oneppo chamber music series
David Shifrin, artistic director
Sō Percussion
Tuesday, February 28, 2023 | 7:30 pm
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Program
Vijay Iyer
b. 1971
Torque (2018)
II.
III.
Nathalie Joachim
b. 1983
Jason Treuting
b. 1977
Caroline Shaw
b. 1982
Bryce Dessner
b. 1976
Note to Self (2021)
Much More Maybe Motivated
Nine Numbers 4 (2017)
II.
III. intermission
Taxidermy (2012)
Music for Wood and Strings (2013)
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profile
Sō Percussion
Eric Cha-Beach ’07MM
Josh Quillen ’06MM
Adam Sliwinski ’03MM ’04MMA ’09DMA
Jason Treuting ’01MM ’02 AD
For twenty years and counting, Sō Percussion has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker). They are celebrated by audiences and presenters for a dazzling range of work: for live performances in which “telepathic powers of communication” (The New York Times) bring to life the vibrant percussion repertoire; for an extravagant array of collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater; and for their work in education and community, creating opportunities and platforms for music and artists that explore the immense possibility of art in our time.
Recent highlights have included performances at the Elbphilharmonie, Big Ears 2022— where they performed Amid the Noise, premiered a new work by Angélica Negrón with the Kronos Quartet, and performed their Nonesuch album with Caroline Shaw, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part—and a return to Carnegie Hall where they performed new collaborations with Nathalie Joachim, and Dominic Shodekeh Talifero. Their Nonesuch recording, Narrow Sea, with Caroline Shaw, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish, won the 2022 Grammy for Best Composition. Other recent albums include A Record Of… on Brassland Music with Buke and Gase, and—on new imprint Sō Percussion
Editions—an acclaimed version of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It, and Darian Donovan Thomas’s Individuate. This adds to a catalogue of more than twenty-five albums featuring landmark recordings of works by David Lang, Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, and many more.
In the Summer of 2022, Sō performed at the Music Academy of the West Festival, Newport Classical, at Time Spans in New York, and offers four concerts at Our Festival in Helsinki – including a performance of Let the Soil with Caroline Shaw. 2022–23 dates include concerts for Cal Performances, at the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona, at the Barbican in London, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Penn Live Arts in Philadelphia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at The 92nd Street Y, New York.
In Fall 2022, Sō Percussion began its ninth year as the Edward T. Cone performersin-residence at Princeton University. Rooted in the belief that music is an elemental form of human communication, and galvanized by forces for social change in recent years, Sō enthusiastically pursues a range of social and community outreach through their nonprofit organization, including partnerships with local ensembles including Pan in Motion and Castle of Our Skins; their Brooklyn Bound concert series; a studio residency program in Brooklyn; and the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, an intensive two-week chamber music seminar for percussionists and composers.
Artist Profile cont. Program Notes by
the composers
Sō Percussion wishes to thank all of our donors. Sō Percussion’s 2022-2023 season is supported in part by awards from:
• The National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov
• The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature;
• The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council
• The Aaron Copland Fund for Music
• The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University
• The Amphion Foundation
• The Brookby Foundation
• The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
• The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation
• The Howard Gilman Foundation
• The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation
Sō Percussion uses Vic Firth sticks, Zildjian cymbals, Remo drumheads, Estey Organs, and Pearl/Adams instruments. Sō Percussion would like to thank these companies for their generous support and donations.
At the piano, I listen for how the contortions of the hand can suggest the surges of a body in motion.In my trio music, I’m often evolving rhythmic shapes, shaping gestural patterns with an embodied resonance, and striving to evoke specific qualities of movement with our performed rhythms. Someone once compared us to The Flying Karamazov Brothers, with their coordinated, cyclical, antiphonal actions.I see the work of the rhythm section as a ritual of collective synchrony, aiming above all to generate a dance impulse for everybody in the room. Torque, a twisting force on a body, seems to appear for the listener at music’s formal boundaries, when one movement type gives way to another. This piece for Sō Percussion invites them to perform transformations that twist the music’s temporal flow, bringing the micro-relational art of the rhythm section to this virtuosic quartet.
