"'Gutterflys' is written to illustrate the feeling or expression of having butterflies in your stomach. Nerves are a natural emotion that we all experience, so I wanted to capture that in this piece as authentically as I could." -JaRon Brown 

Learn more about Brown's work: https://www.wildlightpublications.com/

Recorded February 2021 at Third Coast Percussion's rehearsal studio.
Audio capture and editing by Colin D Campbell.
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JaRon Brown is a composer with his bachelor’s degree in music composition from The University of South Carolina. He has studied composition under the direction of Dr. John Fitz Rogers and Dr. David K. Garner, as well as percussion with Dr. Scott Herring and Dr. Brett Landry. While at The University of South Carolina, he has had the luxury of premiering four of his most recent works Fragmented Shards of Crystallized Water (2015), Neurobaloo (2016), RIPEHEART (2017), and Giant Woman (2017). Most recently he provided original music for an all new original play script entitled "Growing up Alice" for the Blythewood High School drama team under the direction of Sandra Dietel, which won the South Carolina division in competition in 2017. He is a co-founder of Wildlight Publications: https://www.wildlightpublications.com/
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Third Coast Percussion is a GRAMMY® Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet. For fifteen years, the ensemble has created exciting and unexpected performances that constantly redefine the classical music experience. To learn more, visit: 
https://thirdcoastpercussion.com/​​
And join our email list:
http://bit.ly/TCP-email-list

Gutterflys by JaRon Brown

January 31, 2014 - Yellow Barn, Ann Arbor MI.

Hanuman's Leap Live in Ann Arbor with Willo Collective

Download on bandcamp! https://yaddayadda.bandcamp.com/track/has-to-be

Has To Be

Nox is scored for an open instrumentation comprised of voices, woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. The performers are organized into four groups that surround the audience. The result is an immersive and highly visceral sonic experience that is played in partial darkness.

The title of the piece is drawn from Anne Carson's Nox, an elegiac scrapbook filled with bits of letters, photos, personal reflections, and a moving translation of poem No. 101 by Catullus. Through the linear and spatial arrangement of these artifacts, Carson forges an intense atmosphere that connects the ancient and the modern, intimacy and distance, present experience and memory. These connected oppositions emerge within the music despite the fact that the piece itself is not expressly programmatic. 

Nox was commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival and is dedicated to Augusta Read Thomas.

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. If Congress is quiescent and the public listless, Donald Trump can set the country down a path toward illiberalism, institutional subversion, and endemic graft. Full Text can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

How to Build an Autocracy - David Frum - The Atlantic March 2017

Artwork by JoshhMadeIt
Mixed and Mastered by Don "Hullio" Outten

Red Beans & Rice

cope (2017) for vibraphone and tape

Premiered Friday, April 14 at The Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University amongst a multimedia exhibition entitled "Convergence: Digital Media and Technology" 

I began writing "cope" in December 2016 after my dear friend, Matthew Reynolds, asked me to present a piece at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration his campus was hosting the following month. An early sketch of the piece was presented at his campus in January 2017. My initial reactions to the idea of writing a piece for such an event in a time of political unrest caused me to feel a bit overwhelmed. 

"cope" is born out of a desire to deconstruct systems, to simplify and rationalize a set of specific ideas in search of the ideal––a somewhat dangerous notion depending on where you call home. It is not an inherently political work. (Although, one of the earliest sketches was dedicated to the memory of Eric Garner, whose finale, pleading, haunting words were (eleven times over), “I can’t breathe,” as several officers squeezed and pressed the life out him on a sidewalk. This inclination was overcome and the dedication struck for several reasons.) To me, this piece is a reprieve, an opportunity to simply reflect.

Cope (Live) (excerpt, One Measure Before Rehearsal B To The End)

WDCB's Gary Zidek previews Hubbard Street Dance's new program, THERE WAS NOTHING/FOR ALL ITS FURY.

The Arts Section: Hubbard Street Dance & Third Coast Percussion Collaborate On World Premiere

*Recorded live at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the campus of University of Chicago on October 12, 2019.

Iguazú superior, antes de descender por la Garganta del Diablo
(“Upper Iguazú, before descending through the Devil’s Throat”)

Iguazú Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina, is (by some measures) the largest waterfall system in the world. The falls divide the Iguazú River into its upper (“superior”) and lower (“inferior”) segments, with about half of the river’s water flow dropping through a narrow chasm known as “The Devil’s Throat,” about 75 feet taller than Niagara Falls.

Haas’s percussion quartet stands out among his decades of tonally innovative music as a work focused on rhythm and texture, with no defined pitch. The 30-minute piece maintains a relentless momentum that persists even as textures thicken and thin, the music becomes louder and quieter, and new sounds are introduced. As the quartet emerges into sections that bubble gently, dart frenetically, or lock into angular, asymmetrical rhythms, it is always being pulled forward. Beneath it all is a rhythmic concept Haas first explored in his Three Pieces for Mollena — a constant tempo acceleration, which is sustained by occasionally introducing slower, related rhythms. Sometimes known as a “Risset Rhythm,” this is the rhythmic equivalent to the “Shepard Tone” used in many of Haas’s other works—an aural illusion of eternally rising pitch. 

The endless accelerando of Iguazu Superior provides a stretching foundation upon which a rich palette of percussive timbres interact. Haas provides an open-ended guideline for the four players to build matching set ups: 6 semi-resonant metals, 3 very resonant metals, 4 wood sounds, and 5 drums for each player. In addition, the players have a few specified unique instruments: a whip crack and bells for player 1, bass drums for player 2, particular cymbals and gongs for players 3 and 4. These specific instrumental sounds anchor the sound of the ensemble and provide dramatic punctuations at intense moments, while the freedom granted in choosing the other instruments create opportunities for each ensemble who performs this grandiose work to construct its own sound world.

Iguazú superior, antes de descender por la Garganta del Diablo was commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, with additional support from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University and the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. It was written for Third Coast Percussion.

Third Coast Percussion would like to an extend an additional thanks to the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, whose support of TCP’s Creative Workshop allowed for the development, workshopping, and preparation of this new work.

TCP 20191012

Iguazu superior, antes de descender por la Garganta del Diablo (2018) by Georg Friedrich Haas

Episode 42 - Sean Connors (Third Coast Percussion) / Archetypes

Third Coast Percussion is a GRAMMY® Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet and GRAMMY®-nominated composer collective. For over fifteen years, the ensemble has created exciting and unexpected performances that constantly redefine the classical music experience. The ensemble has been praised for “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) performances, the “rare power” (Washington Post) of their recordings, and “an inspirational sense of fun and curiosity” (Minnesota Star-Tribune). The four members of Third Coast Percussion are also accomplished teachers, and ensemble-in-residence at Denison University.

Iguazu superior, antes de descender por la Garganta del Diablo (2018) by Georg Friedrich Haas

Third Coast Percussion

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