Daisy Waters is a contemporary classical percussionist, composer, pianist, and songwriter specializing in solo and chamber percussion literature and a wide variety of genre-bending compositions for percussion and other instrumental and vocal disciplines.
Daisy has created an emergent career as a solo and chamber percussionist, having recently performed an immersive intermedia recital entitled Buried in the Earth’s Eternity. This project combining percussion music, art, poetry, cosmetics, and staging is the second in a five-year narrative known as The Concentric Universes Project, a follow-up to 2024’s Voices Heard Through Water. Daisy has performed in masterclasses for Katarzyna Mycka, Juan Alamo, Third Coast Percussion, Jessie Montgomery, Josh Graham, and other leading figures. She also appeared as a semifinalist at the 2023 Great Plains International Marimba Competition, and performed alongside Sandbox Percussion at their 2024 Summer Seminar in New York. She has commissioned works by established and emergent composers, including Dr. Fusun Köksal, Dr. Kerry Hagan, Dr. Greg Simon, Athena Carson, Na’ilah Ali, and Devin Brown.
At the University of Illinois, from which she has graduated with a Master of Music degree, Daisy has appeared with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony, the Sinfonia da Camera, the Danville Symphony Orchestra, and the Lyric Theatre @ Illinois Orchestra, as well as the UI Symphony Orchestra and Wind Symphony, as well as the Percussion Ensemble, Hip-Hop Collective, and the Illinois Modern Ensemble who recently premiered Ilya Demutsky’s new opera Black Square. She recorded four works with the Illinois Wind Symphony for future album release. In Daisy’s studies at the University of North Texas, she appeared with the North Texas Wind Symphony, where she can be heard on their 2023 album releases Respair and Closure, as well as UNT’s Wind Orchestra and Percussion Ensembles. She has shared the stage with Steven Schick, She-e Wu, Mark Ford, Noriko Tsukagoshi, William Moersch, Julian Bliss, Paquito D’Rivera, Andy Narell, Corky Siegel, Alonza Lawrence, Hub New Music, and other world-renowned soloists.
Daisy is also a fervent composer of more than 150 original works and arrangements for a variety of instruments and performance settings. Her oeuvre includes two string quartets, a concerto for percussion, original works for wind ensemble, over five dozen works for solo and chamber percussion, and two collections of hip-hop music. Daisy’s works have been commissioned by professional and student musicians alike, including Dr. Matthew Lau, the University of Illinois Percussion Ensemble, the University of Illinois Steel Band, the Noah Avelar, Tanner Day, Trevor Landreth, Chase Dunaway, Baryl Brandt. She is also the composer for a short film written by Catheryn Kuhar.
Daisy has studied with William Moersch, Dr. Josh Graham, Ricardo Flores, Mark Ford, Paul and Sandi Rennick, Dr. Dave Hall, Ed Smith, Poovalur Sriji, and Steve Barnes.
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Check it out at the following link:
Afterburners Required is a high-velocity and high-energy ragtime work for xylophone
and marimba, the title of which humorously suggests that performer and audience
member alike might need rocket boosters to keep pace. The xylophone part takes on
the soloistic voice throughout, carrying on the tradition of the xylophone in ragtime and
vaudeville music. The marimba plays a pianistic role throughout, providing the
rhythmic and harmonic underpinning for the work. Halfway through the work, the
tempo modulates cleverly to an even faster pace, such that hopefully everyone in the
room will be out of breath at the work’s conclusion! Afterburners Required was
commissioned by Yun-Chen Chou for her undergraduate senior recital at the University
of North Texas, and was premiered by Yun-Chen Chou and Daisy Waters.
Check it out at the following link:
This work for five percussionists transforms the 88 constellations classified by the International Astronomical
Union into musical gestures based on each constellation’s size, shape, group, and
location in the night sky. In the piece, the plane angle subtended by each
constellation’s region of space determines the duration of each gesture; the relative
location determines the pitch content, with more distinct pitches used for
constellations closer to the North Pole and vice versa; the IAU’s 8 Constellation Groups
determine the players used in each gesture; and the shapes of each constellation are
mapped as pitch material emulating MIDI rolls. The exception to the last rule is the
constellations of the Zodiac Group, which provide the piece with a recurring theme. The
work uses metallic instruments amidst this ever-evolving harmonic and gestural
landscape to create the feeling of staring out in awe at the night sky.
These works for audio include hip-hop, classical, and world music inspirations:
Welcome to Hell: Hip-Hop Beat, Inspired by Harry Partch and the Classical Underworld:
Arcade 2001: Hip-Hop Beat, Inspired by Backrooms and Early Internet Aesthetics:
Drums of the Bhaalspawn: Fixed Audio Composition, Designed as Background Music for a D&D Campaign:
Supervocalic: Solo for Tambourine with Audio Accompaniment, Based on the 5 Vowels in Different Genres:
Hindsight: A Variety of Instrumental Tracks:
This melancholy and reflective soundtrack music was written for a short film written by Catheryn Kuhar, which is currently yet to be released.
I arranged three songs from Hozier’s 2019 album Unreal Unearth for voice and marimba accompaniment in the summer of 2025, and recorded these songs with a colleague at the University of Illinois:
The Empathy Cycle is a set of five works, of which three have been written and two of those three have been recorded, for various solo instruments. The works in this cycle are connected by their themes of love, human empathy, and the power of compassion and community building to change lives.
Currently, the works in The Empathy Cycle include:
Men Against Fire, for Solo Bass Drum – Inspired by Black Mirror:
The Two-Headed Calf, for Solo Glockenspiel and Narrator – Based on Laura Gilpin’s 1977 Poem:
Open Ocean, Forever, for Solo Tam-Tam – Imagery of an Infinite Blue Sea:
Recording Coming Soon!
Trevor Landreth and I have begun collaboration on an ongoing series of works for percussion and other instruments and voices, with narrated of sung text taken from works of classic literature. To date, this collaboration has resulted in the premieres of two new works:
The Tell-Tale Heart (text by Edgar Allan Poe):
Two Scenes from Frankenstein (text by Mary Shelley):
Check it out at the following link:
This is my senior performance recital which I gave at the University of North Texas. The recital explores the unique rhythmic material of solo and chamber percussion music through a diverse selection of 21st-century compositions, including an original work of mine for Percussion Quintet and Piano entitled Forward, Beyond Perception.
I also worked with a suite of visual artists, myself included, to create color-coded artistic designs for each piece in the recital, which can be seen accompanying each piece on the projector screen behind the stage. These are further enhanced by the light projection capabilities of the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater.
Check it out at the following link:
From the Event Program:
"The Concentric Universes Project is a cycle of five intermedia recitals to be given over the course of five years, combining solo and chamber percussion music, visual art, poetry, and cosmetic art. These art forms are centered around the story of a lost soul, traveling through a chaotic and beautiful universe in search of her voice.
The music of The Concentric Universes Project is organized around a model of multi-dimensional programming; the works featured in each program are organized around a sphere of the natural universe, and at the same time, multiple programming decisions can be traced throughout the programs of all five recitals.
This is a story of a lost soul searching for her voice, but it is also a story of the world around us, our connection to the universe, and what it means to be alive.
Welcome to the first installment of The Concentric Universes Project: Voices Heard Through Water. Enjoy the show!"
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