On Thursday, September 7th, we joined The National on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to perform “Day I Die” from their new Album “Sleep Well Beast.” What a thrill to perform on national television at the Ed Sullivan Theater!
We contributed some typical Sō Percussion color to the new album, which has just been released September 8th.
Our summer institute (SoSI) approaches! Check out our SoSI page for more information.
If you can’t make it in person, most of these events will be live-streamed from Sō Percussion’s Facebook Page: facebook.com/sopercussion.
Thursday, June 8th – 7pm
Honoring Limor Tomer
LE POISSON ROUGE
158 BLEECKER STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Performances by Sō, Theo Bleckmann, and Wolfgang
After party at 10pm featuring Round Peg Square Hole
RSVP to so@sopercussion.com
Tickets to main benefit $300 each
Tickets to after party $25 each (already included for main benefit attendees)
Purchase below! (If ordering more than six tickets, fill in custom amount below and send us an email. Also, let us take you out to coffee sometime, because you are awesome!)
If you can’t make it, we’re also running an online auction leading up to the benefit!
Performance at the TED conference in Vancouver, BC, February 2016.
We were honored and delighted to present an excerpt from Bryce Dessner’s work for the audience at TED 2016. Keeping in line with the ethos of the TED organization and community, we brought this unique piece with its newly designed instruments to show some of what’s going on in contemporary music.
Performing in this amazing venue was exciting enough, but we were surprised to realize that some pretty heavy hitters were in the audience as well!
Sō Percussion with Emily Johnson
Directed by Ain Gordon
Sō Percussion (Where (we) Live, 2012 Next Wave) gives the Second Amendment a soundtrack in this affecting foray into America’s fraught relationship with guns. Taking mallets to disassembled sniper rifles and assorted drums, the musicians serve as Greek chorus, commenting instrumentally on sung and spoken texts drawn from the nightmares and nostalgia of armed experiences. Three-time Obie-winning director Ain Gordon and choreographer and performer Emily Johnson give depth to this probing work in which anger meets inalienable rights, dark memories resurface, and a contested weapon sings a bittersweet song.
Check out our amazing project with StoryCorps to collect stories about gun culture and gun violence.
SŌ PERCUSSION TO PLAY FREE CONCERT IN RICHARDSON AUDITORIUM
Having just wowed audiences at the Lincoln Center Festival this summer, acclaimed ensemble SŌ Percussion will offer the first of two free performances in Princeton as part of their Edward T. Cone Residency at Princeton University. On Friday, September 16, 2016 at 7:30PM in Richardson Auditorium at Alexander Hall, the community has the incredible opportunity to engage in an unparalleled range of music—from John Cage’s Living Room Music transforming household items into instruments, to the world premiere of Emeritus Professor Paul Lansky’s Springs. Also on the program is Taxidermy, specially written for Princeton alum and Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw, as well as the ensemble’s first major commission: David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature. Tickets are required for this free concert. Reservations are available online at tickets.princeton.edu or at the door (Richardson Auditorium Box Office) the day of the concert.
The anticipation of a world premiere performance of a composer as esteemed and experienced in percussion writing as Paul Lansky already is much cause for excitement. Yet SŌ Percussion cannot help but add some humor into the mix of such an occasion. It seems fitting to a group always fusing whimsy with earnestness that “the ensemble’s first major commission, Mr. Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, balances humor and poise” (The New York Times), unearthing unexpected beauty from a row of “carefully tuned flower pots.” In juxtaposing the astounding wit, surprise and charm of finding music in everyday items with the masterful scores of some of the most celebrated composers in recent history, the evening will be particularly positioned to engage and welcome music lovers of all backgrounds. Or, as SŌ Percussion’s Adam Sliwinski succinctly puts it, this program is simply “a lot of fun.”
SŌ Percussion’s second free concert as part of their residency will be a celebration of Steve Reich, including a pre-concert discussion with the composer, on March 14, 2017. Tickets for that event are not yet available.
Sō is incredibly grateful to Chamber Music America for their commissioning of Paul Lansky’s new piece. This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.
LISTING INFORMATION
SŌ PERCUSSION, Princeton University Edward T. Cone Performers-in-Residence
WHEN: Friday, September 16, 2016 at 7:30PM
WHAT: PAUL LANSKY Springs (WORLD PREMIERE); CAROLINE
SHAW Taxidermy; JOHN CAGE Living Room Music; DAVID LANG the so-called laws of nature
WHERE: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, Princeton University
TICKETS: Free admission. Reservations are available online at tickets.princeton.edu or at the door (Richardson Auditorium Box Office) the day of the concert.
Join us for Sō Percussion’s Third Annual Benefit,
honoring special guests Steve Reich and members of Nexus Percussion.
Tuesday, May 17th – 7pm
BRIC House Ballroom
Brooklyn, NY
Reserve tickets at https://sopercussion.com/benefit/
or RSVP to so@sopercussion.com
We’ll be playing music, auctioning off special Reich-related items, and celebrating the North American release of the Cambridge Companion to Percussion, edited by Russell Hartenberger.
