DrumUltimA's senior recital

[DrumUltimA]

Hey guys, I know you're only really supposed to post album releases as far as my music goes here, but I kind of consider this to be something to that effect.

Basically, this past April, I performed what was probably the most stressful, challenging, and LONGEST performance I've done to date--and that was my senior recital! I decided to make a little project out of it--once I got all of the video from my cousin (those of you who attend VGL probably met him), I uploaded the recital to my youtube piece by piece, and accompanied each piece with a blog entry, talking about the piece and my experience learning it.

The performance started with the minimalist work "Electric Counterpoint" (links to part I and II of the video respectively) by Steve Reich, originally performed on electric guitars. It was transcribed for vibraphone and marimba by my friend/colleague/teacher Svet Stoyanov.

The next piece was a work for marimba, violin, and clarinet called "And

will

" (Once again, parts I and II respectively) by Kevin Puts. This piece was written pretty recently, and I really think it's a beautiful work. It reminds me a lot of the music in Shadow of the Colossus.

The third piece on the program was a bizarre theater piece in three movements called "

" (Movements I, II and III respectively) by Stuart Saunders Smith. This was probably the weirdest piece on my program, but each and every one of those rhythms I play was deliberate. I'm playing junk, singing, shaking trees, playing bird calls, and speaking text in Passamaquoddy Native American... amongst other things. This piece was definitely the hardest work to learn.

As if it couldn't get much weirder, the next piece was a piece for solo vibraphone called "

" by Franco Donatoni. I don't have to walk around or say stuff, but the harmonic language of this piece is pretty complex. There a lot of duality going on in this work... each section is sort of like a crazy dude having an argument with himself. This piece was by far the most difficult to perform.

After Omar was performed, the pace went way down with Peter Klatzow's "

". I only played one of the two movements of this work, even though I had prepared to play both movements. This piece is based largely around the octatonic scale, and was the most emotionally draining piece for me to play. I had to search pretty deep within myself to really understand what this piece meant to me.

I closed my program in typical Doug Perry fashion by playing a

. Basically played about how relieved I was to be done, in my typical cheesy C-minor Yasunori Mitsuda harmonic language.

For each of these pieces, I wrote a fairly involved blog entry. You can find links to the individual entries in the videos.

You can find the playlist here: http://www.youtube.com/user/DougDrumUltimAPerry#grid/user/6DFAD2BD9A080A95

There was one other piece, but we made a better recording of it, so I will wait until it's done to post it.

Thanks guys, hope you enjoy!

[Gario]

Listening to the Electronic Counterpoint is fun (all I've gotten to, atm). Actually, it's pretty catchy.

I remember my Senior Recital. It was... quite interesting, and hard as hell to set up (I was foolish to have a full on Choral piece... you can imagine the stress of setting THAT up, lol). You seem to have me beat in length of the recital, though.

I'll give this a listen while I can - new music is always awesome . Great work with finishing a degree, though (I'm sure you've finished college, if you've done your recital ).