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Move over, Ringo Starr and Lars Ulrich. The guys in the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet are here to show that classical percussionists can make some wild noise, too. Their third album, “Beyond,” redefines what percussion includes, and what percussion music can sound like.
The four members of LAPQ — which started in 2009 — are Nick Terry, Matthew Cook, Cory Hills and Justin DeHart. The repertoire for percussion quartets is fairly large, DeHart said, but the first work was only written in the 1940s, “So it’s less than a hundred years old. We don’t have the great quartets of the 19th or 18th Century, even. So it’s relatively new. But it’s a building area of repertoire, and this is one of our missions, to expand that.”
“The albums are definitely a cornerstone” for the group, Hart said, “because one of our missions is to not just commission and perform the works, but also create really high-quality recordings.”
“This new album is LAPQ’s departure outward,” explained Cook. “The first two albums were only West Coast composers, but we’ve started to re-explore what the idea of local or community meant to us. So, two of the composers are technically from Iceland. One of them, Daniel Bjarnason, was just the curator of the Reykjavik Festival at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The other is Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who went to college with Justin. So even though they’re not local, they kind of have a community tie to us.”
On this day, three of the group's members were in a conference room at Disney Hall, where they had been rehearsing with the L.A. Philharmonic and the opera company, The Industry, in a production of “Young Caesar.” Spread out on a table was an odd assortment of objects, including some empty beer bottles.
“What we do is we blow across the top and fill the bottles with different amounts of water,” Hart demonstrated, “which either raises the pitch or lowers it from the fundamental when there’s nothing in the bottle. This is in Chris Cerrone’s piece, ‘Memory Palace,’ and it’s in the last movement where Matt and I have four bottles each, and we kind of have this melodic exchange, while Nick and Justin are rolling on the marimba, sort of creating some harmonies in the background.”
Hart demonstrated another sound from the album: hitting a ceramic bowl, with a mallet, containing different amounts of water.
“It’s part of Andrew McIntosh’s 45-minute piece called ‘I Hold the Lion’s Paw,’” Cook explained. “The very beginning of the piece, we all play quarter-notes on the bowls to set up the mood. Nick starts pouring in the water to raise the pitch just a little bit, and then we basically all match it. So over the course of this whole work the piece kind of changes, and it’s like the audience is sinking, in a way.”
“A lot of what we use is called ‘found percussion,’” said DeHart, “or instruments that you can find at the store, or sometimes in the gutter. And we’re trying to bring life to these impoverished instruments, and make music with it.”
DeHart moved to a row of pipes on the table, with a different note written in marker on each one:
“These are some aluminum pipes, cut to length by the composer himself, Andrew McIntosh. He meticulously tuned each one of these pipes to some kind of quarter-tone, so they’re all kind of in the cracks. But then he combines these, often, with a similar sounding instrument that you can buy at the store, a vibraphone, which is also aluminum bars. When you put them together, you get this kind of gamelan, shimmer effect.”
“Beyond” was recorded in 9.1 Blu-ray Surround Sound, although the release also includes two regular CDs.
“When we recorded the piece,” said Cook, “basically they have a tower set up in the middle of the room with nine microphones in every direction. So when you listen to it in surround sound, it’s this totally immersive experience that I think, in a live concert, would be very hard to fully realize. The stereo version, it will sound beautiful, but there’s this totally immersive experience that’s very unique, if you can listen to it in surround sound.”
"Beyond" is available through streaming services and at select outlets.