A Recital by the Aspen Percussion Ensemble
Jonathan Haas, conductor

A Recital by the

Aspen Percussion Ensemble

By Matthew Mugmon

In 2003 Jonathan Haas, long-serving percussion faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival and School and director of its percussion ensemble, introduced a remarkable—and monumental—musical object: the world’s largest timpani, which Haas built from a seventy-inch copper bowl found on a nearby ranch. As quoted in an article by Stewart Oksenhorn in the Aspen Times, Haas described its sound as “like thunder in the distance—you can actually feel the air moving. It moves so much air that, to really hear it, you have to be forty feet away from it.” Haas’s passion as a percussionist has centered on the timpani, an instrument that he has recently played alongside orchestras worldwide in Philip Glass’s Concerto Fantasy for two timpanists and orchestra. In fact, Glass composed that work for Haas, who has worked tirelessly to promote the instrument, including in his forays into Jazz and Rock. (Rock music has also inspired Glass, three of whose symphonies were in direct dialogue with David Bowie albums.)

Haas’s connection to Glass extends beyond the Fantasy. Glass’s music for Godfrey Reggio’s landmark 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi intensifies the visual experience of time-lapse and slow-motion journeying through various natural and human-made environments, and it showcases Glass’s signature style of cycles of repeated arpeggios and oscillations overtop sustained notes. Glass also wrote the music for its 1988 sequel, Powaqqatsi; the excerpt for this concert, Haas’s arrangement of “Train to São Paulo,” joins a long history of musical works that evoke the sights and sounds of trains—here, train whistles and the chugging of a locomotive. That hypnotic chugging ceases toward the end of the piece, where fast figures combine with a measured fanfare that ends abruptly.

Following this brief segment of Glass’s music on the program is Javier Diaz’s Alchemy, for metal sculptures. Diaz, who is based in New York, has taught at several institutions in the New York area; he has performed across genres and media and has established himself as an expert on Afro-Cuban percussion, and he composed this work while a student at Juilliard. Alchemy is of course the medieval pseudoscience of converting various metals into gold, and that title along with the composition’s sonic world conveys a sense both of transformation and of the intense, inquisitive experimentation one might encounter in an alchemist’s workshop. In this mesmerizing accumulation of sonorities, Diaz creates an atmospheric dreamscape in which rhythmic patterns are established, intensified, layered, exchanged, and dissipated. Toward the piece’s conclusion, a thunderous climax yields to a meditative passage with spoken interjections from the performers.

Stewart Copeland, like Haas, Glass, and Diaz, has developed a career that crosses the boundaries between classical and popular music. Copeland has written operas, ballets, and film scores, though his most high-profile musical role was as drummer for the immensely popular Rock group The Police, alongside Sting and guitarist Andy Summers, in the late 1970s and early 1980s and for the trio’s 2007–08 reunion. (Recently, on his album Police Deranged for Orchestra, Copeland offered arrangements of many of the group’s hit songs.) Copeland’s new work, The Bells, had its premiere just this past April with Juilliard’s Pre-College Percussion Ensemble. And it’s difficult not to hear some of Copeland’s trademark drumming approaches with the Police—with his virtuosic, polyphonic, and colorful treatment of the drum kit—in this engaging and quirky piece. At the start of The Bells, castanets establish a triplet pattern, soon taken up by the marimba and returned to the castanet, that will remain prevalent throughout the work. Here Copeland uses a range of instruments, including tubular bells and crotales, to allow the piece to live up to the title. The triplet figure transforms into a quick short-short-short-long pattern in the playful second section, which highlights xylophone and marimbas as well as glockenspiel, timpani, and bass drum. In a short transitional passage, the performers see this puckish instruction: “Air drumming across six imaginary tom-toms in the sky (from left to right).” The final section begins with the initial triplets, which return in a jumbled marimba melody, and, after a mysterious interlude, in the xylophones before briefly revisiting the castanets. As the work comes to a close, Copeland combines chromatic scales and jaunty melodic fragments with unexpected pauses and the persistent triplet rhythms.

If the instrumental palette in Copeland’s The Bells is fairly traditional (except, of course, for the “six imaginary tom-toms in the sky”), then that in Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June is quite the opposite. Tan, who was born and trained as a musician in China, moved to the United States in the 1980s and studied at Columbia University. Tan’s accessible and engaging style combines a close attention to his own Chinese heritage with adventurous compositional decisions that point beyond the Western classical tradition. It was during his time at Columbia that he composed Elegy: Snow in June, for cello and four percussionists, and this work’s adventurousness comes partly in the form of his choice of low-tech forces to go with (or against) the cello—specifically, as he described it, “the singing” of this instrument “contrasts with the sound of tearing paper or the roughness of stones and cans.” The piece’s topic, as Tan explained, came “from a thirteenth-century Chinese drama by Kuan Han-Ching, in which a young woman, Duo Eh, is executed from crimes she did not commit. Even nature cries out for her innocence—her blood does not fall to the earth but flies upward, a heavy snow falls in June, and a drought descends for three years. Elegy sings of pity and purity, beauty and darkness, and is a lament for victims everywhere.”

