The Boost Percussion Group performs works by Paul Lansky, Andys Skordis and John Cage at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional of Madrid.
Tomorrow Saturday at 12:30, the Museo Arquelógico Nacional offers, as part of the MusaE project of the Ministry of Culture and Sport and Acción Cultural Española -which offers a circuit of concerts and micro-concerts that circulates through the 16 state museums-, the performance of the Boost Percussion Group, with a programme entitled Rituales [Rituals]. This is a free concert, until full capacity is reached, which will take place in the Salón de Actos of the Madrid museum.
The title of the programme refers to the different ceremonies of a religious or social nature which, after being repeated and transmitted to successive generations, have become tradition throughout history. As an element consubstantial with dance or speech, music is essential in rituals and, in the context of classical music, Western society has generated its own particular ritual: the concerto.
The works that make up this programme are based, according to the quartet, “on the concept of ritual adapted to our times, within the language of contemporary music and using percussion instruments as a common thread”.
Founded in 2013 in the Spanish town of Alcorcón, Boost Percussion has a wide-ranging and versatile repertoire that tomorrow will include Threads, a work by the American composer Paul Lansky (New York, 1944), which he composed in 2005 expressly for the percussion quartet Sõ Percussion, and which, as Lansky himself explained, “is a half-hour long ‘cantata’ for percussion quartet in ten short movements. There are three ‘threads’ that are interwoven in the piece: Arias and Preludes that focus on the metallic pitched sounds of vibraphones, glockenspiel and pipes; Choruses in which drumming predominates; and Recitatives made largely from Cage-like noise instruments, bottles, flower pots, crotales, etc. The aim of the different threads is to highlight the wide range of qualities that percussion instruments are capable of, from lyrical and tender to forceful and aggressive, and weave them into one continuous ‘thread’. The movements are performed without interruption.”
The other works in the programme are R.I.N. (2021, Spanish premiere), seventeen minutes long, divided into two movements, The Ritual and Catharsis, by the Cypriot composer Andys Skordis (Nicosia, 1983), and Third Construction (1941), by the American John Cage (Los Angeles, 1912-New York, 1992).