Percussionist and composer Brian Blume said in a 2017 concert talk, “I think that, by nature, percussionists are tinkerers. We are explorers.” In the Cambridge Companion to Percussion, Adam Sliwinski wrote that percussionists are “curators of sound.”
In the world of classical chamber music ensembles, string quartets have many encyclopedias of masterworks to consider. Meanwhile, the history of compositions for percussion ensembles is barely a century old, but in the first quarter of the 21st century, chamber music written for percussionists has blossomed tremendously.
Founded in 1999 by Jason Treuting, Sō Percussion unquestionably has been at the vanguard of this exhilarating evolution in chamber music. Treuting is joined by Adam Sliwinski, Josh Quillen and Eric Cha-Beach.
Presented in part with the University of Utah School of Music, Sō Percussion will give the UtahPresents audience next week a real treat, including previews of new works and music featuring student percussionists from the university’s music school. The concert will take place Tuesday, Jan. 13, at 7:30 p.m. in Libby Gardner Hall.
The two premieres are notable, considering Sō Percussion will perform them 10 days later at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The world premiere will be Kendall K. Williams’s Panorama for Mallet Quartet and the U.S. premiere will be Caroline Shaw’s Strange and Artificial Echoes. Other works include Eric Cha-Beach’s 4+9 as well as selections from Amid the Noise and Go Placidly with Haste, composed by Treuting (which will feature local student percussionists).
Sō Percussion is the epitome of collaboration in terms of performances and commissions of new works. To mark its silver anniversary, the ensemble released 25×25 last September, described as “a stand-alone listening experience, featuring more than 8 hours of entirely new and previously unreleased recordings, with each piece written for, in collaboration with, and premiered by Sō Percussion.”
In an interview with The Utah Review on a wide range of musical matters, Treuting talked about Williams and Panorama, a work inspired by the steel band musical culture in Trinidad. Prior to the pandemic, Sō Percussion launched an international residency program to learn about various cultures of percussion music and Trinidad was the first stop.
About the experiences with a steel pan band of 120 members, Treuting said he and his fellow musicians learned about the technical skills and styles “in epically long rehearsals where we learned by singing the notes and phrases one at a time.” The notation in steel pan music differs from the traditions in Western classical music. Panorama refers to a steel pan band competition that occurs during the Carnaval season.
A Trinidad native, Williams, from Princeton University’s doctoral program in composition and CEO Pan in Motion which promotes steel pan heritage, had already collaborated with Sō Percussion members, who have been the Edward T. Cone Performers-in-Residence at Princeton for more than a decade.
“I asked Kendall [Williams] to write a new work and teach us the piece,” Treuting added. The new Panorama piece extends a timeline that has befitted the provenance of the ensemble’s unique name with Sō. It was Jenise Treuting, the founder’s sister. who came up with the idea, inspired by 奏, the second character in the compound Japanese word 演奏 (ensou), to perform music.” As she explained in a note at the ensemble’s website: “By itself, so means ‘to play an instrument.’ But it can also mean ‘to be successful,’ ‘to determine a direction and move forward,’ and ‘to present to the gods or ruler.’”
Undoubtedly, the Grammy-Award-winning ensemble has lived up to every letter in the promise of its name. While still in grad school at Yale University, Treuting conceived the project of a chamber percussion ensemble that could eventually commission new works on a scale similar to what world-famous string quartets have accomplished. Gradually, Sō Percussion branched out from minimalism and post-minimalism to many other styles, cultures and genres. Today, Sō Percussion has experienced the same degree of success that, for instance, Arditti Quartet has found in championing contemporary classical music for strings as well as Kronos Quartet which has become famous for its crossover collaborations in jazz, folk, rock and pop. “The chamber music scene feels very different now than it did in 1999,” Treuting said. “Now branching out in music is widely accepted and encouraged.”
A prominent long-standing collaborator is Shaw, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, whose Strange and Artificial Echoes will receive its U.S. premiere at the UtahPresents concert. Sō Percussion premiered the work last November at Amsterdam Concertgebouw in the Netherlands, as part of its European tour. It follows their previous Grammy-winning collaborations, such as the 2024 album Rectangles and Circumstance and the 2021 album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part.
Shaw’s most recent work reflects the co-composing process with the ensemble which has been a bedrock in their artistic relationship. Strange and Artificial Echoes incorporates numerous voice and musical fragments, in acoustic and electronic forms, which Treuting described as “wafting in and out continuously while creating a beautiful atmospheric effect.” Astute listeners will immediately detect quotations from Bach and Mozart (the opening of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, Dissonance) as well as more recent composers such as Morton Feldman.
The piece emerges as a biographical reflection for both composer and ensemble, in terms of the intellectual, creative and philosophical relationships they have established. When asked in an interview published elsewhere last year about her creative process, Shaw said, “Every project is so different. It’s rarely a melodic idea, almost never, actually. It’s usually a texture or a concept, something like ‘I want this to happen’ or ‘I want to feel this particular thing.’ From there, I try to figure out how to get to that feeling, and I start designing all the little things that need to happen along the way.”
The relationship between Sō Percussion and Shaw is as natural as one could ever expect from the best experiences of collaboration. One of the most memorable came from a project to record George Crumb’s song cycle Winds of Destiny. which included soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gil Kalish. Later, Upshaw proposed a new commission for the six musicians and Shaw’s name came to everyone’s mind. The resulting work was Narrow Sea, which explored American songs and hymns with percussion, voice and keyboard.
While Narrow Sea was being recorded, Shaw and Sō Percussion found time to workshop other new music. This resulted in a bonanza of new works: Shaw and Sliwinski wrote a multi-layered motet of ABBA’s Lay All Your Love On Me for marimba and voice, while Eric Cha-Beach combined medieval plainchant with I’ll Fly Away over ethereal drones. Other pieces were created, including “orchestrations in layers of keyboard instruments, ‘found’ percussion sounds, drums, and steel drums. Some lyrics for Caroline’s vocals came from her own invention, others came from members of Sō, and some were even lifted out of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Adam [Sliwicki] was reading at the time of the sessions.”
In addition to touring with as many as 50 concerts, Sō Percussion is ensuring the legacy for percussion ensembles in chamber music will continue into the next generation and beyond. In addition to teaching classes at Princeton, the ensemble convenes the Sō Percussion Summer Institute every year for two weeks where twenty percussionists and eight composers produce new works for premieres. The group also hosts a popular concert series Sō Laboratories at its studio in Brooklyn as well as in nearby venues. The ensemble also offers studio residencies for peer artist groups and an internship for emerging nonprofit professionals.
For tickets and more information, see the UtahPresents website.