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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."
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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.
For the latest touring and clinic information,
www.sopercussion.com |
