As part of the Master of Music degree at McGill University, I was required to give a recital of percussion works each year. My first recital consisted of a well-known piece for solo vibraphone called Loops II by Philippe Hurel, a less-known piece for solo marimba called As If Time Would Heal By Its Passing by Stuart Saunders Smith, and then the large duet for piano and percussion with fixed quadraphonic electronics called Kontakte by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The goal of this recital was to play solo pieces that showcased virutosity on various percussion instruments and then show cased my interest in electronic music. Kontake was a seminal work for electronic music, notably for it’s used of four loudspeakers, Stockhausen’s spatialization techniques, and compositional techniques to, as Stockhausen put it, “for the first time, ways to bring all properties [i.e., timbre, pitch, intensity, and duration] under a single control"