Back to Press Release List > - So Percussion Performs the World Premiere of Steven Mackey's It Is Time in Zankel Hall on March 25

Percussion quartet So Percussion (Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting) comes to Zankel Hall on Thursday, March 25 at 9:30 p.m. to perform the world premiere of Steven Mackey’s It Is Time (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall). Also on the program is the New York premiere of Dan Trueman’s neither Anvil nor Pulley along with Part I of Steve Reich’s classic Drumming from 1971.

Eclectic composer, guitarist, and Princeton University professor Steven Mackey first workshopped his new piece at So Percussion’s first annual Summer Institute on the Princeton campus in 2009. According to the composer, It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members of So to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini concerto for one of the players. First, Eric Beach leads the music in a multi-percussion set up composed of metronome with delay, pump organ, bells, china cymbal on hi-hat stand and a few other assorted toys. Josh Quillen follows on steel drums, Adam Sliwinski on marimba, and Jason Treuting on drum set.”

Composer Dan Trueman and So Percussion first collaborated on Five (and a half) Gardens, a multi-media extravaganza for Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, guitar, and percussion quartet. The New York premiere of neither Anvil nor Pulley takes a percussionist’s best friend—the metronome—and makes it a dynamic chamber music partner through a laptop interface. Truman writes, “neither Anvil nor Pulley is an epic musical exploration of the man/machine relationship in the digital age.”

Steve Reich’s seminal, early work, Drumming Part I, revolutionized contemporary classical composition and placed the composer at the forefront of the minimalism movement. According to So Percussion’s Adam Sliwinski, “For So Percussion, the reasons to play Steve Reich’s Drumming are simple: it is exhilarating to perform, it is elemental yet intelligent, and it is fun to share with audiences. The other story, however, is a revolutionary approach to musical composition. Although every note of Drumming rocks, its existence is due to the composer’s tireless search for new modes of musical expression.”

Artist Information
Since coming together at the Yale School of Music in 1999, So Percussion (Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting) has been creating music that is both raucous and touching, barbarous and refined. Realizing that percussion instruments can communicate all the extremes of emotion and musical possibility, it has not been an easy music to define. Called an “experimental powerhouse” by the Village Voice, “astonishing and entrancing” by Billboard Magazine, and “brilliant” by The New York Times, the Brooklyn based quartet’s innovative work with today’s most exciting composers and their own original music has quickly helped them forge a unique and diverse career.

Although the drum is one of humanity’s most ancient instruments, Europe and America have only recently begun to explore its full potential, aided by explosions of influence and experimentation from around the world. In the twentieth century, musical innovators like Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis brought these instruments out from behind the traditional orchestra and gave them new voice.

It was excitement about these composers and the sheer fun of playing together that inspired the members of So to begin performing while still in school: Cage’s Third Construction wove elaborate rhythmic counterpoint using ordinary objects, while Reich’s Drumming harnessed African inspiration to ecstatic effect. A blind call to David Lang, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of New York’s Bang on a Can Festival, yielded their first big commissioned piece, the so called laws of nature, which appeared with Evan Ziporyn’s gamelan-inspired Melody Competition on their first album So Percussion. In the following years, the thrill of working with amazing composers would yield new pieces by Paul Lansky, Dan Trueman, Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Fred Frith, and many others.

For their next disc, they tackled Drumming, one of the first and few percussion pieces of symphonic scope (well over an hour long). A landmark American work, Drumming fuses African aesthetics, western philosophical concepts, and technologically inspired processes in a minimalist masterpiece. In 2010, So will be presenting the U.S. premiere of Reich’s new Mallet Quartet, written for the group and several other renowned percussion ensembles.

So’s third album, Amid the Noise, heralded a new direction for the group: original music, written by member Jason Treuting. Eager to expand their palette, the members experimented with glockenspiel, toy piano, vibraphones, bowed marimba, melodica, tuned and prepared pipes, metals, duct tape, 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. This ongoing work has resulted in exciting new projects such as the site-specific Music For Trains in Southern Vermont and Imaginary City, a sonic meditation on urban soundscapes commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival in consortium with five other venues.

For the past several years, So has been joining the electronic duo Matmos for shows around the country and in Europe, exploring the sonic and theatrical possibilities of beer cans, hair clippers, ceramic bowls, and dry ice. This collaboration will culminate in a new album to be released on Cantaloupe Records in summer 2010.

Summer 2009 saw the creation of the annual So Percussion Summer Institute on the campus of Princeton University. The Institute is an intensive two-week chamber music seminar for college-age percussionists. For their first festival, the four members of So Percussion served as faculty in rehearsal, performance, and discussion of contemporary music, working with twenty-three students from around the US.

So Percussion has performed this unusual and exciting music all over the United States, with concerts at the Lincoln Center Festival, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Stanford Lively Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others.

In addition, recent tours to Russia, Australia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Ukraine have brought them international acclaim. 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 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 defined after all.

Program Information
Thursday, March 25 at 9:30 p.m.
Zankel Hall
SO PERCUSSION
   Eric Beach
   Josh Quillen
   Adam Sliwinski
   Jason Treuting

STEVE REICH Drumming Part I
DAN TRUEMAN neither Anvil nor Pulley (NY Premiere)
STEVEN MACKEY It Is Time (World Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

Bank of America is the Proud Season Sponsor of Carnegie Hall.