a powerful and muscular cadenza. Crisp, precise, dynamic, sharp, and uncompromising, Hannah Lash’s Start challenges the performer to begin again constantly. Start is based on a handful of sharp motives which are continu-ously, obsessively, monomaniacally, tenaciously, and explosively developed. The performer highlights these themes with (hopefully) dynamic élan, abetted by an array of implements (brushes, hands, metal and wood chopsticks) whose colors delineate formal sections. For Hannah, the features of the snare drum’s sound which make it so challenging to play—its brutally unforgiving sound, its sharp focus—are also pathways to highlight touch, finesse, and subtlety. Start never relaxes, and the piece’s jagged silences are gradually eliminated in pursuit of a breathless climax.

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Where Start uses timbre to elucidate motive, Amy Beth Kirsten’s Ghost in the Machine turns to color to reveal the true soul of the instrument. Like a modernist chef mobilizing myriad advanced techniques (and plenty of silverware) in pursuit of the “essence” of a flavor, Ghost in the Machine calls upon the performer to use a number of implements to chase the “pure” sound of the snare drum, that ghost so often caught in the machinery of rigid, milita-ristic music. In addition to a triangle set on the head and jangled with finger or mallet to sound like a groaning electric guitar, Amy deploys popping, echoing, clicking, clacking, jangling, buzzing, and dinging sounds in an increasingly dense groove, sautéing, sous vide-ing, and foaming the drum with shot glasses, knitting needles, and a wide assortment of sticks and mallets. The result is a grace-ful and pure declaration of the snare drum’s inner sound. Unsnared Drum concludes with Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic, which discovers an all-but-hidden realm of melody, harmony, and reso-nance by almost completely loosening the drum’s tuning. After an acclimating ritual which calls to mind an ancient storyteller finding their voice, we hear a meandering conversation between the clattering shell of the drum and the ringing head and a series of melodious sonic waterfalls which emulate the same vertiginous acceleration, transforming from curious to sinister. Directly in the center of the piece, the snares are activated, and the music repeats, buzzing with new life as sharp accents are juxtaposed against a tremulous texture. By the end, the performer gradually loosens the snares until they are deactivated again, unspooling Negative

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Magic’s rhythmic process. The only sound possible is the head itself, scratched by nails. The drum dissolves into air, escaping the beautiful garden’s walls.

“The drum reveals the drummer.” Nina’s program note for Heart.throb could aptly describe all of Unsnared Drum. Each of these works subverts our expectations of what the snare drum can do. More importantly, our workshop sessions, notational experiments, and sonic adventures challenged me to rethink what a percus-sionist can be, asking me to develop and refine new expressive pathways and percussive techniques while freeing me from rigid expectation and dogma. In the end, it is the performer—not the instrument—who is freed.

— Michael Compitello

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military marching bands,drumcore parades,sharp, staccato rudiments: The obvious story

of the snare drum.

delicate contrast, precision and care,passionate nuance:A secret love story

of warm resonance cradled by tension-coupled heads.

With simple technological mediation, the percussionist, our valiant heartthrob, pulses life into the membranes. The drummer reveals interior whispers resuscitated, amplified, filtered. The drum reveals the drummer.

— Nina Young

HEART.THROB

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When Mike Compitello first approached me about writing a solo snare drum piece, I remember being both excited and quite daunted by the prospect of what I could do for this instrument in the context of a solo piece. Mike explained to me that the snare drum represents in many ways the medium for some of a percussionist's finest technical control, and yet also carries with it so much perceived musical limitations being used oftentimes only as an affective and evocative signifier in an ensemble setting—implying something militaristic perhaps.

I wanted to take some of my most characteristic and dear musical aspirations and translate them to something which would make sense on solo snare. Eventually I arrived at the idea of a kind of developing variation technique, which I defined as a kind of rhythmic motive. I wanted to allow the instrument to express material that was not evocative of a particular thing, but more abstract, something Mike could make his own.

