Sō Percussion decided for our 25th Anniversary to set out to accomplish something truly historic. And when we realized we were had more than 25 pieces ready to share with the wider world but not recorded or filmed, we decided to create something worthy of the occasion. 25×25 is big, yes; but it’s full of the sort of beautiful details and wild quirks that we’ve come to exemplify.
Usually, Box Sets are about glorifying the past, but all the music on these discs is brand spanking new. If you’d like to pre-order a copy of the gorgeous physical package or digital downloads just go to Bandcamp. 25×25 will be available streaming and for purchase on September 26. And if you just can’t wait, the physical box set will be available earlier in September at our two record release celebration shows, September 10 at Le Poisson rouge in NYC and September 12 at Princeton University.
PREORDER FOR SEPTEMBER 26 RELEASE!
Disc One: Quartet
Eric Cha-Beach – Four + Nine
Olivier Tarpaga – Fēfē
Kendall K. Williams – Melodic Concept III
Andrea Mazzariello – Babybot
Leilehua Lanzilotti – sending messages
Disc Two: Keyboard
Donnacha Dennehy – Broken Unison
Vijay Iyer – Torque
Dan Deacon – Purse Hurdler (feat. participants from SōSI 2012)
Suzanne Farrin – diamond in the square
Disc Three: Electronics
Nathalie Joachim – Note To Self (feat. Nathalie Joachim)
Angélica Negrón – Inward Pieces
Dan Trueman – Machines for Listening with Sō
claire rousay – in places (feat. Beth Meyers and Cristina Altamura)
Disc Four: String Quartets
Angélica Negrón – When The Sun Hits Just Right (feat. Bergamot Quartet)
Jason Treuting – Oblique Music for Four Plus (blank) (feat. Bergamot Quartet)
Tristan Perich – Sequential (feat. JACK Quartet)
Disc Five: Composer-Performers
Shodekeh Talifero – Vodalities: Paradigms of Consciousness for the Human Voice (feat. Shodekeh Talifero) Parts I and II
Bora Yoon – the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart (feat. Bora Yoon)
Michael J. Love/Jason Treuting – A Better Genome (feat. Michael J. Love)
Vân-Ánh Võ / Jason Treuting – In True Dialogue (feat. Vân-Ánh Võ)
Disc Six: Live from Princeton
Caroline Shaw – Narrow Sea (feat. Alicia Olatuja)
Steve Mackey – Afterlife (feat. Alicia Olatuja)
Robyn Jacob – Collective Ungraspable (feat. Amy Garapic, Mika Godbole, Petra Elak, Elijah Shina, and Luca Morante)
Juri Seo – vv
Cenk Ergün – Waves
Disc Seven: From Out A Darker Sea
Sō Percussion – From Out a Darker Sea
Disc Eight: Amid the Noise Live
Jason Treuting – Amid the Noise (feat. participants from SōSI 2024)
All recordings produced by Sō Percussion and Matt Poirier.
Box set artwork and design by DM Stith.
A Guide to Sō Percussion’s 25th-Anniversary Box Set (Booklet Essay)
By Adam Sliwinski
Sō Percussion started with a simple thought: there should be more music for percussion instruments.
Over twenty-five years, we have played almost 800 live concerts and released more than thirty albums, mostly of music written for us. The usual way to celebrate such a milestone would be a retrospective. But, as we contemplated releasing a 25th-anniversary collection of recordings, the pile of unreleased material and new projects was so immense that we decided instead to release new recordings of work by twenty-five of our favorite collaborators.
Each of these new works contains DNA from those first twenty-five years, ever since Dennis DeSantis wrote our first commissioned piece Shifty in 2000. David Lang’s decision to create an entire movement for wooden slats in 2002’s the so-called laws of nature set a new standard of ambition for percussion works, and it also left shelves full of wood slats in our studio for any other composer to borrow in their work.
At times, new sub-genres emerged from just one new piece, such as the configuration of two marimbas and two vibraphones in Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet. The concept of percussion ends up encompassing so much more than drums or mallet instruments. It is, as John Cage realized, more of an approach, where curiosity leads endlessly to experimentation.
