So Percussion Group
Eric Beach - Josh Quillen – Adam Sliwinski – Jason Treuting
What kind of music is this? For So Percussion, the question has never been an easy one. They’d never been just another modern performance ensemble anyway. Following two acclaimed albums of rigorous music by modern master Steve Reich and even-more-modern masters David Lang and Evan Ziporyn, as well as ongoing collaborations with electronic gurus Matmos, the 20-something quartet has discovered a bold new voice: their own.
Called "astonishing and entrancing" by Billboard, "brilliant" by the New York Times, the discovery is perfectly appropriate. Coming together in the green pastures of New Haven at Yale's graduate program, So Percussion was created to give fresh voice to what co-founder Jason Treuting calls "funky contemporary music." Devoted to the conceptual dreamscapes of Reich, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, and others, So established a disciplined work ethic, absorbing pieces over months in the Yale studio. A call to Bang on a Can founder David Lang yielded a commission. Called "a must-hear" by Billboard, their self-titled debut featured Lang's "the so-called laws of nature."
In 2004, realizing Steve Reich's nine-part "Drumming" as a quartet, they made one small step for music, one radical step for a percussion group: they overdubbed -- and to great success. Having explored the past, in the form of Reich's classics, and the present, in the form of Lang and Ziporyn's freshest, it was time for So to start exploring the future.
In that vein, their newest CD/DVD Amid the Noise began as an after-hours project. Eager to expand their palette, the members of So experimented with glockenspiel, toy piano, vibraphones, bowed marimba, melodica, tuned and prepared pipes, metals, a wayward ethernet port, and all kinds of sound programming. The resulting idiosyncratic tone explorations were synchronized to Jenise Treuting’s haunting films of street scenes in Brooklyn and Kyoto.
"If you're sick of the sounds you've got, you go and find more," declares Sliwinski of the group's sonic philosophy. "There's always something to hit or rub or whatever." It is an approach they have taken with them to countless educational programs, ranging from community talks to masterclasses with student percussionists and composers at Juilliard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Texas, the University of Toronto, The Moscow Conservatory, and many other schools. It also has inspired them to commission dozens of composers to write for this most eclectic of instrumental groups. With the list spanning from such notables as David Lang and Paul Lansky to emerging talents Cenk Ergun, Dennis DeSantis and Suzanne Farrin, this unique repertoire has been heard at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and The Knitting Factory in New York, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, and Montreal’s Le National, to name a few. In fact, So is one of the only outfits that can play at a major concert hall and with indie's hippest artists within 24 hours.
With an audience comprised of "both kinds of blue hair... elderly matron here, arty punk there" (as the Boston Globe described it), So Percussion makes a rare and wonderful breed of music that both compels instantly and offers vast rewards for engaged listening. Edgy (at least in the sense that little other music sounds like this) and ancient (in that people have been hitting objects for eons), perhaps it doesn’t need to be called anything at all.
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So Percussion 2008 Summer Schedule
This year has been amazing! Look soon for stories about our trips to Australia, the Ukraine, the Ojai festival, and all over the U.S. this past spring.
Summer is here, and we have some exciting things in store:
Saturday, June 28 -- 5:00pm
CitySol Festival
New York, NY
"Four days of solar-powered music, art, comedy, and
more to entertain and enlighten New Yorkers about urban sustainability..."
Premiering Jason Treuting's 16 words with Grey McMurray (of itsnotyouitsme) and Ryan Ferreira (of Jersyband).
Music based on the 16 new words added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2006, including such greats as unibrow, ringtone, avian influenza and manga.
The world premiere of 16 Words at Citysol is made possible through a grant from the Greenwall Foundation.
Saturday, July 5 - all afternoon
PS1 MOMA
Long Island City, NY
So Performs some Reich outdoors
Music for Trains
So's exciting summer project in Southern Vermont...
new music for trains and train stations.
Check out musicfortrains.com for the experience.
Friday and Saturday, August 8 and 9th
Brattleboro and Bellows Falls, VT (and in-between)
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Recent Concerts and Events:
So Percussion performance was pure ecstasy
By KITTY MONTGOMERY, Reviewer THE DAILY FREEMAN
06/08/2008
Ecstasy commences with the cessation of agony. Imagine four Pililated Woodpeckers, those big birds frequently confused with the quasi-mythical Ivory Bill, knocking on impenetrable pines of varying resonance, until they hit a groove and rap variations on it like a swamp full of toads, to almost infinity. Just when so you think you'll go out of your freaking mind, they stop. The silence is bliss.
Thus did the four Yale Music School master shamans of So Percussion prepare the skulls of their audience for ultimate sonic receptivity at Quimby Auditorium, May 30. Returned from a tour encompassing points in Australia and Ukraine, their foray into beatific audience mind expansion transpired at the invitation of David Aphner, founder and artistic director of the Marbletown Chamber Arts Festival. Talk about eclectic programming!
The So's exercise in pre-lobotomy drill was an actual composition, by Steve Reich, titled "Music for Pieces of Wood," "based on the process of rhythmic build-ups" which, the composer confesses is the loudest (unamplified) piece he has ever written.
Thanks, Steve, for preparing the way, because when this scruffy gang of four, dressed in grey convict shirts, moved on to mesmerize us with a tonal amalgam of sonics, in Jason Treuting's composition, "Amid the Noise," we were ready to ascend with their seductive soundscapes, rapt as sacrificial Pied Piper groupies.
Conceived as a series of accompaniments to video clips filmed by Treuting's sibling, Jenise on the streets of Kyoto, Japan and Brooklyn, involving the static structure of a fire escape, repeat motion - people riding an escalator - and doing "everyday things," the So's painted tone to radiant mobile edifice with a spectrum of instruments - toy piano, vibraphone, melodic and bowed marimbas that evoked the mysterium of whale song, so the plain world of everyday things bloomed inexplicably wondrous.
Think rainbow scapes reflected like oil spills on still waters, or maybe visions in Queen Galadriel's mirror, from Lord of the Rings.
Further weird images come to mind in search to convey the rising, unfolding, mobile, sometimes rhythmically eruptive sections of Paul Lansky's "Threads," a 10-part cantata written for So Percussion in 2005. The work has arias, recitatives, choruses; the participants deploy a melange of non-instrument instruments -- bottles, flower pots, pipes and actual traditional instruments.
Engaged, they seem to find the latent sing in all things, and through drummed rhythms, incidentally reveal the dance impulse and innate the grace these cutting edge dudes of contemporary sonics possess. They seem to be engaged in the creation and release of something timeless.