As part of our ongoing series of department interviews, Julia Tobiska (Performance Program Assistant) sat down with University Professor Augusta “Gusty” Read Thomas to discuss the upcoming World Premiere of “Resounding Earth” performed by Third Coast Percussion (pictured left) at Notre Dame. (Press Release)
Do you have a dream master-work? Something that you have had in your head for a very long time but if you had the time some day you would finally complete?
For me, the dream master-works are along the lines of the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven 7, Mahler 4, Ravel String Quartet. If I’m thinking about my own work…hmmm… Organic and at every level concerned with transformations and connections, my music is always leading me toward this fundamental goal: to try to compose a work in which every musical parameter is allied in one holistic gestalt. There are some projects that I really want to do but I haven’t written the music in my ears and brain yet. In general, I compose one-work-at-a-time and get very buried in all of its meanings and relationships, focusing on it immensely… I dream about it and think about it non-stop even if I’m doing something else – large compositions take months to compose.
What are you most looking forward to in the coming year?
I’m looking forward to teaching and working with my tremendous colleagues. I have an awfully busy season in terms of my own works being played, including a huge premiere coming up at Carnegie Hall on October 11th.
How exciting!
Thanks! And then I’m very much looking forward to a piece that I’ve done that is quite unusual. …
I’ve focused on writing music since I was fifteen years of age. I’m forty-eight! So it’s thirty-three years of effort. Bell sounds have saturated my music for decades. I decided to make a piece for nothing but bells and/or bell-like objects and/or metal objects that ring.
So, the quick summary of this piece is that it’s for 300 pieces of metal to be premiered by the stellar Third Coast Percussion Ensemble. It’s definitively the hardest piece I’ve every written. Every piece I will write from now on will seem easier. Composing half an hour of nothing but metal is tough: no strings, no voice, no skins of drums, and the metals are in all different intonations and some of these bells, when you hit them, have different pitches.
If you hit here you get one pitch and different mallets bring out different over-tones so it’s exponentially endless! “Resounding Earth,” re-sounding earth is the title. Throughout history, humans have taken metals and made instruments. We have bells from India, Africa, Japan, China, bells from all around the world. So, it’s a metaphor for interdependence or the universe of people ringing their bells together. There’s a spiritual over-tone (no pun intended) to this piece.
Beautiful concept!
Thank you… [“Resounding Earth”] has been a huge, weighty project. There’s no other piece in the world that could ever sound like this because no one has this collection of bells. Just to give you one example, we have 18 Burmese Spinning Bells – you usually hear one! We have twenty-five Japanese singing prayer bells … it’s a very specific, one-off piece: not generic at all, highly iconoclastic piece.
Read another interview with Augusta Read Thomas