Percussionist Matt Sharrock is putting out new vibes these days.
For the last 15 years, the Boston-based percussionist and new music specialist has performed around the country and here in central Ohio with chamber ensembles and orchestras and on instruments ranging from marimbas and maracas to triangles and tam-tams.
Next week Sharrock steps out onstage alone in the premiere of their first solo program, Time-Lapse, Tues., Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. in the Green Room of Columbus’ Garden Theater. The program features works for vibraphone and electronics by contemporary composers Keith Kirchoff, Pamela Z, Bowling Green State University music professor Elainie Lillios and Ohio native Dan VanHassel.
The concert appears on the New Music at Short North Stage series, presented by the Johnstone Fund for New Music.
Time-Lapse explores the role of soliloquy in the contemporary world. The decision to create and perform a program on this theme, Sharrock says, comes after years of thinking about the role of the individual – and in particular the individual percussionist – in the context of today’s new music scene and social media-driven world.
“It’s taken me about a decade to have the courage to decide that there’s a reason for me to stand onstage by myself for an hour,” Sharrock said, “and this program is me psychologically dealing with that concept.”
The issue was never a matter of stage fright – “I’m perfectly happy to be onstage in front of people,” Sharrock says. Rather, they questioned whether a solo percussionist could shed the full battery of percussion instruments, perform on a single instrument and carry a solo concert of artistic weight equal to that of the more common solo piano, violin or cello concerts.
“Percussion is so vast in (the instruments) we have at our disposal, but each individual piece of percussion, it can be argued, is not as interesting as, say, a piano,” Sharrock said. “When percussionists give solo recitals, often we will have this huge array of different setups. And I had to kind of deal with the fact that maybe it’s okay if (a solo vibraphone performance is) a lot of the same sounds, because the performer is more than the instrument itself.”
An added complication is that the vibraphone, in Sharrock’s view, is a percussion instrument with a limited palette of sound colors. Sharrock prefers the varied coloristic possibilities of the marimba and says they’re intentionally stepping out of their comfort zone in performing a solo concert on an instrument with more sonic limitations against a backdrop of electronically generated sounds.
“I thought the most interesting way to make this instrument (the vibraphone) fascinating to me is to hear it in the context of other sounds,” Sharrock said. “The vibraphone works incredibly well with electronics. My hope is that my personal voice can come through on an instrument that is less nuanced, I think, than some.”
In Time-Lapse, Sharrock’s interpretive voice explores in sound what it means for one person to speak – literally or figuratively – in a world that may or may not be listening.
In Keith Kirchoff’s from my seat in the clouds, i thought i could see heaven, which Sharrock commissioned, Sharrock performs the vibraphone part live to the accompaniment of electronically manipulated recorded samples of their own vibraphone playing.
“The idea is the solo voice is in an echo chamber, but the echoes are distorted, so it’s the idea of private thoughts being amplified and distorted,” Sharrock said.
Pamela Z’s Only If It’s Asked For goes meta, amplifying the thoughts of a hypothetical electronic listener in response to the vibraphone soloist. The work’s electronics carry the spoken words of a narrator analyzing, as the vibraphone soloist plays, the idea of composing music for vibraphone.
“The electronics themselves are like this external narrator figuring out how to write for the vibraphone. So the narrator in the electronics is talking about what to do with this thing in this sort of beautiful post-modern mashup,” Sharrock said. “It is by far the quirkiest piece on the program and super delightful.”
The program’s title work, Time-Lapse by Elainie Lillios, professor of music theory and composition at Bowling Green State University, places the vibraphone in the middle of an electroacoustic sound world that gives the appearance of paying attention and responding to the soloist.
“You have the solo voice, then you have this wicked loud, awesome pseudo-pop music happening in the background,” Sharrock said. “(Lillios’) writing is so tight and her attention to detail of timbre is so tight that it really sounds like all of these beats and weird grooves that come out of it are spinning out of what I’m doing, but it’s just a backing track.”
In Dan VanHassel’s Fracture, two wooden instruments, two metal instruments and two glass instruments lie on the vibraphone in quick reach of the soloist, offering timbers that expand and complement the vibraphone sound. All that percussive color sparkles amid a swirl of electronic rhythmic loops and short samples.
“Fracture is about the internal struggle of talking onstage. It’s a war with itself, but that war is what makes it interesting and engaging,” Sharrock said.
Although Sharrock has performed all of the works on Time-Lapse in other contexts, they say they won’t know what they've learned from the process of developing the program until they stand onstage and play all of the works together in the same concert.
Beyond the program, a dedicated space for quiet honesty artfully delivered could itself be the engine for a lone voice in today’s noisy world.
“My favorite form of theater is the soliloquy,” Sharrock said, “because I think that’s where you get to see an actor be their most authentic.”
Percussionist Matt Sharrock performs Time-Lapse Tues., Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. in the Green Room of the Short North’s Garden Theater, 1187 N. High St., Columbus.
WOSU’s Jennifer Hambrick is an advisor to the Johnstone Fund for New Music.
