Program
| Jlin (arr. Robert Dillon) | Derivative (2020) |
| Chris P. Thompson |
The Nature of the Lie (2023) world premiere |
| jlin (arr. Peter Martin) | Obscure (2022) |
| Jlin (arr. Robert Dillon) | Embryo (2022) |
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| Christopher Cerrone | Goldbeater's Skin |
Artists
Wesley Sumpter
Percussion
Wesley Sumpter is a freelance percussionist based in Los Angeles, California.
He has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco, National, and Atlanta symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival, Cabrillo Festival, and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK.
With the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music from Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas to Christina Aguilera and Herbie Hancock. As a recording musician, he can be heard on a number of the LA Phil’s recently released recordings including their 2021 Grammy-Award winning Charles Ives symphony cycle, the BBC Phil’s Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute, along with the original motion picture soundtracks for West Side Story (2021)and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
Wesley is also an active chamber musician with his trio Lineage Percussion.Lineage has performed and participated in residencies at the Universities of Maryland, Arizona, and Georgia.
He also looks forward to performances later this year with the LA Phil, Snoop Doggat the Hollywood Bowl and making his second appearance at Carnegie Hall with the Gateways Chamber Players in performances of Stravinsky’s, A Soldier’s Tale,and Wynton Marsalis’s, A Fiddler’s Tale,narrated by renown actress, Phylicia Rashad.
Wesley received his Bachelor’s from the University of Georgia under Timothy Adams jr. and received his Master’s at the University of Southern California under James Babor and Joseph Pereira.
Sean Ritenauer
Percussion
One of New York City’s most in demand percussionists, Sean Ritenauer has performed on Broadway, as a concerto soloist, for film and television, and with the world’s most prominent symphony orchestras. Well versed in classical, contemporary, and popular music styles, the Ohio native’s multi-genre fluency has led to his similarly disparate career.
Mr. Ritenauer has become one of the industry’s most active commercial musicians, performing in award-winning television and film soundtracks like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Tick, Tick… Boom!, A Dog’s Purpose, Zoolander 2,andMoonrise Kingdom, with several other projects yet to be released including White Noise and Salem’s Lot. He made his Broadway debut on the 18-month national tour of Hair, followed by holding the percussion chair of Something Rotten! and Pippinon Broadway. As a substitute, he has performed in countless Broadway productions. Currently you can find Sean filling in for his esteemed colleagues at MJ, Tina, andBeetleJuice.
Ritenauer holds a deep affinity for classical repertoire, proudly serving as Principal Percussionist of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra (AL) since 2016 (member since 2005). As a guest musician, Sean enjoys performing regularly with National Symphony Orchestra (D.C.), and the New York Philharmonic, whom he accompanied on tours of Europe (2017), Asia (2018), and Germany (2022), and in residencies in Vail and Shanghai. In 2022, Ritenauer joined the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra (Santa Cruz, CA) in his first season as a member of the percussion section.
With the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, he has often appeared as a concerto soloist, including the second-ever performance of Andy Akiho’s Percussion Concerto in January 2020. The Akiho marked Ritenauer’s third solo appearance with the orchestra, joining performances of Gregory Vajda’s Drums, Drums, Drumsand Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto. Reviewing his interpretation of the Higdon, The Huntsville Times praised Ritenauer for “mesmerizing dexterity”, and recounted “an immediate standing ovation” from the audience.
Perhaps most at home as an artistic leader and chamber musician, Sean co-founded Rocket City New Music in 2021. Determined to make Huntsville, AL a meeting place for the elite in contemporary music, Sean has combined his affection for music by living composers with his passion for curating performance opportunities for like minded artists from across the country. In addition to performing with his own organization, Sean is frequently featured as a chamber musician with the world famous Mark Morris Dance Group.
Ritenauer also places a premium on excellence as an educator. As Adjunct Assistant Professor of Percussion at Hofstra University, he teaches privately and is the director of the Hofstra Percussion Ensemble. As a private teacher, his Manhattan-based studio features alumni admitted to the country’s top music programs, including Juilliard, Eastman, and the New England Conservatory to name a few. Mr. Ritenauer strives to find the ruthless self-critic and the careless artist in all of his students in an attempt to help them become generous educators and marketable musicians.
A proud graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy, Mr. Ritenauer holds degrees in Classical Percussion (B.M.) and Orchestral Performance (M.M.) from the Manhattan School of Music. He resides in New York City with his wife, the oboist Hsuan-Fong Chen. They share a home with their cockapoo, Hiro.
Kevin Ritenauer
Percussion
Kevin Ritenauer holds the position of Associate Principal Timpanist/Section Percussionist of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, he has enjoyed a multi-faceted musical career. Prior to joining the SLSO, Ritenauer spent four seasons in Miami Beach as a Percussion Fellow at the New World Symphony. Ritenauer has performed on stages domestically and abroad with orchestras including the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony. Aside from orchestral playing, he enjoys chamber music. Along with his two brothers, Ritenauer has commissioned and performed works for percussion trio.
