On January 26th, I attended the VSO’s 100th anniversary celebration at the Orpheum. This festival had many performances occurring at the same time in different locations of the venue. One of these was the UBC Percussion Ensemble performing in the lobby of the Orpheum. If you have been to the venue, you can visualize the lobby in front of the Orpheum stage doors as an open area below four levels of four balconies in each direction. Although there was no front stage for the ensemble to perform, the musicians were perched above the lobby on each balcony.
The director encouraged the audience to roam around the lobby and different floors to explore the different instruments, but I decided to stand on the bottom floor in the middle of everything. In this position, I was equally exposed to all of the notes and sounds coming from all directions. This creates an experience where with a polyphonic piece such as Jordan Nobles’s “Perseid Cloud”, being surrounded by the music can pull the audience’s attention everywhere instead of focusing on one voice.
The first piece was Nobles’s “Perseid Cloud”, a piece only played on glockenspiel. Nobles, who was present during the performance, claims that by only using glockenspiels it can give an “out of this world” atmospheric ambiance. The 12 glockenspiels used in this performance represented astroids, or more specifically the debris resonating from a comet; a Perseid Cloud. Although there were 12 glockenspiels used, there appeared to be only 4 voices, and sometimes these voices were isolated for easier detection. Due to my position, sometimes I would hear the isolated voice from my (relative) west, and then it would travel along the glockenspiels on my north and south to the east wing’s voice. This created a sense of being immersed in the music, cultivating an appreciation for the delicate notes from the glockenspiels cascading down from the four levels and surrounding the audience.
The ensemble’s second piece was “Pillow Talking Shop” by Erin Graham. Performed on glockenspiels, xylophones, drum toms, suspended cymbals, finger cymbals, a snare, cowbell, and a wood block, this contained more of a variety of instruments than the previous piece. The piece began with a homorhythmic trill of chords for each voice on the glockenspiels and xylophones. From there, the glockenspiels were being played with the handles of the mallets. This put an emphasis on the rhythm, and allowed the xylophones to carry out the main voice of the melody. At one point, on one side the cymbals and tambourines played, then the timpani and toms would repeat the same rhythms on the other side of the lobby. This was an excellent use of imitation, which allowed the audience to isolate the sounds coming from the left and right sides.
The third piece was another by Jordan Nobles, “Oort Cloud”. This was similar to “Perseid Cloud”, except with cymbals. Before this day, I had never encountered pieces composed in the way Nobles writes. Not only is an all-percussion ensemble atypical in modern pop culture, but there appeared to be a clear direction for the despite despite the amount of instruments and layers of polyphony.