Where (we) Live - Brooklyn (Vermont, PA, Minneapolis, Montana)

Jason performing with blacksmith Dave Berger at Juniata College
Photo (c) Chad Herzog 2012

Strangers All Along  

When So Percussion conceives big projects of our own work -  especially those that make it to theatrically-oriented venues like BAM - we always start with a source of inspiration outside of purely musical ideas.  We look for a kind of libretto; but being rather non-linear guys, we quickly abandon the source and allow its discourse to inform our process.

For Where (we) Live, that source was Jane Jacobs' manifesto of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  We found in it an analogue to something that we had been thinking about for awhile:  what about attempting a unified creation with multiple and sometimes chaotic inputs?  In Jacobs' book, she rails against the well-meaning but (in her mind) hopelessly short-sighted urban planning of the 50's and 60's by the likes of Robert Moses, where whole communities and use-areas were conceived together as one design.  She claims that a truly vibrant city must have stages of growth, unplanned diversity, and mixed uses on every block.

My knowledge of effective urban planning goes only about as far as I've read that book and a few other commentaries, so I'll leave that issue here.  Also, many of the compositions we perform were created via top-down planning, and we're perfectly happy with it in music.   As I said, we abandon the source pretty quickly.

But it sparked in us the thought that our art forms are often planned and segmented in exactly the same way, so that our conservatory degrees in "Percussion Performance" designate us for a specific function in the art world.  While we eagerly embrace that function, we also feel that it requires only a simple act of outreach to experiment outside of its boundaries.

But that function is also what we've trained for, and what we're best at.  Just as with Jacobs' mixed-use block, what if we practice our craft, but ask other folks to share the stage and practice theirs?

Would it just be a big happy mess, or could we hammer out an aesthetic shape and purpose?  

Along with the many other moving parts that we attached to Where (we) Live, we decided to ask specific artists and artisans to join us on the stage and make things.  While our collaborations with Emily Johnson, Ain Gordon, Martin Schmidt, and Grey Mcmurray would be long and consistent, our work with these other artists would be very short, perhaps only a day or two before each show.

We visit each in their own studio before the performance, learning about their process by observing the idiosyncrasies and rituals of their work.  They then bring tools to one rehearsal, where we hash out the parameters of our brief collaboration.   To us, the juxtaposition is not enough.  We strive for the uncanny sense that our simultaneous and disparate activities are part of the same ecosystem, a created community on stage.

The results so far have delighted us:  Steve Procter fired his giant ceramic pots with a blowtorch; Michelle Holzapfel gathered fabric to the gently whirring amplified hum of her sewing machine; Dave Berger's mighty anvil pounded out its own rhythms while a cloud of amber-burnt dust rose to the ceiling, wafting an ancient aroma through the hall.   In Helena and Billings, Montana, Joseph Firecrow whittled a new flute, joining us in playing "Strangers All Along."


The Dignity of Craft

The concept of "craft" came up over and over again.  Why, when we have the ability to fabricate massive quantities of perfectly symmetrical and consistent objects, would somebody still labor over creating them?  The question applies just as well to music:  At this point, I can barely tell the difference between a programmed marimba in Ableton Live and the real thing.

For me, the question was answered vividly when we visited Dave Berger's forge.  I had never actually been close to a skilled blacksmith (or I guess any at all).  Something deeply human in me thrilled at the physical gesture, the smell of burned ash, the proximity to melted steel.

It brought to mind my favorite quote by the composer Iannis Xenakis, which may surprise those who think of him as a mechanical composer:

The hand, itself, stands between randomness and calculation. It is both an instrument of the mind – so close to the head – and an imperfect tool. ... Industrialization is a forced purification. But you can always recognize what has been made industrially and what has been made by hand. Industrial means are clean, functional, poor. The hand adds inner richness and charm.  

Steve Reich, another of my favorite composers, talks about the joy of discovering how much he liked hearing imperfect humans attempt phasing in his music.   Mathematical perfection pales aesthetically in comparison with our experience of identification with the performers who exert themselves in achieving it.

Our increasingly digital lives, while conferring many benefits, detach us from this thrill.  Live performance, and craft by hand, jolt us back into a basic humanity.


Our Artists

The four performances at BAM (December 19-22) feature a different Brooklyn-based artist each night.  Their creations, and the aesthetic experience of watching them make things alongside us, change the musical and theatrical environment.  We encourage anybody who comes out to check out more than one night and see how the show changes.