I am in awe of Mike's degree of precision and control at this instrument. It gives me great pleasure to hear the developing variations come out so clearly in his very capable hands.

— Hannah Lash

START

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Ghost in the Machine was inspired by the idea of consciousness carried in a physical entity. I wanted to see if I could find the snare drum’s hidden singing voice, some ways in which this instrument could manifest pitch that are hidden within the walls of its physical design. Many thanks to Mike for the many experiments we made together and to Avaloch Farm Music Institute for letting us play in the sandbox there.

— Amy Beth Kirsten

Negative Magic discovers richness and complexity by relinquishing control. Rather than acting upon the initial impulse to augment and add to the snare drum, I set about exploring the instrument’s many components. By doing so, the compositional challenge flipped in concept: I was not to write “just” for snare drum, but was rather curating a combined state of all the separate parts: the drum head, rim, and snares. My work maximizes the resonance and beating of the drum by tuning it irregularly: both the drumhead and snares are almost completely loosened. Since snare drums are wonderfully diverse, this set-up creates a sound world unique to every instrument. However, I imagine a common link between every new preparation of the drum, which is an atmosphere of a powerful ritual taking place between performer and instrument. This is perhaps not unlike a wizard stirring a magic cauldron, conjuring various potions and spells in a mysterious language.

— Tonia Ko

GHOST IN THE

MACHINE

NEGATIVE

MAGIC

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Michael Compitello is a dynamic, “fast rising” (WQXR) percussionist dedicated to commissioning and premiering new works that explore the sonic and expressive possibilities of percussion instruments.

He has developed sustained collaborations with composers such as Thomas Kotcheff, Tonia Ko, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Robert Honstein on new repertoire, in addition to working with Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, John Luther Adams, Alejandro Viñao, Marc Applebaum, and Martin Bresnick on premieres and performances of new solo and chamber works.

With cellist Hannah Collins as the “remarkably inventive and resourceful” (Gramophone) New Morse Code, Michael has created

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a singular and personal repertoire through collaboration with some of America’s most esteemed young composers. New Morse Code’s 2017 debut album Simplicity Itself on New Focus Recordings was described “an ebullient passage through pieces that each showcase the duo’s clarity of artistic vision and their near-perfect synchronicity” (I Care if You Listen) and “a flag of genuineness raised” (Q2 Music). In 2019 they released the title suite of Matthew Barnson’s portrait album, Vanitas, on Innova recordings and collaborated with Eliza Bagg, Lee Dionne, and andPlay on and all the days were purple, Alex Weiser’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist work on Cantaloupe Music.

Michael is also a member of Percussion Collective, an ensemble dedicated to refined performances of contemporary percussion repertoire, with whom he performed as soloist with the Colorado Symphony, and on concert series across the country. He is currently Assistant Professor of Percussion at Arizona State University. He holds degrees from The Yale School of Music and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

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Recorded February 6 & 7 2021 at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, New York

Engineering, mixing, and mastering: Ryan Streber Production: Nina YoungCover Art and Design: Laura Grey and Molly Haig, Laura Grey Studios (lauragrey.net)Photography: Four/Ten Media

Nina Young’s Heart.throb is published by Peermusic Classical.Hannah Lash’s Start is published by Schott Helicon Music Corporation.Amy Beth Kirsten’s Ghost in the Machine is published by Bad Wolf Music.Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic is published by Composers Edition.

THANKS TO

Ryan StreberJess SlavenDan LippelPatricia BrooksMalcolm CompitelloGina CompitelloArizona State University The University of KansasVic Firth Inc.Pearl/Adams Percussion Black Swamp PercussionAvaloch Farm Music InstituteSandbox PercussionFour/Ten MediaZoey Zuo

FOR MORE INFORMATION

michaelcompitello.comninacyoung.comhannahlash.comamybethkirsten.com

toniako.com