"I've never played so many drums in my entire life!" cried percussionist Joseph Gramley during a rehearsal on Wednesday, shaking his fists slowly at the ceiling.
Gramley is one of four Silk Road Project musicians who will play in Salomon 101 tonight at 7 p.m. for a Works in Progress presentation that represents a week's worth of intense composition and improvisation.
Virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project in 1998 as a way to explore the traditions of the ancient Silk Road, a famous route that linked Europe and Asia in the first century B.C. The road greatly facilitated the exchange of cultural currency, and the Silk Road Project, which brings together musicians, storytellers, vocalists and dancers from around the world, strives to do this as well.
"The Silk Road - as both fact and metaphor - is of great relevance today as we explore the historical and inherent interrelatedness of the world's many cultures," said Laura Freid, CEO of the Silk Road Project. "We hope the exchange of music and ideas will serve to deepen the understanding we have of our own lives."
Gramley and fellow percussionists Sandeep Das, Shane Shanahan and Mark Suter are Silk Road Ensemble members who have been artists-in-residence at the Rhode Island School of Design since Jan. 22, due in part to Silk Road's five-year long educational collaboration with RISD and Ma's alma mater, Harvard University. The RISD residency will culminate with the performance in Salomon tonight.
The performance's theme is the exploration of composition. Each musician composed a piece for the group to play, though most of the pieces began with one man's concept and were composed more collectively through improvisation. The collective artistic authorship was almost indescribable, without rules or guidelines.
On Wednesday, just two days before their performance, the percussionists were still composing music, often bending over their individual drums to pencil musical notes onto paper after a particularly inspired improvisation or idea by the piece's composer.
"We started on Monday. Each one of us came with our own ideas and they were developed more fully when we started playing together," Shanahan said.
The group spent most of Wednesday practicing Shanahan's piece, an Arabic-inspired rhythm that uses several instruments, including the Indian drum tabla, which Das tames masterfully, and an almost anachronistically glittery tambourine that Shanahan manages to convert into a melodic instrument. Although Shanahan's piece only uses four instruments, Freid said the audience can expect to see the musicians collectively play at least 10 before the performance closes.
Shanahan's piece centers on one rhythm but leaves ample time for each percussionist to solo. At a pivotal moment in the composition, each musician plays alone for just a few notes before the person sitting next to him solos for an equally short amount of time. With each rotation, the amount of time each musician plays shortens. The rotation gives off the impression that the drummers are passing music around their circle, like a sonic game of "hot potato."
The other pieces are also uniquely inspired. Gramley drew inspiration from the Ryõan-ji temple's rock garden in Japan, where 15 rocks are placed such that from any place in the garden, one can only see 14. Gramley's piece, composed in three rhyth-mic cycles of 13, 7 and 31, tries to musically evoke the elusiveness of the 15th rock.
"One person goes away each (cycle). We never play in unison. We each go into separate tunes," he said. "When we play in 7, I'm actually playing 1, 2, 1, 2, so I'll be off. I wanted the audience not to understand."
Das' piece is about creation, he said. Das was inspired to compose this piece the last time he was doing a workshop at RISD and saw a statue of the Hindu god Shiva at the RISD Museum.
"Shiva is the creator of the universe. He actually created the universe with the sound of his drums," Das said. His piece starts off simply with one note, the sound of a conch, and moves fluidly through cycles of 7, 12 and 4.
"The 4-beat is very basic to life. It is somehow very related to creation. It's the heartbeat. It's how we talk, how we eat. That's how the piece ends," Das said.
What results from the four per-cussionists is something that will probably sound foreign to most listeners. Seldom do drummers, forever doomed to take the back seat to rock 'n' roll guitarists, provide the melody and harmony, the meat, bones and soul of a song. Although there will be non-percussive instruments in the performance, they will play backup. "They'll actually be playing behind us," Shanahan said.
The group's music, though highly controlled, exudes an inescapable primal urgency. The rhythms are undeniably infectious; listening to them, you might feel your heart start to pound faster, as though it is racing to align itself with the beat.
The percussionists, who have known one another for almost five years now, play together as a cohesive whole. They all smile at the same parts of the song, perhaps all recalling the moment of inspiration that gave birth to it. Once, when Shanahan, Suter and Gramley wandered off on a musical tangent in the middle of rehearsing Shanahan's piece, Das was able to keep up perfectly, leading Gramley to jokingly exclaim, "You didn't even know what was coming, you just felt it!"
Ultimately, the Works in Progress performance is just that: an experiment in the feeling of composition. The combination of different styles, musicians and instruments in an unrestricted creative environment has led to the creation of four unique pieces of music.
"It's great," Shanahan said of being a Silk Road musician. "We learn a lot from each other. That's one of the best parts, I believe."
The performance is free and open to the public.
