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So Percussion - Imaginary City

Presented by DiverseWorks Art Space at DiverseWorks ArtSpace

February 12-February 13, 2010

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DiverseWorks Presents So Percussion - Imaginary City, February 12 & 13, 2010, at 8pm. Commissioned by DiverseWorks with Myrna Loy Center/ Helena, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and National Performance Network.

The New York Times described So Percussion as “brilliant” and Billboard Magazine called them “Astonishing.” Imaginary City is the newest work by Brooklyn’s So Percussion. The virtuosos of So Percussion create mind-expanding chamber music that is at turns raucous and touching, barbarous and heartfelt. They have collaborated with filmmaker Jenise Treuting to capture the sounds and images of several cities – from Treuting’s home in Tokyo to the vast skies of Helena, MT; to the mountains of Denver, CO; through the heartland of Cleveland, OH and the New England landscape of Burlington, VT and to the urban jungle of Houston. to emphasize the uniqueness and commonalities between the various cities.

The performance will center around So Percussion’s utilization of percussion instruments to communicate the extremes of emotion and musical possibility. Imaginary City takes the experimentation one step further with music based partially on invented instruments, blurring the lines between sound and vision to create an artistic metropolis.

So is: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting.

Since coming together at the Yale School of Music in 1999, So Percussion has been creating music that is both raucous and touching, barbarous and refined. Realizing that percussion instruments can communicate all the extremes of emotion and musical possibility, it has not been an easy music to define. Called an "experimental powerhouse" by the Village Voice, "astonishing and entrancing" by Billboard Magazine, and "brilliant" by the New York Times, the Brooklyn based quartet's innovative work with todayy's most exciting composers and their own original music has quickly helped them forge a unique and diverse career.

Although the drum is one of humanity's most ancient instruments, Europe and America have only recently begun to explore its full potential, aided by explosions of influence and experimentation from around the world. In the 20th Century, musical innovators like Edgard Varese, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis brought these instruments out from behind the traditional orchestra and gave them new voice.

It was excitement about these composers and the sheer fun of playing together that inspired the members of So to begin performing while still in school: Cage's Third Construction wove elaborate rhythmic counterpoint using ordinary objects, while Reich's Drumming harnessed African inspiration to ecstatic effect.

A blind call to David Lang, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, yielded their first big commissioned piece, the so-called laws of nature, which appeared with Evan Ziporyn's gamelan-inspired Melody Competition on their first album So Percussion. In the following years, the thrill of working with amazing composers would yield new pieces by Paul Lansky, Dan Trueman, Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Fred Frith, Martin Bresnick, and many others.

For their next disc they tackled Drumming, one of the first and few percussion pieces of symphonic scope (well over an hour long). A landmark American work, Drumming fuses african aesthetics, western philosophical concepts, and technologically inspired processes in a minimalist masterpiece. In 2010, So will be presenting the U.S. premiere of Reich's new Mallet Quartet, written for the group and several other renowned percussion ensembles.

So's third album Amid the Noise heralded a new direction for the group: original music, written by member Jason Treuting. Eager to expand their palette, the members experimented with glockenspiel, toy piano, vibraphones, bowed marimba, melodica, tuned and prepared pipes, metals, duct tape, a wayward ethernet port, and all kinds of sound programming. The resulting idiosyncratic tone explorations were synchronized to Jenise Treuting's haunting films of street scenes in Brooklyn and Kyoto. This ongoing work has resulted in exciting new projects such as the site-specific Music For Trains in Southern Vermont and Imaginary City, a sonic meditation on urban soundscapes commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2009 Next Wave Festival in consortium with 5 other venues.

For the past several years, So has been joining the electronic duo Matmos for shows around the country and in Europe, exploring the sonic and theatrical possibilities of beer cans, hair clippers, ceramic bowls, and dry ice. This collaboration will culminate in a new album to be released on Cantaloupe Records in Summer 2010.

Summer of 2009 saw the creation of the annual So Percussion Summer Institute on the campus of Princeton University. The Institute is an intensive two-week chamber music seminar for college-age percussionists. For their first festival, the four members of So Percussion served as faculty in rehearsal, performance, and discussion of contemporary music to 23 students from around the USA.

So Percussion has performed this unusual and exciting music all over the United States, with concerts at the Lincoln Center Festival, Carnegie Hall, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Stanford Lively Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others. In addition, recent tours to Russia, Australia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Ukraine have brought them international acclaim.

With an audience comprised of "both kinds of blue hair... elderly matron here, arty punk there" (as the Boston Globe described it), So Percussion makes a rare and wonderful breed of music that both compels instantly and offers rewards for engaged listening. Edgy (at least in the sense that little other music sounds like this) and ancient (in that people have been hitting objects for eons), perhaps it doesnÂ’'t need to be defined after all.

Imaginary City is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks, Myrna Loy Center/ Helena, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, and the NPN. Major contributors to the NPN are the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information on NPN: www.npnweb.org.

ABOUT DIVERSEWORKS ARTSPACE
Known for its groundbreaking artistic and education programs, DiverseWorks is one of the premiere contemporary arts centers in the United States. DiverseWorks has been a hub for the presentation of daring and innovative work, a commissioner of major artistic projects in all disciplines, and an advocate for artists worldwide. Founded by artists for artists, DiverseWorks continues its commitment to bold artistic exploration, creative risk-taking, and building audiences for contemporary art.

Photo above by Janette Beckman, 2008.