We have been fortunate in our friends. Creator after creator has risen to the challenge of this vast medium. Many of them seized the opportunity to take a break from worrying about classical music’s past. This collection is dedicated to all of them.
Each of the discs in the 25 x 25 collection is organized around a topic. I’ll walk through them, describing the idea behind each one and briefly discussing the works. The only disc that won’t get its own section is the Live from Princeton collection. I will instead discuss those works as they fall into other categories.
1. Quartet
A percussion quartet is an assortment of sounds distributed among four players.
That is about all we can say definitively. Over the years, it has meant everything from drums and cymbals, to collections of junk, to an actual string quartet of two violins, viola, and cello. When Sō is speaking with audiences, we frequently ask them to close their eyes and picture in their mind what a percussion quartet looks like. No two people are likely to be imagining the same thing.
There are some patterns from the early percussion repertoire which carry over into the music written for Sō Percussion (early for us means about 1940). The most common attribute is non-specialized parts. The training that all classical percussionists receive in snare drum, melodic mallet instruments, and multiple percussion supplies enough skill to be able to pick up any part (timpani is the other major skill group, which rarely appears in percussion quartet repertoire). In our earliest days, we even chose our parts out of a hat!
Composers of percussion quartets tended to write for similar instruments among the four parts. In John Cage’s Third Construction (1941), all four players have tin cans and drums. But then, one player blows into a conch shell that nobody else has, while another plays a log drum.
Each of the pieces on this first disc have this characteristic of non-specialization. In this category, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. As a result, these are the pieces that are often easiest for other groups to pick up and play.
Eric Cha-Beach’s Four + Nine is inspired by Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood, except that where Reich’s pattern took up twelve beats, Cha-Beach’s uses thirty-six. It alternates between short notes and resonating chime pulses, exploring all the mathematical combinations of four times nine and divisions of thirty-six. The changing pulses are a guide to the structure of the piece.
Andrea Mazzariello’s Babybot is part of his multi-movement “bot” series of pieces. The players each have the same heterogenous setup of metal pipe, glass bottle, wood slat, tin can, and ceramic plate, with the instruments pitched progressively lower with each player. For each of these pieces to work, the performers must achieve split-second timing, making sure that their sense of rhythm and phrasing doesn’t stick out too much.
Olivier Tarpaga’s Fēfē infuses the contemporary percussion quartet with rhythms and melodies from West Africa. He transplants djembe playing onto an amplified table, dun-dun onto toms with wood slats, and balafon onto the 5-octave marimba. Olivier has a saying that “Africa is contemporary.”
Kendall Williams’ Melodic Concept III is a key example of non-specialized writing for a usually specialized instrument. It is a quartet for the double second steel pans, an instrument that Sō member Josh Quillen has played for many years. Steel pans have a unique physical layout which doesn’t transfer from any other instrument — even an experienced percussionist starts from scratch when playing them. Kendall’s hypnotic, minimalist-influenced piece utilizes a small number of notes and doesn’t call for any improvisation, so we were able to learn our parts without more extensive training. Also, steel pan ensembles rarely consist only of four of the same type of instrument, while percussion quartets often do.
Leilehua Lanzilotti’s sending messages calls for an assortment of tuned flowerpots. It is performed using a stopwatch timer, a common strategy in contemporary music since John Cage’s time. The first movement is a kind of rhythmic chorale for the flowerpots, with harmonies ebbing and flowing out of the texture. The second movement creates a delicate ambient soundscape with tiny bells and shakers.
In 2020, when everything shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked the internet to send us scores and recordings to listen to. Robyn Jacob’s music caught my ear, in part because she had such a wide range of interests. We commissioned Collective Ungraspable from her, which isn’t a percussion quartet – it is written for nine players – yet it fully exemplifies the collective, non-specialized nature of the quartets in disc one. We move from an abstract sound world of rubbing and scraping on snare drums, to unison hi-hat beats, to spacious and ambient marimba chorales.
2. Keyboard
The keyboard is a pattern, not an instrument.
That pattern can be applied to different instruments, such as pipe organ, harpsichord, piano, or marimba. A scale or arpeggio lays the same way on each one, and the last 300 years of music are unthinkable without it. It transformed the art of musical composition by enabling a sophisticated system of harmonic modulations to take hold.
When students learn how to play on percussion keyboard instruments like marimba and vibraphone, they have access to that entire history. In particular, learning a J.S. Bach cello suite or violin partita is often mandatory in classical percussion training.
Sō Percussion has always been interested in percussion keyboard music that reflects the influence of contemporary music after John Cage. That world is less concerned with development of harmony, and more with repetition, rhythmic complexity, and color. For the most part, mallet ensemble pieces follow the non-specialization of percussion quartets.
The most influential figure in that history is Steve Reich, who combined a love of percussion with experiments with technology and study in West Africa. His works like Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, and 2009’s Mallet Quartet (written for Sō Percussion) created a whole new space for marimbas, vibraphones, xylophones, and glockenspiels in contemporary music.
Many other composers have written for these instruments, all with their own unique musical ideas in mind.
Vijay Iyer, whose musical influences range across the globe, straddles the worlds of composed and improvised music. He wrote Torque after I worked with him on a mixed ensemble piece called Radhe Radhe with the International Contemporary Ensemble. I thought his beautiful open harmonies and supreme rhythmic complexity would pair perfectly with the mallet quartet configuration. Some of the musical effects in the pieces, such as the endless loop of accelerating chords at the end of movement II, were techniques he had tried with his small ensembles but never written into a score. The piece features a dizzying array of odd meters and groupings, such as the sevens and fours in the first movement, or the wildly inventive five groups of 5/16 bars in the second.
When we asked Donnacha Dennehy to write for Sō Percussion, we didn’t have mallet instruments in mind at first. We experimented with different ideas, including tuned teacups. When Donnacha noticed how much we enjoyed playing complex hocketing rhythms and canons, he conceived Broken Unison, a work in which we constantly chase each other around with melodic fragments in canon. Donnacha uses the sound color of the wooden marimbas and metallic vibraphones to organize the piece. Sometimes, they play together, while at other times metals or woods exist alone. This creates dark, warm movements on the marimba, and bright sparkly sections of vibraphone and glockenspiel.
Suzanne Farrin’s diamond in the square deconstructs the piano by working almost entirely inside of the soundboard. This is reminiscent of John Cage’s prepared piano, which he invented when he couldn’t fit a percussion orchestra into the allotted space for a dance piece. Farrin’s piano is not so much prepared as woven. It becomes a loom for sound as we thread yarn in between the strings. I play on the actual keys in the traditional way, but I also mash a padded 2×4 plank of wood gently on the keys to play a cluster.
Dan Deacon’s Purse Hurdler was written for assembled forces during the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, with an exciting and interminable accelerando. Dan is well known for creating ecstatic experiences through electronic music in his live show. The piece was originally an electronic composition, and he wanted to see what it would be like to realize the sounds live.
When Juri Seo joined the faculty at Princeton University the same year as us, we started talking to her about writing a new piece for us. vv is a virtuosic work for four players at two vibraphones and is the closest thing we have to a string quartet in terms of its interwoven melodic lines. vv has quickly become standard repertoire in the percussion world.
3. Electronics
All musical instruments are a form of technology.
The piano, though now considered a traditional instrument, is an exceedingly complex piece of machinery that emerged out of centuries of experimentation with tuning systems, keyboard layout, hammer action, and body design.
Electronics and digital technology have contributed many of the newest innovations in instrument design and capability in the last 100 years. Composers recognized that advances in recording, synthesis, magnetic tape, and digital instruments went hand-in-hand with the expanded sound palette of percussion. Varese’s early percussion piece Ionisation (1933) was partially an attempt to create sonic combinations that were not yet possible through electronic means, but which he predicted soon would be.
While the electronics these composers worked with from the 1940s to the 1970s required specialized studio equipment, almost every person now carries in their pocket a computer more powerful than any that existed in the world of that time. We interact with technology constantly, and through AI it is already capable of manifesting humanlike behaviors. The composers Sō works with tend to use electronics in a humanizing way, harnessing technology to create new opportunities for virtuosity and interconnection.
In Nathalie Joachim’s quartet Note to Self, percussionists trigger short samples of her voice on SPD electronic drum pads. Even though the samples are always the same, the timing and velocity of the strokes on the drum pad determine everything else. We mix these samples with acoustic instruments in one seamless performance, listening carefully to the tempo they suggest.
Angelica Negron’s Inward Pieces utilizes special robots designed by Nick Yulman. Although the robot’s performances are fixed and never change, they perform acoustic sound via little metal pins that poke up and hit the object sitting on top of them. The physical presence of a robot drummer creates an element for us to interact with, which feels more like performing with a partner.
Dan Trueman’s Machines for Listening with Sō employs an instrument that he designed, and which I have been performing on for many years, the bitKlavier. The bitKlavier is a software instrument that works with a digital keyboard to alter, augment, and re-tune notes. It has three primary effects: Nostalgic, which plays notes backwards upon release, creating growing lines with duration; Synchronic, metronomes that gather up the notes and spit them back out as rhythmic loops; and de-tuning, where any note can be warped out of standard equal temperament tuning to create shimmering effects. This new quartet combines the bitKlavier’s effects with the colors of vibraphone, steel pans, marimba, and the rhythmic drive of acoustic drumming.
claire rousay’s in places doesn’t use any robots or software instruments, but her practice of recording environmental sounds and incorporating them into her music fits perfectly with forms of musique concrete and collage music. in places also asks the musicians to contribute ordinary and noisy sounds, such as stones dropping into a bucket or crumpling newspaper.
We used to play a piece by Cenk Ergün called Use, which consists of a variety of instructions like “use friction,” “use gravity.” He often expresses natural phenomena through musical ideas. For Waves, we play sampled tones into transducers placed on drums, using the resonating chamber of the drum to create wavelike patterns.
4. String Quartet
Sō Percussion learned how to play chamber music together by watching great string quartets.
From closely observing ensembles like the Kronos Quartet or the Tokyo String Quartet, and from the excellent instruction we received from Robert Van Sice at the Yale School of Music, we developed a way of distributing musical leadership around the ensemble.
We possessed a strong desire to combine the weirdness of percussion with the balanced virtuosity of the string quartet. When we started, quartets were not standardized for percussion ensembles. Of the important groups that came before us, Hungary’s Amadinda was a quartet, but Nexus was a quintet, several of the best European groups were sextets, and Percussion Group Cincinnati was a trio.
The string quartet tradition provided ballast as we developed our art form. One of the things we noticed while watching the Tokyo Quartet was that all four players were always engaged in leading and following – the exchange of energy around the ensemble was dynamic and thrilling.
Percussionists needed to develop our own ways of communicating with each other, and Van Sice provided a method for how to do this. It involved a combination of cueing, breathing together, and showing time while still maintaining the physical stability required to play properly (these skills were not commonly taught in orchestra programs).
When we decided to be a full-time chamber music ensemble, we looked to the Kronos Quartet just as much as other percussion ensembles. Their dedication to new music cleared a path for us. We especially admired how they chose to champion new work over playing the music of Beethoven and Bartók, while we had almost no existing repertoire and therefore nothing to lose.
Partnering with string quartets has been a natural fit for all these reasons and more. To date, we have performed with the Kronos Quartet, the JACK Quartet, Attacca Quartet, the Calder Quartet, the Bergamot Quartet, and the Kamus Quartet.
Angélica Negrón’s When the Sun Hits Just Right was the first work that Sō and Kronos commissioned together. We collaborated on a mammoth performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Carnegie Hall in 2009, shared a Steve Reich album on Nonesuch Records, and appeared together on many festivals, but never commissioned anything. This work uses samples on an SPD drum pad, and also vibraphone and glockenspiel, harnessing the bright sonorities of these instruments along with pizzicati and high harmonics in the strings.
Jason Treuting’s Oblique Music for Four Plus (blank) exists in two forms: a concerto with string orchestra and an octet with string quartet. Like Steve Reich in his quartet Different Trains, Jason asks the string players to think at times like a percussionist, playing complex rhythmic cycles in unison. The Bergamot Quartet have become frequent Sō collaborators, joining us for both Angélica’s and Jason’s pieces in this collection.
The JACK Quartet and Sō Percussion have risen through the new music scene togetherl, although Sō started a few years earlier. We collaborated on Dan Trueman’s Songs that are Hard to Sing in 2017, which includes a unique system of tuning for the string quartet that pairs with Trueman’s bitKlavier instrument.
