Photo: Davide Monteleone
Armenian-born, Los Angeles-raised pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan is one of the 21st century’s true slipstream musicians. His work crosses boundaries between jazz, crossover classical, electronic, Baroque dance, vocal, and Armenian folk musics atop electronic backdrops and hip-hop beats. Hamasyan was born in 1987 in Gyumri, Armenia. He began playing the family’s piano at three and was enrolled in music school at six. His jazz tastes early on were informed by Miles Davis’s fusion period, and then around the age of 10 his family moved to Yerevan and he came to discover the classic jazz songbook under the aegis of his teacher Vahag Hayrapetyan. Tigran found himself part of the festivities at the Yerevan Second International Jazz Festival in 2000 and, when he was 16, his family immigrated to Los Angeles. Tigran stayed in high school for two months before gaining entrance to the University of Southern California, which he attended for two years. As a teen, he would go on just a few years later to win a number of contests including the 2003 Montreux Jazz Festival and the grand prize at the prestigious 2006 Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition.
While he has built a career as a performer of his own music — known to his fans as a sort of prog rock version of the modern jazz musician — Hamasyan’s work has started to be available to other performers in recent years, first as sheet music of his solo piano works transcribed from his recordings, and now in the form of new compositions written for other performers. In particular, he seems a natural choice for composing for a contemporary percussion ensemble, as his creative voice plays with extremely complex rhythmic cycles. Within this rhythmic landscape exists a compelling counterpoint, with different voices supporting or pushing against one another. Hamasyan’s great power as a composer is that the individual musical lines are always melodies in their own right, transcending the mathematics of their complex rhythmic skeletons.
His Sonata for Percussion is very classical in some ways — it has three distinct movements (fast-slow-fast), and it is abstract music, not meant to tell a story or metaphorically represent anything outside of the music itself. Lilting dance feels, arpeggiated harmonies and ornamented melodies give an additional wink to the classical, but the vocabulary is pure Hamasyan, with the moments of hard-grooving energy or ghostly lyricism winding their way through an asymmetrical rhythmic landscape. The outer movements both explore different subdivisions of 23-beat rhythmic cycles, while the middle movement is in a (relatively) tame seven.
Working through this material — both in workshops with the composer during the creative process and in rehearsals for the premiere — was an exhilarating but humbling experience for the members of TCP, who had to work to develop the unique skill set that Tigran has built with his band, in order to fit together the rhythmic jigsaw puzzle in a way that grooves and allows the character of the musical lines to shine through.
Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion was commissioned for Third Coast Percussion’s 20th Anniversary by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting and the Zell Family Foundation.
Duration: 20 minutes