Composed 2021; 8 minutes    

Rubix, Third Coast Percussion’s collaboration with Flutronix, eschews the typical model of classical music, where an individual, specialized composer writes music for a group of performers. Instead, for this work, all six performers worked together to co-compose three movements of different characters. Prompted by concepts for musical games or directed improvisation, each musician brought semi-composed textures, sketches or performance instructions that the ensemble sculpted together through improvisation, conversation and collaboration into their final, through-composed form. While Flutronix regularly compose together as a duo, and TCP has collaboratively composed a few works as a quartet, this is the first time that either ensemble has co-composed with musicians outside of their ensembles.

Rubix appears on TCP’s album Perspectives, released in 2022 on Cedille Records, alongside works by Philip Glass, Jlin and Danny Elfman. The album was nominated for GRAMMY® Awards for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance” and “Best Engineered Album, Classical.”

Flutronix, founded in Brooklyn, NY, is Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, two distinguished performers and composers who are paving the way from their classical roots to the future of music. Their current large-scale projects rooted in social consciousness include Discourse, an evening-length community-centered performance activism initiative, and Black Being, an immersive electro-acoustic song-cycle examining the complexities of black womanhood, featuring newly commissioned text by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green. In addition to their collaborative creations, the duo support each other regularly on individual projects, and as producers on recorded work, including Joachim’s GRAMMY®-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti.