Percussionist, Composer, Author
The debut of Spankinhide in my time at the Conservatorium! I decided to bring Elliott and Piers, my bandmates from Spankinhide, to play some African drumming in my recital and share a part of my musical background. The great thing about being in my final year at uni was being able to choose what I wanted to play and to play some unconventional things.
It was an out of the ordinary experience as well, because I’d never led any pieces in Spankinhide. I was always playing accompaniment parts
I find that the greatest thing about recitals is, the closer I get to the end of my degree the more freedom I have to perform music that I enjoy listening to and that I’m interested in. A great example of this in my Semester 1 Recital 2015 was Marimba Phase by Steve Reich.
It can be hard sometimes to create interest and musicality in studies and etudes, most times because they’re not written as “music” but more as technical exercises that are designed to mess with your brain and challenge a
MARIMBICS by Markus Halt is a four-mallet marimba solo that I have interpreted as the ‘Marimba Olympics’. Each section of the piece challenges the performer to play with different technique and cope with changing ‘tonal worlds’. It is a trip down the rabbit hole involving high technical demand and quirky musical ideas.
This was definitely one of the most challenging marimba solos I had played up until this point in uni, in my recital and just in general. The process of choosing
Suomineito is a four-mallet vibraphone solo written by Nebojša Jovan Živković. Suomineito in Finnish, in the language of the "Suomi" people (as the Finns calls themselves) means "Finnish girl". This quiet and melancholic composition was inspired by an original folk song from Finland, called "Heili Karjalasta". In Suomi, this means "a friend from Karelia", a region that used to be a part of Finland.
This is a heart wrenching piece and I loved playing it because of the music and the challenge.
MEDITATION NO. 1 by Casey Cangelosi is a snare drum solo that was commissioned by Majestic for the U.S. release of the Prophonic snare series. This unique solo employs a variety of contemporary techniques, like the use of hands, different striking places on the rim and gestures. It is a very visual piece that aims to captivate the audience’s eyes as well as their ears.
I worked my but off for this one!
I enjoyed learning and performing this piece because of its attention to detail and the
