Ko’mm Percussion Performs at Strathmore’s “Art After Hours” series

MUSIC

The Washington Post
Saturday, March 26, 2005

By Andrew Lindemann Malone

We don’t get enough all-percussion concerts, despite the fact that
today’s wide-ranging percussion ensembles can provide hypnotic melodies
in addition to hard grooves and explosive outbursts. So it was
enterprising of Strathmore’s Art After Hours series to host a concert by
Ko’mm Percussion in the mansion on Wednesday night. The group,
consisting of local percussionists Leon Khoja-Eynatyan, Richard
McCandless, Rich O’Meara and Joseph Jay McIntyre, presented works by the
latter three.

Three of the eight works Ko’mm played stood out. The mesmerizing
minimalist-style marimba arpeggios of O’Meara’s “Island Spinning”
wobbled dangerously after some subtle metrical twists, but the piece
righted itself like a top given an extra spin. O’Meara followed that
with “301,” a work commemorating the official conversion of Armenia to
Christianity, in which Khoja-Eynatyan played breathtakingly quiet
ruminations on the marimba as his daughter Tatevik rang an Armenian hymn
on hand bells. The concert ended with a piece by McCandless called “Pile
Driver,” which he introduced with the half-boast “This piece is not
subtle,” but the poetry McCandless found in the cacophony made “Pile
Driver” absorbing.

Yet even the less successful pieces were interesting; for example, the
world premiere of McIntyre’s “Negative” found the composer using real
mallets to strike a nonexistent drum, cuing two bass drums behind him to
stop rumbling and thus “playing” silence. The reverberations of the
drums prevented the silence from cutting sharply through sound, but it
was fun to see the idea tried. And as the members of Ko’mm worked hard
to make the music sound good, they proved that the sheer athletic
spectacle of a percussion concert can be a lot of fun to watch.