Ritenauer has spent summers as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, and the Roundtop Festival Institute. In 2022, he appeared as Principal Timpanist with the Artosphere Festival Orchestra in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Ritenauer attended the Manhattan School of Music (BM) where he studied with Christopher Lamb, Duncan Patton, She-e Wu, Erik Charlston and Jeffrey Milarsky. He continued his studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music (MM) with his primary teacher, Marc Damoulakis as well as Paul Yancich, and Richard Weiner.
Clara Warnaar
PERCUSSION
Clara Warnaar is a percussionist and composer who tends towards interdisciplinary projects. As a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Clara is actively premiering and recording the experimental and new classical music of many of today’s established and up-and-coming composers and artists. Additionally, Clara has appeared as a guest artist with So Percussion, Yarn/Wire, the Bang on a Can Orchestra, and Ensemble Signal. Clara has appeared on Broadway in the show Into the Woods, and can be heard playing on the soundtracks of White Noise, The Fate of the Furious and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She is also the drummer for the band, Infinity Shred.
Daisy Press
voice
Daisy Press’ distinctive and singular voice carries through wild, diverse artistic worlds with its plainspoken emotional fingerprint, and, when left to its own devices, gravitates towards incantation. Daisy is a prolific creator and performer in New York City nightlife, and is a prominent soloist in experimental classical music in the US and Europe.
In September 2022 she released her debut solo album “You Are
The Flower,” the first volume of chants to emerge from her long-term relationship with the 12-century German saint Hildegard of
Bingen (Hildy). This album’s untraditional approach received high praise from NPR: “Daisy Press reinvents Hildegard.”
In Europe, Daisy sings regularly as a soloist with Vienna-based ensembles Klangforum Wien and Phace, and in Germany with the Aleph Guitar Quartet. There she has performed works of composers Bernhard Lang, Martin Smolka, Rebecca Saunders, Claude Vivier, György
Ligeti, and Fausto Romitelli.
In January 2023, Daisy “blew away the entire evening” at the Vienna Konzerthaus with her “outstanding,” “dazzling” coloratura in Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre” with Klangforum Wien. For her recording and performance of Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” at the Museum of Modern Art, Press was hailed by the New York Times as “intrepid” and “passionate.” With So Percussion, she has performed multiple works
of Steve Reich, including “Drumming” and “Music for 18 Musicians” worldwide. The Times also noted the “winning subtlety and understatement” of her performance of George Crumb’s “Unto the Hills” with So.
At Brooklyn’s notorious House of Yes, Daisy has served as singer-in- residence. In the pop world, Daisy once served as the lead backing singer/dancer for Chromeo, and appeared with them
on Letterman, Conan, Fallon, at Lollapalooza, and at Coachella. On Broadway, Daisy originated her own role in “The Devouring” at the Times
Square Edition, where she nightly sang her divine-feminine re- embodiment of Nine Inch Nails’ 90s banger “Closer.”
Composers
Jlin
JLIN, ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT ELECTRONIC PRODUCERS OF THE CURRENT GENERATION, FIRST APPEARED ON PLANET MU’S SECOND BANGS & WORKSCOMPILATION, WHICH HAD A HUGE IMPACT ON ELECTRONIC/CLUB MUSIC. THOUGH SHE IS KNOWN FOR BRINGING FOOTWORK TO A WIDER AUDIENCE, JLIN DOESN’T CONSIDER HERSELF A FOOTWORK ARTIST. HAILING FROM GARY, INDIANA, A PLACE CLOSE YET DISTANT ENOUGH FROM CHICAGO TO ALLOW HER TO DEVELOP A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON THE GENRE, SHE HAS MORPHED ITS SOUNDS INTO SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW. RELEASED IN 2015, HER DEBUT ALBUM DARK ENERGY'S INNOVATIVE SOUND PROPELLED IT TO THE TOP OF MANY OF THE YEAR’S BEST OF LISTS. JLIN’S SOPHOMORE ALBUM BLACK ORIGAMI WAS RECENTLY RELEASED TO EVEN GREATER CRITICAL ACCLAIM AND ATTENTION. IN 2017, JLIN ALSO COMPOSED THE MUSIC FOR A MAJOR NEW DANCE WORK BY WAYNE MCGREGOR, ONE OF THE UK’S BEST KNOWN CHOREOGRAPHERS.
Robert Dillon
Robert Dillon is an Ensemble Member and Development Director of Third Coast Percussion. He has also performed as a substitute with the Chicago, Boston, and San Diego Symphony Orchestras, and served as principal percussionist in the Madison Symphony Orchestra from 2007-2008. A passionate educator, he previously served as chair of percussion studies at Merit School of Music and a percussion instructor at Loyola University Chicago.
Robert has appeared numerous times on the Chicago Symphony’s contemporary music series, MusicNow, as well as the University of Chicago’s Contempo series, and was a member of the unique, international 12-percussionist Ensemble XII, which grew out of Pierre Boulez’s Lucerne Festival Academy (Switzerland). Robert was a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and participated in programs at the Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival USA, National Repertory Orchestra, and Pacific Music Festival (Sapporo, Japan).