Note to Self
joachim
Though I’ve spent much of my life trying to quiet my inner voice, for this work, I chose to focus on and explore the thoughts that occupy my headspace as a result of my chronic anxiety.
Note to Self, for percussion quartet and recorded samples of my voice, takes the listener through different phases of cyclical thoughts and states of being that I experience regularly. Composed in three short movements— Much More, Maybe, and Motivated—this
Torque iyer
work examines the notion of having my inner voice embodied elsewhere, in an attempt to create new space for processing emotion. It also plays with repetition as an opportunity to bring new meaning, understanding, and perhaps some levity, to the language itself. Each movement is a reimagining of vocal incantations that, driven by imaginative, virtuosic, and whimsical percussion scoring, re-center and re-purpose my voice as a tool for healing.
Nine Numbers 4 treuting
Nine Numbers 4 is a mallet quartet for two marimbas and two vibraphones written for Sō Percussion. Inspired in some ways by Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet, this three movement piece explores the bowed and struck sounds of these keyboard instruments. This piece is the fourth in a set of nine, which are sequenced from solo percussionist to nonet.
All of the pieces in Nine Numbers translate the 9 x 9 solutions of Sudoku puzzles into notes and rhythms. The number nine, with its three sets of three, contains many wonderful symmetries and fractal-like characteristics. It allows for nesting structures at the largest and smallest levels.
In the pieces for fewer players, sometimes I ask the performers to help generate the score. In the solo, duo, and trio, the performers find their own puzzle solutions, and the score is a set of instructions to translate the numbers into music. In this quartet, I present the ensemble with a finished score
based on my realization of the Sudoku. Different scores will exist for different ensembles. Most of the recognizable elements of the pieces will remain fixed, but surface details can change depending on the Sudoku.
The complete work of nine pieces will be the second recording of my music on Cantaloupe Music after 2006’s Amid the Noise, featuring performances by Sō Percussion, Tigue, the Meehan/Perkins Duo, Ji Hye Jung, Sandbox Percussion, and Adam Groh.
Here is the Sudoku for Sō Percussion’s version of Nine Numbers 4:
192 456 378
734 928 156
658 731 924
247 695 831
386 147 592
915 283 467
421 369 785
569 874 213
873 512 649 Taxidermy
Why “Taxidermy”? I just find the word strangely compelling, and it evokes something grand, awkward, epic, silent, funny, and just a bit creepy—all characteristics of this piece, in a way. The repeated phrase toward the end (“the detail of the pattern is movement”) is a little concept I love trying (and failing) to imagine. It comes from T.S. Eliot’s beautiful and perplexing “Burnt Norton” (from the Four Quartets), andI’ve used it before in other work—as a kind of whimsical existentialist mantra.
shaw
Music for Wood and Strings dessner
For several years I have been experimenting with simple chorales in my music that utilize triadic chord inversions that are aligned in complex rhythm patterns to create a kaleidoscopic effect of harmony. These feature heavily in my work for orchestra and two guitars, St. Carolyn by the Sea (2011), and the writing for my song cycle, The LongCount (2009). While I have used this technique on guitars and strings, I have not had the opportunity to apply it to percussion instruments. For this new So Percussion piece I have been working with instrument builder Aron Sanchez (BlueMan Group, Buke and Gase) to design four dulcimer-like instruments to be played by the quartet. These are simply designed double course string instruments which are played like a dulcimer, but which are specifically built and tuned to implement a more evolved hybrid of the chorale hocket. Each instrument is amplified using piezo pickups and will have 8 doublecourse strings tuned to two harmonies. With the use of dulcimer mallets, the quartet players can easily sound either harmony, or play individual strings, melodies, and drone tremolos. There are alto, two tenors and a bass instrument which can play fretted chromatic bass lines. With these elements as well as a few pieces of auxiliary percussion—bass drum, wood block—the work is about 30 minutes long.
Program Notes cont.
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