Program Notes

ANDY AKIHO
Pillars I and V from Seven Pillars (2021)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes, divided

Composing for percussion presents unique challenges, like the bewildering variety of instruments and techniques available to today’s players and the often-unintuitive physical choreography of performance. For this reason, it’s no coincidence that many of the 20th century’s most impactful percussion composers had hands-on playing experience, and this has continued to be true in the 21st century thanks to figures like Andy Akiho. A trained percussionist, Akiho began his musical education in a South Carolina middle school drumline. Later, he spent part of his 20s in Trinidad, where he learned that island’s native instrument, the steelpan. Both experiences left their mark on Akiho’s musical language, including in Seven Pillars, an 11-movement, evening-length cycle for percussion quartet that is Akiho’s most substantial achievement to date.

Filled with propulsive ticks and clicks, Pillar I has some of the rhythmic precision and dynamism of drumline, while Pillar V has a dark, ominous energy produced through the overlap of insistently repeating melodic fragments. Along with the rest of Seven Pillars, Pillar I and V make extensive use of “found” instruments like glass bottles, metal pipes and plywood. Both pieces also draw on a range of performance techniques to reimagine the sounds of more familiar percussion instruments. For instance, Pillar I sometimes instructs the performers to play on the “wrong” parts of instruments, like the bass drum’s shell.

Similarly, at the end of tonight’s program, Pillar V requires the vibraphone player to snap a large rubber band against the lowest bar and, in one passage, the performers strike keyboard percussion without lifting their mallets, preventing the instruments from resonating fully. Akiho is drawn to buzzy, “impure” sounds—timbres not always sought in traditional Western concert percussion practice. The results evoke the vigor, aplomb and playful spirit of “trashcan percussion,” as sometimes encountered in subways and street corners in bustling metropolitan environments.

AMY BETH KIRSTEN
they might be giants for Flute and Vocalizing Percussion Quartet (2015)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

“When I compose,” says Amy Beth Kirsten, “I’m thinking of a character and a story, and how approaches to music and the expression of sound actually mean something for a character and a story.” Kirsten’s fiercely distinctive approach to her craft is rooted in the circumstances of her early musical development. A comparatively late bloomer as a composer of concert music, Kirsten first honed her craft as a singer-songwriter and jazz vocalist. It was only when she was around 30 that she enrolled in a master’s program in composition, where she discovered the envelope-pushing tradition of 20th-century “composed theater,” which featured instrumentalists as active participants in their dramatic happenings. Encouraged by these models, Kirsten has consistently searched over the past two decades for fresh ways to “fuse music, language, voice and theater”— often by treating “musicians’ instruments, bodies and voices as equal vehicles of expression.”

These preoccupations shine through in they might be giants for flute and percussion quartet. Kirsten’s percussion writing is unconventional. For one thing, they might be giants treats the percussionists as vocalizers, instructing them to produce a range of abstract vowel sounds. For another thing, the percussionists swap their drumsticks for pitched tuning forks, whose vibrations they use to activate a motley array of objects and surfaces, like postcards and metal tins. The resulting sounds are quiet but unexpected, arousing the listener’s curiosity and putting a sly spin on the visual spectacle that is a typical feature of percussion performance. Later in the piece, a musical saw and wah-wah tube even make themselves heard—and seen.

they might be giants was a study for Kirsten’s 2017 musical theater piece QUIXOTE, and its title nods at one of the best-known episodes in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which the titular knight mistakes the windmills of La Mancha for oversized monsters. In they might be giants, the flutist embodies Quixote while the percussionists represent the windmill-giants. Kirsten instructs the flutist to sing while playing, producing an unstable sonority that mirrors Quixote’s mental state. As for the percussionists, their arsenal of household objects includes rubber-coated dumbbells—a symbol for “formidable physique,” which Quixote thought was an attribute of his imagined monsters.

IANNIS XENAKIS
Metaux from Pléiades (1978)
Approximate duration: 14 minutes

A one-of-a-kind figure in 20th century composition, Iannis Xenakis always drew his inspiration from domains beyond music. The reason for this was simple: in addition to being a composer, the multitalented Xenakis was also an architect. Schooled in music as well as engineering, the Greek-born Xenakis had a successful architectural career in the late 1940s and 1950s. Xenakis’s architectural activities directly informed his music, which was constructed using stark, swarming masses of sound—analogs to the planes and volumes he used when planning buildings and other structures. Additionally, Xenakis’s music often had a visceral rhythmic streak that reflected the ritual character of ancient Greek dramatic art, which he cherished.

That streak is on full display in Pléïades, a colossal, 45-minute-long percussion sextet. The title refers to the Pleiades of Greek myth, a group of seven nymphs whom Zeus transformed into a star cluster in the Taurus constellation. In ancient harvesting traditions, the Pleiades were associated with rainfall, which is why their name is related to the Greek word pleiôn, for “plenty.” In turn, Xenakis’s title gestures at his interests in musical analogs to swarms and storms, which he built by combining countless small “grains” of sound, like individual droplets in a rain shower.

Pléïades features an invented, homemade instrument that Xenakis, combining the word “six” and the first three letters of his last name, called a “sixxen.” Xenakis’ instructions for building the sixxen call for an array of 19 differently pitched metal bars, arranged like a keyboard, though not tuned to a systematic scale. Pléïades requires a sextet of sixxens, each one slightly out of tune with the others, producing a sonority Xenakis hoped would be “astounding, strange, full, resounding.”

The showcase for the sixxens, Pléïades’ “Métaux” (“Metals”) movement hammers away like a cosmic blacksmith’s shop. Some listeners have pointed out that the timbres of the combined sixxens can resemble the cries of voices—a sonority with humanitarian symbolism for Xenakis, who fled Greece in his 20s as a political exile.

– © 2026 Matthew Mendez

Matthew Mendez is a San Francisco-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University.