Baljinder Sekhon: Places and Times
Innova

On Places and Times, Baljinder Sekhon enhances the appeal of this collection of percussion ensemble music by adding three separate soloists to three of its five pieces. Certainly the sounds generated by the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Line Upon Line Percussion, and McCormick Percussion Group are capable of dazzling the senses without anyone else added to the fold, but the melodic sweetening and contrasts in timbre Dave Gerhart's steel pan, Eunmi Ko's piano, and Dieter Hennings' guitar respectively bring to the three settings goes a long way towards distinguishing this presentation of the composer's music. A percussionist himself, Sekhon, who received his doctorate from the Eastman School of Music and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of South Florida, has seen his work presented in over 500 concerts in twenty countries.

Intense rhythmic propulsion lends the opening Passageways a somewhat gamelan-styled character, especially with Gerhart's steel pan part of the mix. Contrast is abundant, not only between the soloist and Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, but between the quartet's own variously pitched instruments, among them glockenspiels and drums. Sekhon's choice of title proves apt when the piece transitions from one section to another, contrast again present in the shift from a delicate meditative section to an aggressive one. Hennings joins the McCormick Percussion Group for the album's second setting, Musica Casera, which sees the soloist's classical guitar wedded to seven pitched percussion instruments. Contrast between the guest's instrument and those of the percussionists is even more pronounced on Musica Casera than it is on Passageways, though Sekhon uses strumming, harmonics, and bowed percussion in his design to downplay the inherent differences between them, and if anything one comes away from Musica Casera marveling at how naturally the elements blend.

Sekhon isn't averse to using Cage-inspired methodologies in his work. For Death Is an Adviser, a six-part work inspired by Carlos Castaneda's writings about his apprenticeship to the sorcerer Don Juan Matus in the ‘60s, Sekhon had his wife and daughters draw numbers from a hat to determine pitch orderings, durations, and contour. Scored for solo piano and nine percussionists, the album centerpiece pairs the McCormick Percussion Group with Eunmi Ko. Chance strategies enter into the design of individual movements, too, with the ponderous opening part “any time. any place.,” for example, using randomly selected ordering to determine its pitches and durations. As much as the guitar separates itself from the percussion instruments during Musica Casera, piano establishes an even more marked differentiation between the poles, an effect accentuated further when knocking sounds are sourced from the piano during “maybe today. maybe tomorrow.” and when Ko's clearly enunciated patterns differ so fundamentally from her partners' hammering blows in “a worthy opponent.” That's not always the case, however: in the sometimes peaceful and sometimes, due to the use of pitch bending, unsettling “now or later.,” certain passages find the piano's trills merging almost indistinguishably with the ensemble's twinkling mass of triangle, vibraphone, marimba, timpani, and porcelain bowl.

The McCormick Percussion Group returns a final time, now unaccompanied, for Refuge, a process-oriented work that involves each of the seven percussionists playing a pitched bell, a keyboard instrument, and a number of different skins. Ideally suited for live performance, the piece grants the musicians the option of playing the bell instruments as they enter the performance space, after which they hang the bells one at a time as they begin performing at their respective setups.

June 2018