Classical percussion music, world premieres, and works commissioned for The Equal Temperament Percussion Duo by various composers.
Parhelion includes the solo timpani piece "The Final Precipice" which was chosen by juried competition for performance at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, a national convention. The work was then nominated for Best Work of the 1994 conference and won second place in the 1995 Percussive Arts Society composition contest (percussion with tape).
Other works on the album include a high energy drumming piece by David Jarvis, a keyboard percussion duo by Thomas Brett, and "Sun Dogs", a work for marimba, vibraphone, and other percussion instruments by Erik Santos.
Erik Santos is a composer whose special interest is illuminating the connection between music and magic: how mundane elements, musical and non-musical, are galvanized into powerful poetic and ecstatic experience.
Santos is on the faculty at the University of Michigan School of Music where he teaches composition and music technology. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), The MacDowell Colony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Rackham Graduate School of The University of Michigan, and was named the 1999 "Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year" by the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA).
Santos has had commissions for theater and dance music from the Wild Swan Theater of Ann Arbor, orchestral commissions from the Bozeman and Butte Symphony Orchestras of Montana, and a number of commissions for chamber works, among them: Zauberkraft (Magic Power) commissioned by Danish-American percussionist Timothy Lutte for performance at the 1996 Percussive Arts Society International Conference (PASIC) in Nashville, . . . con Cruces de Fuego (. . . with Crosses of Fire) which was commissioned by the Michigan Music Teachers Association, and Sun Dogs for a new CD by the percussion duo, Equal Temperament (Eric and Stacey Jones). The CD, called "Parhelion" has just been released on the Eroica label.
In 1998, in an effort to unify the wide variety of his artistic experience into a powerful new form of expression, he produced Cruces de Fuego (Crosses of Fire). This large-scale synthesis of music, dance, theater, art, poetry, and video projections was rooted in the earthy surrealism of Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo, and Remedios Varo. It sought to dissolve traditional barriers that exist between audience and performer and the experience of deep wonder.
His compositions are beginning to attract performances in other countries as far as Australia, Denmark, and Philippines, eliciting positive reviews: "Erik Santos captivates the listener, giving rise to both a sense of rapture and a feeling of bewilderment..." The New Music Connoisseur described his Guernica Dances ... for two pianos as "full of positive excitement with a final coda that is so thrilling that the audience broke out into loud shouts of approval at its conclusion."
