new and current

"What we do and why we do it."

Music of John Cage, Steve Reich, and So Percussion.

John Cage and Steve Reich are two pillars of percussion chamber music.  Many of their once radical ideas are now widely accepted as part of America's experimental classical music tradition.  So Percussion has been playing their music from the beginning, and it inspires our own original music.  

This program is a balanced mixture of classics such as Reich's Drumming and Cage's Third Construction with selections from So Percussion's amid the noise and Imaginary City.  

"We are all going in different directions:" A John Cage Celebration in 2012

For So, John Cage's work is never far from our mind. Whether we are playing Cage's music, writing music ourselves or collaborating with musicians from across a broad musical spectrum, his ideas of structure, sound and innovation have permeated our music making. When we thought of how to celebrate the life and work of John Cage in the 100th year of his birth, we came up with two programs that follow the thinking of "We Are All Going in Different Directions."

Features Cage works such as: Third Construction, Credo in US, Child of Tree.  Program also includes new work and collaborations honoring Cage by Dan Deacon, Matmos, Cenk Ergun, and So Percussion.  

where (we) live

(where (we) live is currently a work-in-progress, slated to premiere in fall of 2012.  Below is our description-in-progress.)

We live not only in physical places, but also in symbolic ones. 

Rooms, buildings, and ideas enclose and define those spaces, often in very personal ways.   

Jane Jacobs inspires us to think about diverse, mixed elements where we live.  

In our many collaborations with other artists, we have sometimes been surprised at what they have to teach us.

For where (we) live, Sō Percussion is using artists from different mediums as outside inputs to our creative process.  We will ask them to improvise, dance, make video, or whatever else they can think of, and we will both fit them into our artistic world and adjust to fit into theirs. 

We are choosing a small group of key collaborators to each inhabit his or her own space, to show us what's inside. 

Our responses to this input vary from the loosest improvisations to the most rigidly structured compositions -- from narrative play-along to abstract co-existence.