Dear Friends,

September is here, can you believe it?  We are thrilled to share news of upcoming concerts – with the Cincinnati Symphony and Bryce Dessner, with Caroline Shaw, at Carnegie Hall, later this month at Princeton, and elsewhere – new recordings, new commissions from Nathalie Joachim, Shodekeh Talifero, and others.

Read on, and join us!

Then on Sept 25 we join the CSO and Louis Langrée for David Lang’s man made (the performance will be recorded for commercial release — stay tuned for more info!) and Lully’s Suite from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

Learn more (including info about the Cincinnati Symphony’s fantastic safety regulations) and buy tickets here.

This Fall, we release our second Sō Percussion Editions album, featuring new and recent works by Darian Donovan Thomas. The album includes two performances (by the Bergamot Quartet, and by Sō) of Individuate, a work commissioned through the Sō Flexible Commissions initiative. Also on the album is Stephon Clark, and Kid Gunner Brother, performed by Troika Percussion.

This release follows a year of major new Sō recordings; we began 2021 with Caroline Shaw’s Narrow Sea from Nonesuch Records, and our joint project with Buke and Gase, A Record Of… Then in May we released our first album from Sō Percussion Editions: a performance of Julius Eastman’s epic Stay On It.

This summer, we welcomed Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, created and performed by our “band” with Caroline Shaw. We are so deeply proud of this project, and are delighted to say that in November we’ll be touring the songs with Caroline – stay tuned for cities and dates!

So, what is Sō’s Flexible Commissions initiative? Part of our New Works Development project, it begins with these questions:

Does a piece of music consist of the abstract ideas which animate it? Is it about the exact sounds a composer hears in their mind’s ear? Can it just be notes and rhythms, or even a blueprint for construction?

Although we’ve performed with flexible instrumentation works for years – Terry Riley’s In C, Jason Treuting’s Amid the Noise, etc – the concept gained urgency in 2020, when quarantine and social issues made us question and consider every element of music-making and collaboration. Flexibility was the only way forward.

Recent and upcoming Flexible Commissions include new works by Kendall K. Williams, Bora Yoon, Darian Donavan Thomas, Claire Rousay, Shodekeh Talifero, and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Stay tuned for more!

This summer we offered our 13th annual Sō Percussion Summer Institute, a remote, immersive program exploring performance practice and collaboration.

Check out the 2021 SōSI Closing Concert above – it features HOURS of new music and performances by the incredible SōSI artists. Congratulations to all!

We also thank everyone who donated to Sō during SōSI; 100% of those gifts provided meals through The Outreach Program for food-insecure families in Mercer County, NJ.

This is our seventh year partnering with this incredible organization; we are honored to work with them.  THANK YOU, all of you who have supported this effort!