Thursdays at Noon | Joy Boy: Dustin Donahue & Kairos Percussion Quartet

Dustin Donahue, visiting artist
Kairos Percussion Quartet are Bevis Ng, Andrew Busch, Thomas Li, and Hoi Tong Keung

Livestream available on our YouTube Channel.

The Thursdays at Noon series is made possible in part by the Jay Telfer Forum Endowment Fund. 

PROGRAM

Twist
Joshua Weinfeld
Kairos Percussion Quartet

Design Group I 
Netty Simons
Dustin Donahue

vv
Juri Seo
Kairos Percussion Quartet

Amazonia Dreaming
Annea Lockwood

Grapple
Paul Hembree
Dustin Donahue

Joy Boy
Julius Eastman
Dustin Donahue and Kairos Percussion Quartet

BIOGRAPHIES

Dustin Donahue is a percussionist dedicated to chamber music and contemporary music performance. He has performed with many of the country's top presenters of chamber music, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, the Ojai Music Festival, and La Jolla Summerfest. He performs across the United States with groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, the Partch Ensemble, and ECHOI. He appears on recordings for Decca, Mode, Naxos, New Focus, Populist, and Stradivarius Records. He also co-directs Wasteland, an organization dedicated to fostering experimental chamber music in southern California. 

As a soloist, he has been featured at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Carlsbad Music Festival, the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington, D.C., Mengi in Reykjavík, Iceland, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. As an advocate for contemporary music, he frequently develops new work with living composers, such as recent collaborations with Carolyn Chen, Nicholas Deyoe, Laure Hiendl, Tania Lanfer, Bruno Ruviaro, Steven Takasugi, and Yiheng Yvonne Wu.

Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He holds a DMA from the University of California – San Diego where he studied with Steven Schick, and a BM from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with Anthony Di Sanza.

Founded in 2022, the Kairos Percussion Quartet (Bevis Ng, Nikki Huang, Thomas Li, and Andrew Busch) is an emerging performing arts ensemble based in Toronto, ON. Kairos has performed throughout Canada for the Canadian Percussion Network, the Ontario Day of Percussion, and the University of Toronto New Music Festival. The quartet recently made their concerto debut last February performing Kevin Lau’s “Charon’s Dance” with the University of Toronto Wind Symphony. As advocates for new music and unorthodox concert programming, they have released two world premieres composed by Chris Mercer and Joshua Weinfeld, and have presented an original thirty-minute curation entitled, “How to Turn a Bicycle into a Unicorn,” exploring concepts of recontextualization, theatre, and storytelling.  You can listen to the Kairos Percussion Quartet online through their 2023 recording of “Torque” by Vijay Iyer, and their 2024 world premiere recording of “Twist” by Joshua Weinfeld.

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

As part of the Faculty’s commitment to improving Indigenous inclusion, we call upon all members of our community to start/continue their personal journeys towards understanding and acknowledging Indigenous peoples’ histories, truths and cultures. Visit indigenous.utoronto.ca to learn more.