Tristan Perich’s Sequential uses a 1-bit electronic rhythmic gating system that turns the sound rapidly on and off to create emergent rhythms, which have a minimalist-influenced feel to them. The performers hold long bowed notes on crotales and string instruments.
5. Composer-Performers
Percussion training cultivates the skills for collaboration.
Starting in school band programs – as all of us in Sō Percussion did – means always operating in a percussion section, where instruments are shared. Our art form is inherently collective. The social nature of this musical upbringing means that we are always wrangling, adjusting, and gauging based on other people’s input.
The first collaboration Sō embarked on outside of classical music was with the electronic duo Matmos. We had initially heard of them through their work with Björk, and we came to admire their experiments with unusual sounds. As much as we thought making music with tin cans was edgy, they had gone even further by making an entire album out of hospital sounds.
At the beginning of our careers, we set a few rules to help us stay focused. They were: 1) No writing our own music – we were going to concentrate on commissioning composers. 2) No improvisation 3) No playing hand drums, since none of us specialized in performing on them. On the first day of working with Matmos, they said “here is a hand drum for you to improvise a part on one of our songs, and we will play one of your songs next.” We began throwing the rules out and opening ourselves up to what we might learn from collaboration.
One of the composers we worked with encouraged us to consider breaking out of the percussion quartet model. When we commissioned Steve Mackey to write It Is Time (2010), he asked each of us individually what instrument we wanted to play. We had all cultivated interests that were slightly different: Jason played drum set; I enjoyed working with keyboard instruments, including marimba and piano; Josh has played steel pans since he was in grade school; and Eric loved putting together assemblages of miscellaneous instruments and technology.
We didn’t realize at the time that by expressing these preferences, we were forming a new ensemble within Sō, which we came to call “Mackey-band.” This configuration for his piece contained all the elements for a full band, such as rhythm section, melodic lead, bass, harmony, and auxiliary percussion. Mackey-band became the default configuration when we worked with a lead singer, such as our Grammy-winning collaboration with Caroline Shaw in Rectangles and Circumstance (2024).
For the first time it also meant that we could not pick the parts out of a hat. We were now specialists within the ensemble. This allowed each of us to bring our “science projects” into Sō Percussion. We have always invested in ourselves and each other creatively, and incorporating these other expressive outlets was a perfect way to do that.
We started working with Shodekeh Talifero in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Vodalities we asked him to imagine a piece of music for the four of us using his voice. He sent us recordings via stems, which we transcribed and interpreted into physical percussion sounds. Shodekeh’s range of vocal expression is vast, encompassing such sounds as sleigh bells, an LP skipping, drums, tuvan throat singing, and more. For the second movement, I took his recording of rapid-fire vocal percussion, slowed it down, and transcribed every single note.
Working with a tap dance artist seems like such an obvious fit for a percussion group, but we had never tried it until we met Michael J. Love, who has both the searing virtuosity of a great tap dancer and the sensitivity of a modern dance performer. Our collaborative piece A Better Genome asks him to move around to different boards on the stage, conducting us by swooshing and tapping. Gradually, the piece builds towards furious beats and an infectious exchange of rhythms.
Bora Yoon is one of the most creative and multi-faceted composers we know. She pairs her curation of delicate sounds with performance as a vocalist and string player to create utterly unique landscapes. In the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart, she pulls in Korean drumming traditions, typewriters, the sound of thin bible pages turning, radios, and tiny bells, all culminating in a touching and heartfelt song.
Vân-Ánh Võ performs on the 16-string đàn tranh (zither). For our collaboration, Jason composed In True Dialogue for percussion and Bryce Dessner’s “chord stick” instruments as a conversation with Võ’s instrument and voice. She is a hypnotizing performer who has worked with many other ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet.
Caroline Shaw wrote the Grammy-winning composition Narrow Sea for Sō Percussion with the legendary soprano Dawn Upshaw and the equally legendary pianist Gilbert Kalish. For this live performance at Richardson Auditorium in Princeton, we are joined by Alicia Olatuja, a singer who brings a heart-wrenchingly unique interpretation to this text which expresses sorrow, displacement, loss, and hope. Caroline is one of the many composers who perform with Sō frequently.
