Percussionisti della Scala

The Marimba as a Bridge
Jacopo Tomatis

John Cage once wrote that “percussion is completely open. Not in the sense that it is undefined, but in that it has no end.” The other instruments of the orchestra, he argued, have much to learn at its “school of noise,” because percussion is a one-way ticket out of “the chicken coop of harmony,” and the first step toward flight. Percussion, then, as a space of infinite possibilities—for the composer, but also for us, the listeners. Cage also reminded us that percussion is the sound of the world, and therefore the world itself “sounds” like a percussion ensemble. Harmony and melody are more the exception than the rule: “If you’re not hearing music, whatever sound reaches your ear is percussion—wherever you are: indoors or outdoors, in the city or in the country. Outside or even beyond this planet?”

In the history of Western art music, percussion has always played a supporting role. Visible on stage and, above all, audible (indeed—hard to ignore…), yet almost always at the service of its more noble colleagues. As is well known, it was the twentieth century that brought percussion to the fore. And few other objects seem to lie so precisely at the center of that broader rethinking of the “sound we live in” that shaped the last century and whose echoes continue today. If art music aspired to be music “for the mind,” percussion reveals, without mercy or compromise, the bodily nature of that same music—of all music. We do not listen only with our ears, nor—as thinking beings—are we made of thought alone. Percussion has bones, skins, membranes that vibrate like—and make vibrate—our entire bodies. If the history of music has been told as a succession of innovations and breakthroughs, a race toward complexity that took harmony as its main playing field, percussion forces us to focus on rhythm and timbre. If variation has stood at the center of great composers’ creative architectures, percussion has instead thematized—and problematized—repetition.

It is also for these reasons that percussion instruments are capable of weaving connections between diverse musical worlds and cultures like few other objects can. A bridge—and the very structure of the marimba, a walkway of wood and string, seems to support this imagery—between East, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Between high and popular culture, body and mind, intellect and emotion, the elevated and the everyday.

And so, suspended over the void of musical possibility, we set out with the Percussionists of La Scala. It is no accident that at the heart of the program lies a double Philip Glass, with two pieces from the cycle Águas da Amazônia: the hypnotic and dreamlike Madeira River, and the more obsessive Xingu River. The first material that would become Águas da Amazônia dates back to the 1990s, when Glass composed a suite for the dancers of the Belo Horizonte company Grupo Corpo, titled Seven or Eight Pieces for a Ballet. In an expanded version of twelve tracks, those pieces would later reach the hands of the Brazilian group Uakti, reimagined and rearranged by Marco Antônio Guimarães for an ensemble of percussion, strings, winds, and keyboards in a beautiful album (Águas da Amazônia, Point Music, 1999). An orchestral version followed, performed by the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra with the Absolute Ensemble conducted by Kristjan Järvi (Orange Mountain Music, 2017). Most recently, a new recording was made with fresh arrangements by the American group Third Coast Percussion (Rockwell Records, 2025). Having survived more than two decades of reinterpretation with undiminished freshness, the “waters of the Amazon” flow through the cultural atmosphere of the golden age of “world music,” revealing the convergence of styles and inspirations that animated Glass’s work during that period, when the more minimalist and iterative writing of his early years began to regularly inhabit forms that appeared more pop in nature—aware both of African cyclical structures and the emerging electronic music scene. One only has to listen to the opening of the second part of Madeira River, with its overlapping and interlocking arpeggios that could recall a Congolese likembe orchestra, a sequencer, a Balinese gamelan, or Aphex Twin’s Drukqs. In any case, repetition and harmonic synthesis placed, without shame, at the service of musical emotion.

Gravity, by American composer Marc Mellits, at times seems to move in the same direction, with rhythmic cycles of marimbas and vibraphones accumulating like waves, now submerging, now revealing the pulse. But a similar idea is also found—transfigured into a more jazz-inflected sensitivity, at once recalling the piano music of Béla Bartók—in some of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs, presented here in a new arrangement for percussion. Composed over the course of many years and eventually gathered in an ECM album in 1984, these “songs for children” search the world of childhood for a simplicity and sweetness that sound far removed from much of the American musician’s better-known output. Corea passed away in 2021.

Other pieces in the program also seem to move in the direction of an (apparent?) sidelining of harmony in favor of rhythm. Sano Daiko by Milanese composer Loris Lenti reflects on pulse, with solos from the various performers emerging against a regular backdrop—an homage to and evocation of Japanese drum ensembles. Teamwork, by American composer Mitch Markovich, transfers a similar concept to the United States of the marching band, showcasing virtuosic techniques that have become an obligatory proving ground for the boldest percussionists.

It is perhaps no coincidence that at the symmetrical midpoint of the program lies the most radical piece—the simplest and at the same time the most complex: Music for Pieces of Woodby Steve Reich (1973). Composed for five pairs of claves (woodblocks) tuned to different pitches, the piece belongs to the same lineage as other landmarks in Reich’s repertoire, such as Clapping Music (from the previous year, and similarly reduced in timbre—claves here, handclaps there), Drumming (1970–71), and Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76). In a famous 1968 essay, Reich expressed his interest in “music as a gradual process”—in the real-time contemplation of perceptible variations that shape a performance as it unfolds. A practice he compared to releasing a swing and watching it until it stops, or standing at the edge of the ocean watching the waves slowly bury your feet in the sand. Once again, the resonance with electronic and global music is clear—Reich himself anticipated it, noting how, in the end, “all music turns out to be ethnic music”.

So many ideas, then, so many sounds—all different, yet all similar. Perhaps this is the most important lesson percussion and its repertoire can offer: that in the irreducible diversity of every identity, a common ground can be found—must be found—beyond difference, beyond intolerance, beyond cultural distance. Returning to Cage, where we began: “Two percussion instruments of the same family,” he wrote, “are no more alike than two people who happen to have the same name.” But they are still people. And still music.