Boston Modern Orchestra Project to Begin 2025-26 Season With BANG THE DRUM Concert

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will kickstart its 29th season with BANG THE DRUM: a one-night only orchestral concert at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall, Saturday, November 1, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. Celebrating the versatility of percussion instruments, BMOP and its Grammy Award-Winning Conductor and Artistic Director Gil Rose present three virtuosic works showcasing the vast and imaginative sonic possibilities of percussion.

The program opens with the bright and playful percussion quartet STUDY No. 1 (2023) by one of today's leading female artists, the Grammy Award-winning composer Jessie Montgomery (b.1981). Inspired by marching band cadences and the West African "talking drum", STUDY No. 1 explores a wide range of timbres and various types of pitch bending and speech-like rhythmic patterns. Acclaimed for her compositions that are "turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life" (Washington Post), Montgomery is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation's Leonard Bernstein Award and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence.

Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour (b.1956) has established himself as one of the most sought-after composers of his generation. His Celestial Circus (2013) is a 25-minute suite composed for two pianos and three percussionists that uses electrifying, inventive effects to showcase the spectacular deftness and multifarious sounds of the percussion. Featuring a trio of drumming masters, this compelling work requires precise coordination "among the three as they pass moving figures to one another, and the xylophonist is frequently asked to double the first piano" (New York Classical Review).

2025 marks the centennial of Gunther Schuller's birth (1925-2015). Ranking among the most eclectic of his generation or any other, Schuller was a composer, conductor, jazz and classical performer, author/historian, music publisher, record producer, and creator of a revolutionary, hybrid style known as "Third Stream."Schuller served as President of the New England Conservatory, where he established a successful degree-granting jazz program, from 1967-1977. He was the winner of several major honors including the MacArthur Genius Award, DownBeat Lifetime Achievement Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two Grammy Awards, and inaugural membership in the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

"There was no more prodigious and passionate master of the musical 20th century in America than Gunther Schuller. He was American music-making at its best. To commemorate his centennial, we recognize and celebrate the indelible mark he left on American music." - GIL ROSE

To celebrate Schuller's centennial, BMOP presents his sole work for percussion ensemble, Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards (2005). Known for its extensive use of both pitched (such as the marimba and vibraphone) and non-pitched percussion (such as drums, cymbals, and a wind machine), the four-movement Grand Concerto was written for eight percussionists, harp, cello and ensemble and premiered by the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble in 2005. According to Schuller, the idea of writing for a lot of percussion with their almost limitless sound and textural possibilities really turned him on.

"Writing this piece was like enjoying a tremendous gourmet feast. Or to put it another way, I felt like a little four-year old splashing wildly around in a big bathtub with dozens of plastic or rubber toys. My imagination was constantly fired with the excitement of talking all those hundred-instrument sounds, like a chef's ingredients, and mixing, collecting, combining - and/or featuring - in a seemingly limitless, inexhaustible variety." - Gunther Schuller

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