“Kurt Grissom and three other longtime percussionists for the Florida Orchestra were practicing Third Construction, a 12-minute piece they will perform this weekend at the orchestra’s Mozart and More masterworks concerts,” writes Andrew Meacham in Tuesday’s (1/19) Tampa Bay Times (Florida). “The musicians will make music on everything from animal bones to beer kegs. It should be a jarring diversion from the rest of the program, which begins with Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks concerto. Third Construction comes after intermission, between Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 and Symphony No. 39. Composer John Cage, who believed ‘everything is music,’ wrote the piece in 1941, following two similar works that used piano, cardboard, anvils and the brake drums from cars. This percussion piece was his most expansive, making use of a wide range of primitive and do-it-yourself instruments, from tin cans to a donkey’s jawbone, a conch shell or metal tacks in a jar.… They began to play, and the piece unfurled with offsetting ticktocks and clangs, cowbells and pill bottles on top of offsetting drumbeats. A hypnotic pull settled in quickly, not just from the unusual collection of sounds but the meticulous structure. This was no improvisational drum circle.”
Posted January 22, 2016