Alicia also joined us on the same evening for Steve Mackey’s epic work Afterlife, which utilizes “Mackey-band” to its fullest. We perform on drums, marimba, steel pans, organ, and many other instruments. The work comes out of It Is Time, and forms part of a trilogy for voice and percussion ensemble. It ruminates on the concept of time as it measures music and weaves into our lives.
7, Our Music
Writing music makes us better performers.
After leaving music school, we began to realize that the distinction between performer and composer is often blurry. New York was brimming with bands, improvisers, and creators. Although we wanted to focus on our unique value as performers, eventually we started to make our own work.
It started with the project that would eventually be called Amid the Noise. Jason first tried composing at Yale in Martin Bresnick’s class “composition for performers.” Rather than thinking of composition in a traditional way, Bresnick challenged the students to experiment with different musical parameters, treating them as musical problems to be solved. Jason loved this way of thinking. Around 2005, he started to compose short pieces for a documentary film his sister Jenise Treuting was making. Initially, he hadn’t thought to bring any of them in for Sō to try.
At the same time, we were hitting a roadblock in our programming: unlike any other kind of ensemble, each piece we performed required a unique setup with different instruments. This caused logistical problems whenever we needed to stretch a program ten minutes longer or carry instruments into a radio station. One of the reasons we played Steve Reich’s music so often was that works like Music for Pieces of Wood were portable.
During one of our rehearsals, Jason asked if we would like to look at some of his pieces together. Over time, we also discovered that when we ran out to small gigs around the city, if we played his music we could substitute instruments and make calls that wouldn’t be appropriate with other pieces. In fact, Jason really enjoyed the challenge of seeing how flexible his music could be.
Sō’s studio in Brooklyn has always been the engine of our creativity. As Jason experimented with his abstract forms, we started to record the pieces, pulling objects off the shelves to add new sounds. In 2006 we released Amid the Noise on Cantaloupe Music. Gradually, composing our own music became a regular part of our practice as an ensemble. When we met with Joe Melillo about performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he expected us to compose our own music just as our mentors at Bang on a Can had done for their shows.
In 2009, we premiered Imaginary City at BAM, an 80-minute work consisting of pieces written collaboratively with each other. That December, reflecting on the prevalence of percussion in the concert scene that year, Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times that “if you think about it, drums are the new violins.”
Initially, we arranged a few of the pieces from Amid the Noise for the four of us to tour with. Because we had added so many layers during the recording process, it seemed that there could also be a version for large mixed ensemble, like with Terry Riley’s In C. We came up with a version of the work where Sō plays the core parts, while the large ensemble supplements us in movements like Go. The recording on this box set involved participants from SōSI 2024.
In 2016 we premiered a co-composed work that grew out of a residency in the north of England. We spent several site visits in former coal mining communities gathering research and interviewing residents. The eventual work, a multi-media collaboration with the Amber film collective, was called From Out a Darker Sea. The name comes from a poem by Joseph Skipsey, a self-taught poet who worked in the coal mines from childhood.
In 2017, we toured the full production to churches all over England, from London to Newcastle. In this box set, it represents how our collaborative efforts with each other feed our work with collaborators.
Percussionists are the ultimate generalists in the classical music world, called upon to wear different hats all the time. The danger with this is that we don’t always truly excel on one instrument. Most percussionists solve this issue by cultivating a science project – the practice that they always return to and obsess over. The opposing danger is when we don’t allow ideas from other disciplines to infiltrate our own thinking. Assumptions and habits from your craft present themselves as the only way to do things: “to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
By writing our own music, we have a greater appreciation for the process that composers undergo when they write for us. Conversely, as performers we are always in the position of trying musical ideas out in real time, which leaves little room for neurotic fidgeting with the material. That flexibility and perspective-switching defines this 25th-anniversary collection: from percussion quartets, to tap dance, to piano music, and even to robots. It touches on all our personal curiosities and obsessions, and we hope that the creators represented here have felt supported and challenged by us to make their most daring work for it.
Trust your collaborators. Believe that it is worthwhile. Let your curiosity get the best of you. After 25 years, we believe in these ideas just as much as we always have.
