Feel the power of every measure

Andy Akiho (b. 1979) 
Percussion Concerto (2021) 

Composers who perform tend to be pianists or conductors, but not Andy Akiho. A specialist on steel pans, his favored bailiwick is percussion ensemble, so often relegated to building annexes or basements given its ability to crank up the decibels to hard-rock levels. But that’s not all that’s going on behind those heavy soundproofed doors. Just because percussionists create sound by hitting stuff, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have to hit it hard. They can conjure up delicately transparent fantasias just as readily as they can peel the paint off the walls. 

Time spent listening to Akiho’s output reveals a kaleidoscopic sonic imagination at work, from gossamer embroideries to thundering bombardments. With the Grammy-nominated group Sandbox Percussion he has created album-length works that never fail to fascinate, such as his 2021 Seven Pillars. But he’s just as intriguing beyond his regular haunts; consider his recent BeLonging with the wind group Imani Winds or LigNEousS Suite for string quartet and marimba. 

One of the happier discoveries of modern times is that composers needn’t restrict themselves to traditional orchestral percussion instruments. Timpani, xylophone, tubular bells, bass drums, and all the rest are all perfectly well and good, but there’s so much more great stuff out there – not only such remarkable developments as Trinidad and Tobago’s steel pans, but also the contents of one’s kitchen, garage, and garden shed. Composers such as John Cage and George Crumb came up with fascinating alternative instruments – car wheels struck by construction hammers, jewelry chains dropped across the strings of a piano, toy whistles, baby rattles, and so forth. All things considered, perhaps the best place to seek out new percussion instruments might be one’s neighborhood Ace Hardware. 

That Andy Akiho’s 2021 Percussion Concerto would bask in novel sounds and ‘found’ percussion instruments is to be expected: Akiho is a synesthete, a person who experiences a mixing of the senses. In musicians, synesthesia most commonly manifests as an association of certain pitches and key centers with colors; in general, no two synesthetes share the same associations, nor is it common for them to have associations for all pitches or keys. (As a bonafide synesthetic musician myself, I can attest that certain keys or pitches evoke no colors whatsoever for me, while others are strongly coupled.) Akiho has even written a Synesthesia Suite that reflects his tendency to think in terms of not only colors, but also shapes: “When I’m memorizing music, it’s photographic almost to the colors,” he says. “But with rhythms, it is shapes.”  

Akiho employs numerous found instruments throughout the Concerto, such as the first movement’s amplified and tuned rice bowls, played with chopsticks, or the third movement’s whimsical duo of toy piano with solo violin, accompanied magical glints from a glass bottle. Traditional percussion isn’t absent, either: consider the use of the marimba for the solo in the second movement. Fasten your seatbelts for the finale, a sizzling concoction of “grooves, climaxes, and an epic coda” that positively glories in Akiho’s signature steel pans. 

When the Percussion Concerto was premiered by the Oregon Symphony on October 12, 2019 it brought down the house, as well it should. An exhilarating mix of sounds, its vibrant creativity and sheer heady joy combine to fashion a musical journey that’s as much fun to play as it is to hear. (Nota bene: it may end just a bit later than you expect.) 

Brittany Green (b. 1991) 
Testify! (2024)  

It starts with a solo tambourine riff. Then about two-thirds of the orchestra members proceed to whoop it up with random exclamations of joy. That happy outburst sets the mood for Brittany Green’s 2024 Testify!, an unfettered celebration of rhythm, sound, and the basic joy of being alive and human. One would have to be the gloomiest Gus in town not to succumb to the sheer exuberance of it all. The score directs the orchestra to play with spirit!, and it’s clear that Green means it with her whole heart and soul. 

“Many of my earliest musical memories are from the church,” Green tells us. “As a young girl, I was always enamored by the rhythms of instruments and bodies sounding and moving in jubilation and perfect harmony. I remember watching Mama – a self-proclaimed ‘non-musician – work her way around a tambourine, making it dance and sing like magic. Watching her I would get lost in the sizzle of the jingles and the glistening light that would shimmer off them and onto the pew as she played.” 

