James Wood is an outstanding percussionist as well as a composer and conductor, and all three strands of his musical life come together in Tongues of Fire, his 2001 piece for chorus and percussion quartet. It’s a setting of the Pentecost story, taken mostly from biblical sources, fleshed out with other texts. They are sung mostly in Latin American Spanish (chosen for its “crisp rhythmic articulations, and possibilities for salsa-like syncopations”, says Wood), apart from a climactic section when the description of Christ’s followers speaking in tongues triggers an eruption of different languages from the chorus – Hebrew, Maori, Jamaican English, Latin, Hungarian, German and French. It’s an especially virtuoso moment in Wood’s exuberant choral writing, which is constantly propelled by his equally inventive writing for the percussion quartet playing on oil drums, from which they extract an amazing range of textures and colours, which are vividly realised by the Ear Massage Percussion Quartet.
Cloud-Polyphonies is an equally rigorous exploration of percussion sonorities, a sextet that takes three kinds of natural “cloud” phenomena – pre-roost gatherings of starlings; the movements of a herd of American bison; clouds themselves seen from a hot-air balloon – as the inspiration for its three movements. Each is defined by a different set of instruments, rather like Iannis Xenakis’s percussion classic Pleiades, though Wood’s writing for the six players is far more subtle, never so elementally brutal as Xenakis’s.
