As Peter Margasak pointed out in his recent feature on Third Coast Percussion, classical percussion ensembles are a relatively recent phenomenon. So when someone writes a strong new piece, percussionists are liable to talk.
“Ghost Music was written during 2007 and 2008,” explains Sargent. “I was working on several pieces for solo percussion and percussion ensemble around that time for ringing metal instruments and became especially interested in the sonic signatures of small bells: by listening to them struck in different orders for long periods of time, details of their sonorities started to have a real familiarity and causality in the ear. These sounds also seem to lend themselves to an intense concentration—when struck quietly, they really ask the listener to lean forward in search of them. In deciding to write a long piece, I was simply curious how far I could go within this listening experience.”
Sargent wrote the piece with Solomon in mind, and during the process they got together frequently to talk and workshop it. “We met every two weeks over a nine-month period to play through parts of music from its most primordial stages,” Sargent says. “Bill was both a serious pianist and percussionist as a student, and he plays percussion with a pianist’s sensibility—polyphonic lines are always very clear in his playing, which is something that we really bonded over right from the start.”
