Unsnared Drum Michael Compitello

• Nina C. Young (b. 1984):
• 1 Young: Heart.throb 11:28
• Hannah Lash (b. 1981):
• 2 Lash: Start 06:45
• Amy Beth Kirsten (b. 1972):
• 3 Kirsten: Ghost in the Machine 09:14
• Tonia Ko (b. 1988):
• 4 Ko: Negative Magic 10:43
• Total Runtime 38:10

Info for Unsnared Drum

Unsnared Drum, featuring new works for snare drum from Nina Young, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Tonia Ko. Our mission was to rethink the snare drum, to ask whether the instrument could be bold, coy, suave, and elegant: in short, interesting. Each composer lived with a drum and a number of implements over an extended period of time, and the result is a collection of pieces which highlight the snare drum’s breadth of sonic possibility and depth of expressivity, revealing an instrument of drama, grace, and heart.

After three years of workshops, performances, and presentations, Unsnared Drum will be released August 20th on New Focus Recordings. I am looking forward to sharing this project with those who have been following the process from its outset and those who are new to our snare drum adventure.

Because Unsnared Drum seeks to highlight the dynamic dialogue between performer and composer within the collaborative process, I have chosen four composers whose music I love and whose friendship I value. I’ve premiered, commissioned, and performed new solo and chamber works from Hannah, Amy, Tonia, and Nina, and Unsnared Drum will be a fantastic opportunity to bring these dynamic relationships to an instrument that needs their unique voices and curiosity towards sound, theater and space. This collaborative project highlights the idiomatic, historical, and timbral context for the instrument while incubating ideas over an extended time frame, resulting in a significant addition to the snare drum’s repertoire.

About Unsnared Drum: Unsnared Drum is a project dedicated to pushing the limit of what is possible with the snare drum. Over the past two years, four of America’s most esteemed and dynamic composers—Nina C. Young, Hannah Lash, Tonia Ko, and Amy Beth Kirsten—have collaborated with me on new works for solo snare drum. We chose the title because our mission was to reframe how people think about, perform, and practice the snare drum; to free the drum from its historical and idiomatic chains while challenging the the instrument’s capacity for subtle and refined expression.

The center of my artistic practice is incubating and catalyzing new work, working over extended time frames with composers and artists I admire and whose friendship I value. To a large extent, Unsnared Drum is as much about process and community building (the natural extension of musical collaboration) as it is new music. In addition to loving Amy, Tonia, Nina, and Hannah’s music, I’m fortunate to have worked frequently with them, and had a feeling that our friendship and previous working experience would engender a dynamic and creative collaboration. I sent each composer a drum and a selection of implements, and we spent years workshopping ideas.

Amy, Nina, Hannah, and Tonia certainly have wonderfully unique compositional voices. Their music is united, however, by their craft, curiosity towards sound, theater and space, and willingness to create new practices and techniques to serve dramatic purposes. Although none had written for solo snare drum, they all write boldly and creatively for percussion in other solo, chamber, and large ensemble contexts. While Unsnared Drum’s throughline is our collaborative efforts—workshop sessions, notational experiments, sonic adventures—each of the works explores a unique element of the snare drum’s personality.

Nina Young’s Heart.throb inverts our conception of what constitutes percussive skill in an ear-opening exploration of the snare drum’s unsung melodic and harmonic capacity. Fitting the drum with a transducer and a contact microphone, Nina broadcasts beating sinusoids through the instrument, creating an undulating bed of sound. By pressing into the head and exploring different locations on the rim, the performer filters these tones to create singing melodies and rich harmonies. Throughout the piece, the musical characteristics most associated with percussive virtuosity—fast, fleet stickings—are confined to the rim and re-contextualized as triggers for the work’s harmonic movement.

Virtuosic, rhythmically alive, and uncompromising, Hannah Lash’s music draws upon a rich harmonic palette and a clarity of form, blending melodic nuance with relentless rhythmicity. Start is based on a handful of sharp, polythmic motives which are continuously, obsessively, tenaciously, and explosively developed. Interested in how the timbre might elucidate a monomaniacal, motivically-oriented piece, Hannah uses many implements (brushes, hands, chopsticks, and metal beaters in addition to sticks) to help delineate formal guideposts amid a steady barrage of attacks.

Amy Kirsten’s work is full of melodic invention, otherworldly sounds and hypnotic rhythms. A composer, director, singer, writer, and visual artist who highlights the theater present in music performance, she uses percussion with stunning creativity, often used as integral parts of large-scale staged works. For her Ghost in the Machine, Amy and I found a ghosty language of sounds—a hidden snare language—manipulating the tautness of the snare head, preparing the drum with a variety of accessories, and striking the instrument using different kinds of sticks and mallets. Amy deploys these colors in an alluring, colorful groove.

Tonia Ko’s music has an incredible ability to create inventive and deeply expressive moments which link inspiration, form, content, and performance practice. She invents new techniques which emerge organically from the physical gestures and textures associated with playing instruments. In her Negative Magic, Tonia reimagines the snare drum, revealing a world of harmonic and timbral complexity on the drum by loosening control—literally. By tuning each tension rod of the drum to a slightly different (but very low) pitch, Tonia is able to create chords, or multiplicities of pitches within different areas of the drumhead. After gradually becomes attenuated to the complexity of the drum’s sound through a series of seamless, hyper-nuanced sonic adventures: a ritualistic introduction which explores the drum’s pitch range; a quirky conversation between the head and a combination of dryer sounds from the rim, lug casings, and shell; a series of sonic waterfalls, where pitch descents are coupled with transitions from dry to wet timbre; and a series of explosions where extraordinarily loose snare wires jangle amidst a burst of accents.

