On Sat., Sep. 23 at 8pm, the area’s grandest theater, the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie, welcomes to its stage an ensemble of some of the most accomplished, iconoclastic, and influential classical and world musicians and composers of the last half century. Billed as a farewell concert celebrating 52 years of the percussion quartet NEXUS, the concert will feature performances by the legendary minimalist composer Steve Reich, the World music icon Paul Winter, and the kindred, genre-defying young Brazilian pianist and composer Henrique Eisenmann.
While master percussionist, instrument builder, Woodstock Chimes entrepreneur and long-time Woodstock resident Garry Kvistad is still the “new kid” in NEXUS (having joined this elite modernist percussion ensemble in the early 21st century), his minimalist, experimental, and global music bona fides had been secured decades earlier by his membership in Steve Reich’s ensembles in the ‘70s and beyond. Mr. Kvistad and several other NEXUS members are, in fact, among the 18 musicians to be awarded a Grammy for the 1998 recording of one of Reich’s flagship compositions, Music for 18 Musicians.
Kvistad also belongs to another significant and rare breed of contemporary classical musicians and composers: those who, like Harry Partch, were driven by necessity to conceive and build original instruments to realize their musical visions. The motivation for such experimental instrument design has typically been to escape the confines and distortions of equal temperament or the 12-note western octave altogether. Those listeners inexperienced in this world of microtonal music are often wary, fearing that perhaps classical music has discovered new modes of estrangement even more severe than the radical harmonic systems of Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Babbitt that dominated serious music programming and education through much of the 20th century.
It is a welcome surprise to discover how natural and pleasing microtonal and just temperament music can be in its unfamiliarity, a point that Mr. Kvistad proved lavishly with the stunning 2014 record Chiaroscuro, a Woodstock-centric collaboration between NEXUS (playing instruments of Kvistad’s design) and Baird Hersey’s harmonic overtone singing ensemble Prana. Somewhat ironically, It could be argued that NEXUS, Reich, and other daring experimental artists of the second half of the 20th century went a long way toward restoring pleasure, humanity, accessibility, and heightened states to the experience of modern classical music. The current resurgence of classical music and its cultural connectedness via film, pop music, and multi-art collaboration owes much to Kvistad’s and Reich’s generation of artists, its open ears and its full-on embrace of non-western music.
Enter Paul Winter, the American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader with, Kvistad reminds me, his own Woodstock connection via a long relationship with the late pianist Warren Bernhardt. Winter led the cultural exchange and hybridization that came to be known, rather simplistically, as World music. (Global music-inspired rock star Peter Gabriel once quipped that he has always regarded Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra as “world music” too). In the popular mind, Winter is known primarily for a number of iconic melodies that brought world folk traditions and spiritual practice into contact with jazz (maybe inadvertently founding the New Age genre in the same stroke), but behind the hits, he is as serious a student and pioneer as we have, a pivotal figure in attuning western ears to the consciousness-transforming beauties of numerous non-western traditions.
Kvistad treats the idea of a NEXUS farewell tour with a bit of a chuckle, noting that the estimable Emerson Quartet is well into the third year of its own farewell tour and that the Who’s grand goodbye has been ongoing for half a decade. He adds that the individual members of NEXUS are all in good health and forging on with their own projects (more on his own later), and that Reich and Winter, both in their mid-80s and vital artists still, have expressed no intention of retiring. But the event does afford an opportunity, a platform at a great height, to consider the achievement of NEXUS, Reich, and Winter and their central position in some of the most invigorating trends and developments of modern music.
NEXUS was formed in 1971 by percussionists Bob Becker, Bill Cahn, Russell Hartenberger, and John Wyre, who retired in 2002. While they are strongly associated with contemporary classical and with the exacting precision of profound pattern-study music by Reich and others, it is significant that the ensemble’s very first performance was two hours of entirely improvised music, a practice that has remained with the group ever since and that will be invoked at the Bardavon show, though, Kvistad clarifies, “less than two hours.”
Over a half century, NEXUS has collected a gaudy peacock fan of honors and distinctions. The New York Times has called NEXUS “the high priests of the percussion world.” The group has participated in 60 international festivals, performing four times at the Kennedy Center, twice at the BBC Proms (Royal Albert Hall), and no fewer than five times in Carnegie Hall. NEXUS is in the Percussion Hall of Fame (along with Ringo Starr and Kvistad’s community mate Jack DeJohnette). NEXUS has commanded attention with original compositions as well commissions from such composers Pulitzer prize-winners Reich and Ellen Taafe Zwillich, Grammy-winner Libby Larsen, and the Japanese master Toru Takemitsu. Predictably, NEXUS has collaborated frequently with other notable and adventurous small ensembles such as the Canadian Brass and the Kronos Quartet. For all of this, their greatest fame may derive from their revival of the 1920s novelty ragtime xylophone music of Geroge Hamilton Green. Through their agency, this nearly lost music has become canonical in the world of percussionists.
While Bardavon has yet to release a program for the Sep. 23 concert, Mr. Kvistad had just finished reviewing and approving it before I spoke with him. He describes a dazzling program of some of Reich’s and Winter’s best known works as well as improvisations, some xylophone ragtime, and deep dives into the music of Brazil, Uganda, and Ghana—traditions that have sustained and united the careers of all of these voracious and unfettered musicians and composers.
The program will begin with Paul Winter’s piece “Sun Singer,” “a beautiful melody that Paul does at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at every Solstice concert,” says Kvistad. This will morph into some Ugandan xylophone music–“dynamic, driving, beautiful stuff”–followed by Winter and Eisenmann performing several classic Brazilian pieces and a tribute to Ukraine that they co-composed. The program includes several of Reich’s most influential works including Clapping the signature early composition Drumming. “Even though some people haven’t caught up to yet, his music is incredibly beautiful, with great melodies and rhythmic interest. He was influenced a great deal by J.S. Bach and early music, but it was also heavily influenced by African music and Indonesian gamelan. Drumming,” he adds, “was a very influential piece, not only among composers but also on rock groups like Radiohead.”
Part of the allure of this concert comes from a surprising direction—the visual spectacle of complex, rhythmic music executed on novel instruments. When Kvistad speaks of his own immediate goals after NEXUS’s celebratory tour concludes, foremost on his list is the curation of his own collection of original instruments, “one percent of which,” he says, “will fill the Bardavon stage on Saturday night. My emphasis will be to find a home for these instruments at research and performing arts center situations. Now that we retired from Woodstock Chimes two years ago, I have more time for things like that.”
When I ask about the presence of young Henrique Eisenmann on this bill of elder statesmen and 20th century musical eminences, Kvistad says, “when it comes to music, age is not a factor. It’s the love of music, coming together as friends, trusting each other. That kind of thing.”
For tickets and additional information, visit bardavon.org. For more about Garry Kvistad and NEXUS, visit nexuspercussion.com.
Join the family! 
