Third Coast Percussion, mode 243 *****

Percussion instruments grew in importance in the late romantic symphony orchestra and, after a few experimental forays, they detached themselves for a new, independent identity, announced in spectacular style by the 1933 premiere of Edgard Varèse's Ionisation, for 13 players using 39 instruments. In the 1930s and 1940s, John Cage produced a stream of works on a smaller scale, including three famous Constructions, which still sound like the most fun a quartet of percussionists can have in the music of the first half of the 20th century. Cage's soundworld embraces objects from junk yards and, in Living Room Music, "any household objects or architectural elements". Third Coast Percussion make full use of the freedoms they are given (computers are now household objects), and in one movement of the 1934 Quartet, even work with the detached metal frame and strings of a piano. url.ie/8b2u