MISHAWAKA, Ind. — Sorting through many possibilities after their appointment as ensemble-in-residence for the University of Notre Dame’s leading presenter of world-class artistic programming, the four members of Third Coast Percussion knew that one was to produce “Inuksuit” during their five-year tenure.

Third Coast’s Sean Connors described John Luther Adams’ monumental work as “an intricately structured concert work, a beautifully hypnotic sound installation, an interactive work of performance art, and a communal music making event like no other.”

The Chicago-based percussion quartet is comprised of Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and David Skidmore. This significant arts engagement event is the capstone project of Third Coast’s third month-long summer residency. From mid-July through mid-August the ensemble continues development of commissioned works-in-progress by bringing visiting artists, selected from among the world’s leading new music composers, to Notre Dame.

These commissions, two annually, have their world premieres at Notre Dame on the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center Presenting Series.

“Inuksuit” will receive its Indiana premiere at 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15, outdoors in Mishawaka’s new Central Park, east of Main Street, a 12-acre attraction that reopened July 2015 after a $5 million renovation.

Central Park is the easternmost of those on the city’s revitalized Riverwalk, which connects Kate’s Garden, Kamm Island, Battell Park, Beutter Park and Ball Band Memorial via pedestrian and bike trails along the St. Joseph River. In the event of inclement weather, the performance will take place at 7 p.m. Aug. 15, in the DeBartolo Performing Art Center’s Leighton Concert Hall.

“Inuksuit is an incredible event for the percussion and music communities,” Connor said. “We will be performing with Notre Dame faculty, students, and staff, South Bend community members, professional musicians from the Chicago area and performers of mixed ages and experience levels from 11 states. Since performers will be coming from all over the nation, this exact ensemble and collection of instruments will never exist again, but will be forever uniquely linked to the this community.”

Scored for as few as nine and up to 99 players, its scalability allows each musician to perform their own unique part as a soloist. All sounds created from three instrument families — air, metal, drums — are notated, not improvised.

Connors said instruments for Inuksuit include drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, conch shells, hand crank air raid sirens, several types of rattled shakers, and even the popular “singing tubes,” corrugated plastic hoses sounded by twirling overhead.

Naturally, every performance of this piece varies greatly due to how the notated silences and moment-to-moment responses of one player to another are filled by the environment’s natural and spontaneously occurring sounds. For this reason the sheer acreage of Central Park’s setting was particularly attractive for this site-determined art.

The performers, identified by T-shirts, move freely throughout the green space, where park visitors can plan seamless or by chance encounter “listening points” on their travels over the course of the composition’s five sections: “Breathing,” “Calls,” “Clangs,” “Waves,” and “Wind.”

 

About Third Coast Percussion

Hailed by The New Yorker as “vibrant” and “superb,” Third Coast Percussion explores and expands the extraordinary sonic possibilities of the percussion repertoire, delivering exciting performances for audiences of all kinds. Formed in 2005, Third Coast Percussion has developed an international reputation with concerts and recordings of inspiring energy and subtle nuance. These “hard-grooving” musicians (New York Times) have become known for groundbreaking collaborations across a wide range of disciplines. Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center since 2013, they have the honor of being the first ensemble at the University of Notre Dame to create a permanent and progressive ensemble residency program at the center.

Third Coast Percussion performs multiple recitals annually as part of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Presenting Series, engages with the local community, and leads interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with a wide range of disciplines across campus. Third Coast Percussion at Notre Dame is made possible through the generosity of Shari and Tom Crotty.