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Music

A percussive Pennington evening

Former FLC professor returns for recital
Former Fort Lewis College percussion professor John Pennington will give a free percussion recital at 7 p.m. Friday at FLC’s Roshong Recital Hall.

When John Pennington plays any percussion instrument, you can see delight on his face. Within seconds, he appears to inhabit the music, whether he’s playing the marimba, his Irish Bodhran or his tiny, Egyptian Riqq.

The former professor of percussion at Fort Lewis College returns to the campus Friday night for a free recital, and you can see and hear the musical magic he weaves in a program titled, “Sounds of the Earth.”

Now a full professor and chair of the music department at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Pennington is on a limited tour with works that mix Bach with Keith Jarrett and Pennington himself.

“I wanted to create a program that emphasizes earth sounds,” Pennington said in a recent email. “Metal, skin, seeds and plants.”

At the heart of the recital he will perform a new composition, “Five Elements (Wu Xing).”

“It’s a response to my recent month-long performance tour through China,” he wrote, “where I examined the remarkable history, systems and religions of Confucianism and Taoism.”

The FLC recital will open with Keith Jarrett’s “Moon Child” and continue with a marimba transcription of Bach’s Adagio from Sonata I for solo violin. Then Pennington will leap back into contemporary music, playing Paul Creston’s “Rhythmicon 79.”

Long a proponent of world music, Pennington has taken Augustana students abroad and concertized himself, particularly in India, where he will return next January. He is also a cultural envoy for the U.S. State Department in the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, where he has presented concerts, clinics and master classes. Pennington has performed on four continents and more than 25 states, somehow managing to return to Durango each summer to perform in the Music in the Mountains festival orchestra.

Two weeks ago, Pennington presented this program at the University of Nebraska in Kearney, invited by Tim Farrell, a former FLC music colleague who now teaches there.

For more than 20 years, Pennington taught at Fort Lewis and built the highly-successful percussion studies program. Its current director, John O’Neal, may join Pennington for one selection in Friday’s concert. Pennington will conclude with Isaac Albeniz’s “Asturias – Leyenda.”

jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.

If you go

“Sounds of the Earth,” percussion recital featuring John Pennington, 7 p.m. Friday, Roshong Recital Hall, free.



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