About this Piece

Concertare, the Latin root of the word “concerto,” means to contend, fight, or debate. But by the time “concerto” was first used in music in the early 16th century, Latin had morphed into Italian, and the meaning was literally more agreeable: to arrange or unite—to come together.  

Both senses are at play in Naru, the new percussion concerto by Joseph Pereira, Principal Timpani for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And the Japanese word “naru” adds another semantic layer: It means to become or becoming, underlying traditional Japanese cosmology with the idea that everything is continuously evolving. 

Pereira wrote the piece specifically for his LA Phil colleague Matthew Howard. “When we talked about this concerto, the first thing Matt said was that he wanted a Japanese element in the piece. Matt is half Japanese, so that immediately got me thinking about identity as the central idea of this new work,” Pereira says. “It’s the perfect concept for a concerto because there’s a soloist going back and forth with a larger group of people and finding out how they complement and shape each other.” 

The Japanese connection brought Pereira to gagaku, the repertory of elegant court music from medieval Japan. The “becomingness” of naru is manifest in the ways time and pitch are fluid in gagaku. For Pereira, time in gagaku is almost absent and pitch is more a matter of color or timbre rather than matching precise vibration frequencies. 

The aural rather than conceptual influence of gagaku is immediately apparent. The concerto opens with a solo flute intoning an important theme as if in a distant ritual. The rest of the woodwinds, then muted trumpets, orchestral percussion, harp, and piano join the invocation, which is answered by the soloist on the massive ō-daiko, the largest of the Japanese taiko drums. The ritual turns to wailing—those are the composer’s markings—in the orchestra, which the soloist cuts off with a dramatic cadenza, notated but improvisational in spirit. 

From there the soloist launches a journey of self-discovery. “After the intro, Matt moves quickly through some of the other setups as he’s scrambling to find his identity,” Pereira says. “Throughout the piece he often goes between traditional instruments and material to more Western orchestral instruments and styles. He has five different instrument stations which are carefully coordinated through physical movement and the material’s development.” 

There could hardly be a more protean protagonist than a percussionist, as those stations reveal: ō-daiko and shime-daiko (the smallest taiko drum); wood disks (made from the same kind of plywood as used backstage at Walt Disney Concert Hall) amplified with reverb; electronic mallet sampler (with vibraphone and digital sampled sounds); tom-toms and cymbals; and bass drum with a waterphone. Each of these stations offers different sound worlds and requires different techniques, which evokes music in contrasting styles. 

The search for identity is thus made visible physically. The five stations are arrayed around the conductor, in front of the orchestra. The musical development and evolution of the piece are mirrored in movement, and the soloist’s orbit around the conductor underlines the idea that this is not about abstract identity but finding oneself within a community. Every station elicits a distinctive orchestral texture and different interactions and reactions. There is a lot of peer pressure on the soloist, who in turn is something of a charismatic influencer, as the orchestral players find themselves doing some percussive rappings and clatterings on their instruments. 

Finality is something a piece about identity and continuous evolution might find elusive. Pereira’s solution is a hugely dramatic drive, not to a cadence in any traditional sense, but to a paradoxical eruption of silence. Unity is achieved and this sonic cosmos goes supernova. —John Henken