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“These quartets, which feature a battery of instruments outside the standard drum kit, tease out the different parameters that govern ensemble playing, like synchronicity, imitation, competition and symmetry. They also show off Mr. Kotche’s command of mood and texture…”
We are delighted to announce the release of our 19th studio album, Glenn Kotche’sDrumkit Quartets! We recently had a blast performing these pieces together at Carnegie Hall. Below is a more complete description of the album, as well as a free preview of one of the tracks on Bandcamp. If you’d like to listen to more, Red Bull Music has an exclusive preview of the entire record.
The album is available on all of the outlets above, including the new merch store on ourwebsite. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
-Sō
From the multihued vision of his aptly titled Cantaloupe debut Adventureland to the drumming-without-a-net workout of John Luther Adams’ Ilimaq, Glenn Kotche is on a roll, so to speak, both as a performer and as a composer. While most music fans already know him as the powerhouse drummer behind the beloved rock band Wilco, he’s also an emerging creative force in the contemporary classical world, drawing the attention of Adams, Kronos Quartet, Missy Mazzoli, the Bang on a Can All-Stars and many more.
Sō Percussion certainly took note when the group — Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting — approached Kotche several years ago about collaborating. “At the time, I was feeling a strong desire to get back to writing for percussion,” Kotche reveals in the CD’s liner notes, “because I think the timbral, textural, melodic and rhythmic possibilities haven’t been explored nearly enough. I try to do that through my solo performances, but I jumped at the chance to try it with such an incredible and forward-thinking group as Sō Percussion.”
The result runs the expressive gamut of percussive instrumentation, from the marimba-based “Drumkit Quartet #51” (with haiku recited by Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda) to the hand-cranked sirens that open “Drumkit Quartet #50,” which channels the futurist manifesto of Luigi Russolo’s “art of noise,” spiced with a little John Cage and Luc Ferrari. A rich sonic tapestry of rhythmic exploration, audio collage and third-mind improv, Drumkit Quartets actually goes well beyond the drumkit — which is to be expected, given the feverishly inventive artists behind the recording.
Sō Percussion returns to Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, performing a characteristically diverse program of collaborative works with composer/musicians native to the intersection of popular and art music: Glenn Kotche (of Wilco), Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), Steven Mackey, and Yuka Honda (of Cibo Matto).
Part of Late Nights at Zankel Hall.
Drumkit Quartets (2011) by GLENN KOTCHE
#50 (Leffinge, Chicago)
#54 (Vienna)
#51(Tokyo, Brisbane, Berlin) with YUKA HONDA, voice
#3 Movement III (Minneapolis, Chicago)
Migrations (2015) by GLENN KOTCHE
with GLENN KOTCHE, percussion
World Premiere, Commissioned by Carnegie Hall
Drumkit Quartet #1 (Los Angeles, Russell, Auckland) (2011) by GLENN KOTCHE
with GLENN KOTCHE, percussion
Film by PATRICK BURNS
Before It Is Time (2015) by STEVEN MACKEY
with SHARA WORDEN, soprano
New York Premiere, Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall
Timeline (2015) by SHARA WORDEN and SO PERCUSSION
with Shara Worden, soprano
New York Premiere, Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall
This program contains three Carnegie Hall commissions – including two New York premieres, and the Glenn Kotche Migrations in its world premiere – as part of Carnegie Hall’s 125 Commissions Project, celebrating Carnegie Hall’s 125th Anniversary with more than one hundred twenty-five commissions over five seasons.
This concert showcases Sō Percussion’s distinctive model of composer collaborations, a process beginning with a flexible, playful, world-class performance capability offered to the composer’s distinctive artistic vision and voice, enabling the creation of a work of compelling specificity. Sō Percussion gives every piece a thorough development, with workshop performances and multiple seasons of touring performances, ensuring an ample opportunity for the work to enter the repertoire.
Each work on this program are in the midst of this process: Glenn Kotche’s Drumkit Quartet’s have been part of Sō’s repertoire since 2011, and are being released as a recording from Cantaloupe Music on February 27, 2016; Timeline was written by Sō Percussion and Shara Worden together last season, and given performances in Austin, Dublin, and at Princeton University; Steven Mackey’s Before It Is Time is a expansion of an early sketch for his 2010 work for So Percussion, It Is Time (another Carnegie Hall commission); and Glenn Kotche’s Migrations is a world premiere, heard here in its first public performance.
Additionally, this concert offers a snapshot of a important aspect of 21st music (one that is notably expressed by So Percussion’s artistry and career): the thawing of formerly icy divisions between high art and pop culture, in a manner characteristic of the Information Age.
Our first ever appearance at the Bonnaroo Festival is generating even more buzz than we imagined it would!
Rolling Stone, in their massive “Ultimate Guide” to Bonnaroo 2015, says:
“…don’t miss New York’s ambitious new music quartet So Percussion on Saturday morning. A very rare taste of Modern classical in a big American summer festival setting…”
The blog “No Country for New Nashville” calls it a “definite must see” alongside acts such as Flying Lotus and Tears for Fears.
Information about our midday set at Bonnarroo can be found HERE.
