The New Music Co-op Presents:

Willow Street Spring Concert Series 2005

Nick Hennies, solo percussion - "Music without Instruments"
Saturday, April 9th - 8pm

The economics of percussion music can be described only as difficult. The financial needs for acquiring most percussion instruments is extraordinary, be it the cost of college tuition for the percussion student or by purchasing them privately. What this suggests is that this music is for the bourgeois (the privileged) an assertion in direct contradiction with the philosophical implications of experimentalism, a concept essential to musical progress. "Music without Instruments" is opposed to this idea. It is an entire program of modern music performed on objects that can be found freely throughout our environment, available to anyone who wishes to make music with them. "Music without Instruments" is, to quote Stuart Saunders Smith, impoverished music that still survives with grace and dignity.

Program features music by Stuart Saunders Smith, Vinko Globokar, Kunsu Shim, Gerhard Stabler.

Nick Hennies is a percussionist/improviser from Louisville, KY. In 2003 he received his M.A. from UC-San Diego where he performed regularly with the percussion group 'red fish blue fish' and the trombonist Tucker Dulin. He has studied percussion and composition with Steve Schick, Stuart Saunders Smith, Herbert Brun, and William Moersch and has performed a wide variety of composed and improvised experimental music. He has also performed with Dave Gross, Mike Bullock, Sean Meehan, Michael Griener, Bhob Rainey, the SONOR Ensemble, and was a founding member of the 4th Epicycle Improvisation Ensemble at the Lemp Arts Center in St. Louis. Nick is currently a member of The Weird Weeds and an improvising guitar/drums duo with Kurt Newman called The Long Telegram.