Thanks to percussion ensemble Kopanya, who delivered a mesmerising, hypnotic and in places downright exuberantly dynamic concert to open our new Lunchtime Concert series.
John Woolrich’s Mustering Drum provided an energetic opener to a concert showcasing the diversity of music for percussion, including John Cage’s Quartet for Percussion from 1935, with instrumentation sensitively organised by the ensemble to yield an hypnotic second movement laden with gongs. The group showed how a marimba could be turned into a shimmering curtain of sound in Peter Garland’s Apple Blossom, which saw all four members grouped around the instrument, and the concert concluded in epic fashion with traditional drumming from Senegal.
A dramatic way to launch our new series: our thanks to Kopanya! Next up is the Kentish Piano Trio in music by Beethoven and Suk on Wednesday 9 November – more details here.
As always, the concert starts at 1.10pm, and admission is free with a suggested donation of £3. The first in our new series of lunchtime concerts, later events include the Kentish Piano Trio in November and sitar master Ustad Dharambir Singh in December.
Created especially for the Colyer-Fergusson Gallery, Preludes (where you go, I go) by visual artist Adam de Ville is a series of images in response to Sinking of the Titanic by composer Gavin Bryars, a haunting meditation on the idea of what happens to the music played by the band as the great ship sank.
The exhibition is showing in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery until Friday 4 November during normal opening hours, and admission is free. Find out more about Adam 
Legendary sideman, bandleader, endless searching to break new ground, Coltrane’s long shadow reaches beyond his untimely death from liver cancer at the age of forty, and embraces his time as sideman with Miles Davis to his own groups with figures including McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones to his increasingly experimental work with Pharoah Sanders, and late recordings with his second wife, Alice, as pianist.
Watch it online 
Second-year Music Scholar and Biosciences student, Ruth Webster, (pictured above, second from left) will be familiar to those of you who have come to choral events over the past couple of years – Ruth sings with the University Chorus, Chamber Choir, Cecilian Choir, Minerva Voices and has sung as soloist in Vivaldi’s Gloria, Handel’s Messiah and Horovitz’s Horrortorio; she was also joint winner of the John Craven Music Prize for her contribution to music-making last year.
This year, though, Ruth is trading in the wood-panelled concert-hall and the Biosciences lab for exotic food and clothes markets, tropical storms and the richly-hued life of Malaysia, where and she and several other students from the University of Kent are studying at the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) in Johor Bahru, in the very south of Malaysia.