For those of us with the polyrhythmic landfall of free jazz drummers like Andrew Cyrille and Sunny Murray – the man who played the law of relativity – surging through our imaginations, notated music for ‘classical’ percussionists invariably disappoints. The resulting sonic boom of a struck ride cymbal resonates beyond anyone’s control; the sound doesn’t know it’s been written down, but we do.

As Cornelius Cardew put it, ‘the notation should do it’, and California-based composer Roger Reynolds succeeds where most composers fail: he has devised a notational system for percussion that allows him, as composer, to fix parameters and structures while allowing sound to retain its autonomy. Sanctuary is in three sections. The first movement, ‘Chatter/Clatter’, is for a solo percussionist, the excellent Steven Schick, who uses his fingers to scuttle over, shake and tap percussion instruments (including gongs and a woodblock, also a beer bottle and small box) laid out over a tabletop. The second and third movements (‘Oracle’ and ‘Song’) move this conversation between sound and fingers to a percussion quartet.

And this is how Reynolds’s notation triumphs. Schick fingers each gesture with targeted precision and delicacy, like phrasing the chromatic tumble of a Schubert slow movement. Percussion-writing tends towards grand, splashy pomp; instead Reynolds diverts what he calls ‘the choreography of motion’ normally used by percussionists to produce a sound into a base material that is open for development. Now no longer an instinctive technique deployed to realise generic percussion gestures, Reynolds goes right inside sound. I could fill a whole issue of Gramophone with the nuances of how Sanctuary evolves from here, but the gist is that the melodic archetypes Reynolds sketches out during his opening movement blossom in the second and third movements. Real-time electronics listen in and add commentaries, then harmony like you never did hear materialises on tuned almglocken cowbells in the final moments. Here’s the most outstandingly original view of percussion since Varèse’s Ionisation.

All those composers – James MacMillan, Joseph Schwantner, Jennifer Higdon – who have grafted percussion concertos over cod-Romantic emoting, confusing effect with content, need to think again. Your music is the wrong way round.