In the work, various colorful sounds from the cello begin the proceedings in a slow introduction, with responses from the percussionists, including the use of bells and stones; an instruction for them to “improvise freely on all instruments” leads to a faster section. Tan describes the whole work as “a set of free variations,” and adds, “Beginning with sparse, searching phrases, it coalesces to a theme which emerges in the middle then disperses again.” Throughout, passages of calm, atmospheric introspection give way to intense outbursts, and then back again, as Tan has his performers straddle the line between competition and cooperation. The paper tearing, one instance of which is heard at the very end of the piece as its final utterance, provides a visually and aurally striking effect. (Ahead of a previous Aspen performance of this piece, Andrew Travers’s report in the Aspen Times noted that Haas and his musicians determined that “the pages from the New York Times Magazine produced just the right tearing sound.”)

The program closes with a beginning: an arrangement for percussion of English singer, songwriter, and drummer Phil Collins’s 1981 hit song “In the Air Tonight,” his first single. For most of the original song, although drumming sounds are present, the rhythm section is mostly subdued, with sustained synthesizer tones and a simple repeating harmonic pattern aligning with the sense of anticipation found in the song’s lyrics. But the song’s most distinctive moment is an aggressive drum lead-in to the final chorus, with the prominent drums and bassline from that point on providing a sense of immediacy after a stunning moment of arrival. Another moment of arrival does take place slightly earlier in the song, with drums emphasized to accompany the words “I remember,” anticipating the more definitive moment at the start of the final chorus.

These two moments of arrival—on the words “I remember” and at the start of final chorus—matter because of Javier Diaz’s focus on these moments in his ingenious arrangement of the song, commissioned by both Haas and ESPN and showcased on ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown in 2021, with percussionists from New York University (where Haas teaches). Here, after an introduction that conveys the same sense of mystery as Collins’s original, Diaz amplifies the smaller moment of arrival (“I remember,” at the second verse in Collins’s version). Then, in the climactic moment of Diaz’s arrangement, Collin’s signature drum pattern—from the more definitive moment of arrival—ushers in a monumental climax. Rather than fading out the chorus and ending his arrangement there, though, Diaz has a surprise in store: the ensemble repeats an abridged version of the signature pattern, calms briefly, and then repeats the full version of that pattern four times, immediately joining it with a reference to the song’s “I remember” riff as the final two notes. The only thing missing from sending this program’s final sounds through the air and into the night is a seventy-inch timpani.

— © Matthew Mugmon

Jonathan Haas is known worldwide as a soloist, orchestral timpanist, percussionist, conductor, teacher, clinician, and entrepreneur. He has garnered international acclaim for his performances of Philip Glass’s Concerto Fantasy for two timpanists and orchestra, which he commissioned and has performed seventy times worldwide with numerous top orchestras. Haas is the principal percussionist of the American Symphony, principal timpanist of the New York Pops Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, principal timpanist of the Aspen Chamber Symphony, percussionist of the American Composers Orchestra, and president of Gemini Music Productions. Haas is a professor of music, director of percussion studies, co-director of the orchestra program, and conductor of the Contemporary Music Ensemble at New York University. He also teaches at the Juilliard Pre-College Division (JPC), and conducts the JPC and Aspen percussion ensembles. Haas has performed and recorded with Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Aerosmith; Black Sabbath; The Who; and Grammy award-winning Zappa’s Universe, among others. In his quest to showcase the timpani in unusual musical settings, Haas is known for his Hot Jazz Timpani performances and for highlighting a unique instrumental combination with his nine-piece Latin/Jazz ensemble, Johnny H. & The Prisoners of Swing. Haas is also the author of the timpani method book Jazz Virtuostics for Timpani.

A first-prize winner of the Cleveland Cello Society Competition and the Oberlin Bach Competition, Miles Reed is a cellist of remarkable creativity and passion. Miles has premiered new works in various ensembles including the Oberlin Orchestra, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Reed Trio, and others. In the fall of 2024 he premiered Katya Mueller’s Cello Concerto with the Oberlin Sinfonietta. Other highlights in Miles’s performance career include the American premiere of two works by Alex Paxton at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival and his performance as soloist in Shulamit Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus with the Oberlin Sinfonietta. The work Miles does in Aspen this summer is supported by a Susan and Ford Schumann Scholarship