Director’s Notes

The featured work presented by the Humboldt State Percussion Ensemble will be Edgard Varese’s revolutionary work, Ionization. Written in 1931, this work is widely considered to be the most important composition in the entire percussion ensemble repertoire. Featuring 13 performers playing over 47 different instruments, the sound mass and texture fields heard in the piece are extremely colorful and dense. As well as piano and all of the standard instruments of the percussion family such as snare drums, tenor drums, bass drums, triangles, tambourine ,wood blocks and cymbals, Varese also calls for Afro-Cuban instruments such as maracas, guiros, cow bells and bongos, and exotic instruments such as gongs, sleigh bells, castanets, glockenspiel, lions roar, anvils and, perhaps the most unique of all, two hand crank sirens.

The primary siren used by the Humboldt State Percussion Ensemble is the exact Sterling type III hand crank siren that Varese specified in his 1931 score. The second siren is an authentic combat field siren issued by the US military and made by the Federal Electric Company in Chicago, Illinois. Often considered a radical futurist, Varese claims that he was interested in sound for sounds sake alone, and for that reason, considered all sounds as valid ones. As early as the 1930’s, Varese heard the sound of the siren as a result of the modern world, and as such, used it as a musical instrument in his composition. Many scholars have noted that Varese’s ideas, which predated the invention of the first synthesizer by almost 40 years, have had an extensive effect on the development of electronic music.

The HSU Percussion Ensemble will also feature compositions written by Steve Reich, Almadeo Roldan, and John Cage. John Cage’s Third Construction for Percussion Instruments is a highly unusual work which uses as its sound source tom-toms, found objects (tin cans), rattles, maracas, cow bells, a conch shell, and a dried donkey’s jaw bone w/ rattling teeth!

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