In addition to Third Coast recordings, Robert can be heard as a soloist on Innova Records (Christopher Adler—Ecstatic Volutions in a Neon Haze), and a performer on Naxos Records (American Music for Percussion, Volume 1) and Parlour Tapes+ (Katherine Young – Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight). He has performed as a soloist in America, Switzerland, and Jordan.
Robert holds a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University and a Master of Music from the New England Conservatory, where he received the John Cage Award for Outstanding Contribution to Contemporary Music Performance. His teachers include Michael Burritt, James Ross and Will Hudgins.
Chris P. Thompson
I compose music and play percussion. The influence of a childhood in California’s Silicon Valley of the 80s and 90s, as well as in the New York City contemporary music scene of the ‘00s and ‘10s led me to develop work that draws equally from electronic music, marching percussion, and contemporary classical music.
I released my third solo album True Stories & Rational Numbers in October 2020. A nine-movement work sequenced as electronic music but also fully scored for four keyboardists, it represents my investigation of just intonation and the natural mathematics of rhythm and harmony, my search for a performance practice to incorporate these into live contemporary music, and my personal fan-fiction about Hermann and Anna von Helmholtz. True Stories will receive its world premiere live performance at the Barbican Centre, London in November 2021.
Early 2021 brought the release of Red Folder, a collaboration with playwright Rajiv Joseph for the Steppenwolf Theater’s STEPPENWOLF NOW series.
My first two records, the LP Everything Imaginable Comes True (2019) and EP Lot Hero (2017), draw heavily on the high-energy sound world of modern drum & bugle corps while incorporating luminaries of the New York City contemporary classical music scene in both familiar and unexpected capacities.
I’ve also been member of Alarm Will Sound for the past 15 years, which has given me the opportunity to work both as a performing percussionist and arranger on a wide variety of projects.
As a Percussionist:
Long-time member of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, toured internationally as a performer with Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE, participated in the world premieres of over a hundred new works, and can be heard on 40 studio albums. Frequent performer in the pits of many NYC Broadway show productions including The Phantom of the Opera and Wicked.
Collaborations, Appearances, Recordings:
Björk, Dirty Projectors, James McVinnie, Medeski Martin & Wood, the Metropolitan Opera, Nico Muhly, Brian Reitzell, They Might Be Giants, and Valgeir Siggurðsson.
Education: UCLA ‘01, The Juilliard School ‘03. Student of Mitchell Peters and Daniel Druckman.
Interests: Click tracks, experimental animation, graph paper, libraries, math, Japan, your dog.
Deeper dive into my world at The Fifteen Questions.
Full Discography as a composer, performer, and arranger.
Peter Martin
Peter Martin is an Ensemble Member and Finance Director of Third Coast Percussion.
As a chamber musician, Peter has performed with many leading new music ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Eighth Blackbird, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Atlantic Chamber Ensemble, Opera Moda, Tomorrow Music Orchestra, and Ensemble Signal. In addition to his work with Third Coast Percussion, Peter is a member of the award-winning contemporary music group Ensemble Dal Niente. His recorded work can be heard on the New Focus, New Amsterdam, Mode, Ears & Eyes, Harmonia Mundi, and Narooma labels.
As an educator, Peter was an Assistant Professor and Director of Percussion Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA from 2009-2013. He held previous teaching positions at Northwestern University and Trinity International University.
Peter holds Doctor of Music and Master of Music Degrees degrees from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music and a Bachelor of Music Degree from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. While a student, Peter was awarded first prize at the Percussive Arts Society International Solo Marimba Competition. His teachers include Michael Burritt, She-e Wu, Leigh Howard Stevens.
Christopher Cerrone
(b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s multi-GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.
Cerrone’s recent opera, In a Grove (libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann), jointly produced by LA Opera and Pittsburgh Opera, was called “stunning” (Opera News) and “outstanding” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) in its sold-out premiere run in March 2022, directed by Mary Birnbaum. Other recent projects include The Year of Silence, based on the story of the same name by Kevin Brockmeier, for the Louisville Symphony and baritone Dashon Burton; A Body, Moving, a brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; Breaks and Breaks, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner; and Meander, Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, the Chicago Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival.
Upcoming projects include Beaufort Scales, an oratorio for voices, electronics, and video commissioned by Lorelei Ensemble to premiere at Mass MoCA; a new percussion quartet co-commissioned by Sandbox Percussion, Blow Up Percussion, and the Park Avenue Armory, and new works for the LA Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth.
Cerrone’s first opera, Invisible Cities, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera… could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Cities received its fully-staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon, in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. In July 2019, New Amsterdam Records released his GRAMMY-nominated sophomore effort, The Pieces that Fall to Earth, a collaboration with the LA-based chamber orchestra, Wild Up, to widespread acclaim. The Arching Path, from 2021 (In a Circle Records), features performances by Timo Andres, Ian Rosenbaum, Lindsay Kesselman, and Mingzhe Wang and was nominated for a 2022 GRAMMY.
His most recent release, a studio version of In a Grove, was praised by the New York Times as “Vividly produced… commanding attention until the end.” Cerrone is the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition and is currently a fellow at the Laurenz Haus Foundation in Basel, Switzerland in 2022–2023.
Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York and in 2021 he joined the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Carrie Sun. christophercerrone.com.