I started this project with the goal of reinventing the snare drum, and I couldn’t have asked for more interesting and inspiring results. Interesting is too weak a word, because these works stretch my musicianship, challenge my assumptions, and drive me to open my ears and develop my technique in ways I could have never imagined. Each work treats the drum as a valid medium of musical expression, worthy of our time and energy. These pieces are full of wit, sass, vitality, and gravity: they expand the melodic and harmonic profile of this instrument, and they do so with a grace and honesty that belies their rigor. I’m honored to present them. (Michael Compitello)

Michael Compitello, percussion

Michael Compitello
is a dynamic, “fast rising” (WQXR) percussionist dedicated to commissioning and premiering new works that explore the sonic and expressive possibilities of percussion instruments.

He has developed sustained collaborations with composers such as Thomas Kotcheff, Tonia Ko, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Robert Honstein on new works, in addition to working with Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, John Luther Adams, Alejandro Viñao, Marc Applebaum, and Martin Bresnick on premieres and performances of new solo and chamber works.

With cellist Hannah Collins as the “remarkably inventive and resourceful” (Gramophone) New Morse Code, Michael has created a singular and personal repertoire through collaboration with some of America’s most esteemed young composers. New Morse Code's 2017 debut album Simplicity Itself on New Focus Recordings was described “an ebullient passage through pieces that each showcase the duo’s clarity of artistic vision and their near-perfect synchronicity” (I Care if You Listen) and “a flag of genuineness raised” (Q2 Music). In 2019 they released the title suite of Matthew Barnson’s portrait album, Vanitas, on Innova recordings and collaborated with Eliza Bagg, Lee Dionne, and andPlay on and all the days were purple, Alex Weiser’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist work on Cantaloupe Music.

Michael is also a member of Percussion Collective, an ensemble dedicated to refined performances of contemporary percussion repertoire. He is currently Assistant Professor of Percussion at Arizona State University. He holds degrees from The Yale School of Music and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

Nina C. Young
Composer and sonic artist Nina C. Young (b.1984) creates works, ranging from acoustic concert pieces to interactive installations, that explore aural architectures, resonance, timbre, and the ephemeral. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Sixtrum, the JACK Quartet, and wild Up. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize, Nina has received recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri, Fromm, the Montalvo Arts Center, and BMI. Recent commissions include "Tread softly" for the NYPhil's Project 19, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and a multimedia performative installation piece for the American Brass Quintet and EMPAC’s wavefield synthesis spatial audio system. Young holds degrees from MIT, McGill, and Columbia, and is an Assistant Professor of Composition at USC's Thornton School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of NY-based new music sinfonietta Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

Hannah Lash
Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful...handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at such major venues as Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Walt Disney Concert Hall, Lincoln Center, the Times Center in Manhattan, the Chicago Art Institute, Tanglewood Music Center, and the Aspen Music Festival & School, among others. In 2016, Lash was honored with a Composer Portrait Concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, which included commissioned works for pianist Lisa Moore (Six Etudes and a Dream) and loadbang (Music for Eight Lungs). In the 2017-2018 season, Lash’s Piano Concerto No. 1 “In Pursuit of Flying” was given its premiere performances by Jeremy Denk and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Atlantic Classical Orchestra debuted Facets of Motion for orchestra; and Music for Nine, Ringing was performed at the Music Academy of the West School and Festival. In the 2018-2019 season, Paul Appleby and Natalia Katyukova gave the world premiere of Songs of Imagined Love, a song cycle commissioned by Carnegie Hall. Hannah Lash’s music is published exclusively by Schott Music.

Amy Beth Kirsten
Recognized with artist fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Amy Beth Kirsten’s musical and conceptual language is characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation. Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression. Ms. Kirsten has composed evening- length, fully-staged composed theatre works as well as traditional concert works for her own ensemble HOWL, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Peak Performances, the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird, and American Composers Orchestra, among many others. Ms. Kirsten teaches privately and at the HighSCORE summer festival in Pavia, Italy. She joined the Composition Faculty of the Longy School of Music of Bard College in the Fall of 2017.

Tonia Ko
No matter how traditional or experimental the medium, Tonia Ko’s music reveals a core that is whimsical, questioning, and lyrical. She has collaborated with leading soloists and ensembles across a variety of media, from acoustic concert pieces to improvisations and sound installations. In the attempt to follow aural, visual, and tactile instincts in a holistic way, Ko mediates between the identities of composer, sound artist, and visual artist— most prominently in “Breath, Contained”, an ongoing project using bubble wrap as a canvas for both art and sound.

Recipient of numerous accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ko’s music has been performed throughout the US as well as in Europe and Asia, and lauded by The New York Times for its “captivating” details and “vivid orchestral palette.” She has been supported by the Barlow Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, Chamber Music America, as well as residencies at MacDowell, Copland House, and Djerassi. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Tonia holds a DMA from Cornell University and served as 2015-17 Composer-in-Residence for Young Concert Artists. She was appointed Lecturer in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2020.

Booklet for Unsnared Drum