The North Carolina-based composer has worked with a wide range of collaborators and takes full advantage of today’s sonic landscape to craft her compelling, vibrant, and deeply-felt messages. Many of her works explore the intersections of sound, video, movement, and text, including spoken and electronic performance in addition to large ensemble works. 

“Mama made the impossible happen every day of the week,” she remembers, “and when she plays the tambourine, even to this day I feel like I’m in a whirlwind of sound and technicolor. For me, it’s a little slice of heaven on Earth.” 

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) 
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878) 

The story of the Fourth Symphony is interwoven with two women’s associations with Tchaikovsky. One relationship was long-lasting and nurturing, the other brief and catastrophic. 

First up, the catastrophe: Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a former pupil of Tchaikovsky’s at the Moscow Conservatory who, smitten, made advances of marriage. In what surely ranks high on the list of impulsive follies amongst the great composers, the homosexual Tchaikovsky married Antonina Ivanovna on July 6, 1877 after a ridiculously brief courtship. It wasn’t long before he fled in near-panic. They separated after six weeks, although they remained legally married until Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893. Antonina Ivanova’s confused and chaotic life ended in 1917, after twenty years in a sanitarium.  

Tchaikovsky’s self-inflicted marital wounds made for ripe fodder in his burgeoning epistolary relationship with Nadezdha von Meck, a formidable matriarch who had cajoled her engineer husband Karl into the nascent Russian railroad business. Karl’s sudden death in 1873 left Nadezdha an enormously wealthy, albeit imperious, widow with a passion for family, music, and patronage. Tchaikovsky entered her orbit right around the time of the Antonina Ivanova affair, and before long she began subsidizing him to the tune of 6,000 rubles a year – a lavish income for the time. Hauteur notwithstanding, she and Tchaikovsky exchanged frank, affectionate, and surprisingly intimate letters back and forth over the span of her thirteen-year sponsorship of Tchaikovsky’s career, her only proviso being that the two were never to meet in person. Financial setbacks eventually compelled her to end the subsidy, but by then Tchaikovsky didn’t really need it. 

“Our symphony progresses” wrote Tchaikovsky to von Meck in August 1877, then in December assured her that “I am working hard on the orchestration of our symphony and am quite absorbed in the task.” Our symphony – No. 4 in F Minor, dedicated to “my best friend” von Meck – marks a breakthrough not only in Tchaikovsky’s development as a symphonist, but also in the history of the genre itself. 

The Fourth makes brilliant use of a motto theme, a brief musical pattern that is heard throughout the symphony and acts as an overall unifying device. It’s impossible to miss, stated fortissimo right at the beginning in the horns and bassoons. “As though Schumann’s Spring symphony had suddenly joined the army,” quipped critic Louis Elson at the work’s Boston premiere. “This is fate, that inevitable force which checks our aspirations towards happiness ere they reach the goal,” wrote Tchaikovsky to von Meck in an ill-advised programmatic description that teeters on the border between silliness and surrealism. 

Very little about the first movement conforms to textbook expectations of traditional sonata-allegro form. The key changes don’t follow the rules. The themes morph and blend into each other and usually pop up without appropriately genteel transitions. But no matter. Tchaikovsky grows his materials from their original seeds with such confidence and technical skill as to squelch the usual naysayers. It works, and that’s all that really matters. 

The remaining movements are less revolutionary but none the less remarkable. An exquisite Andantino in modo di canzona states a haunting melody then embarks on a journey of elegant variations. The third-place Scherzo: Pizzicato Ostinato was a blockbuster hit from the get-go, thanks to its novel orchestration with plucked strings for the main reprise, a wind band for the first contrasting episode, and a brass band for the second. The final pianissimo strums on the strings give way abruptly to the torrential Finale, which provides another vehicle for endless commentarial squabbling thanks to a form that defies easy categorization. At least nobody argues about the little folk song There Stood a Little Birch that serves as its primary theme, nor is anyone likely to miss the recurrence of the great fanfare motto theme, after which the Fourth hurls to its spectacular conclusion.