Brooklyn:


Paula Greif, ceramics (December 19) trained as a graphic designer and has always had an interest in rock. Her first job was in the art department at Rolling Stone; she was art director at Mademoiselle, Condé Nast, Barneys New York, and Richard Avedon’s studio and designed album covers as well. At MTV in the 1980s, she made her first Super 8 rock video for The Smiths, “How Soon is Now,” and directed many rock videos and TV commercials. After marrying and becoming a parent, she began making pottery and glassware, taking inspiration from 20th-century artisans such as Lucie Rie, Beatrice Wood, and Rosanjin Kitaoji. She has a shared studio in Red Hook and in the summer is potter in residence at old Field Farm in Cornwallville, NY. Her wares are available at Beautiful Dreamers in Williamsburg and Iko Iko in Los Angeles.

Marsha Trattner, blacksmith (December 20) is the owner of She-Weld, which specializes in welding, black- smithing, custom metal design and fabrication. She gives workshops and private instruction, and runs a “Girls Night at the Forge.” Trattner also creates sculpture, drawings, prints, and designs lighting, jewelry, theatrical sets, and artifacts for the home and garden. 

Marsha's studio in Red Hook was ravaged by Sandy, so we'll be donating a portion of our proceeds from merchandise sales at BAM to the The Red Hook Initiative, as well as to Marsha's personal restoration efforts.  

Riccardo Vecchio, painter (December 21) was born in 1970 near Milan, Italy. From 1990 to 1993 he studied design at the university of Trier, Germany, and continued studies at the European Institute of Design in Milan. In 1994 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enroll in the masters program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, from which he graduated in 1996, receiving the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for his thesis project. Since then, Vecchio has been a faculty member in the School of Visual Arts’ illustration department. He has won awards from American Illustration, Communication Arts and other publications. His work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and books, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Penguin Books. His work has also been published by the Verve Music Group, Adobe, American Express, and other media and commercial outlets in the US and Europe. His work was exhibited in a major solo exhibition at the Visual Arts gallery in Manhattan in 2006 and at project spaces in Brooklyn, including Astor Row unlimited in 2009 and 2010. He lives and works in New York City. 

Victoria Valencia, woodworker/furniture-maker (December 22) hails from California and upholds a respect for materials in their natural state while introducing urban clean metal to contrast and complement. The resulting work retains the imperfections of the varied source materials but demonstrates a finished elegance borne from the mastery Valencia has cultivated. Largely self-taught, she worked in house remodeling and then as a head designer in set design. She then began to design and fabricate custom furniture. Working closely with clients, she creates unique pieces that fuse function and an elegant, unconventional aesthetic. Her passion for solving spacial conundrums often results in enlightened ideas for forgotten spaces. She views her work as a collaboration between the client, the space, the materials, and the external environment. 

Montana

Joseph Firecrow , Cheyenne flute maker and player.


Minneapolis

Zak Sally , Comic book author and illustrator

Kate Farstad, Visual artist


Juniata College - PA

Dave Berger, Blacksmith


Vermont

Veranda Porche , Poet

Steve Procter , Ceramicist

Michelle Holzapfel, Wood artist and seamstress

Where (we) Live - Taking Notes

Although only just under an hour long, So's newest project Where (we) Live is dense, enigmatic, and chaotic.  Some elements - such as the music - are straightforward, at least in the sense that they resemble work that we've been doing for years.  

But a few other elements are very new to us.  We purposefully set it up that way,  bringing people whom we admire into the room without steering them too strongly towards a specific purpose.  Each of our core collaborators was given the power to influence the outcome of the project.  


Here are the elements of the live show:

• So Percussion 
• Grey Mcmurray, guitar, live processing, and vocals
• Martin Schmidt's videos (controlled by So Percussion members)
• Nightly special guest artist/artisan:  we've had a blacksmith, a seamstress, a potter, several visual artists, a graphic novel author.  
• Emily Johnson:  the "note giver."  
• Ain Gordon, the director 

Two of the collaborators infused material directly into the show:  Grey McMurray's music and Martin Schmidt's videos are instantly attributable, and have their own strong profile.

Our director Ain Gordon has a role that is also traditionally defined, even though he is tasked with directing an un-traditional performance.  He stands apart from the show, helping us understand whether our creation is making any sense.  

Even the special guest, who is different every night, has a clear task: to make their work in co-existence with the other performers.  

But we have one final collaborator, whose role and tasks have proven more difficult to explain.    

Choreographer and performance artist Emily Johnson (who was honored with a Bessie Award for Oustanding Production this year) is our "note giver."  She sits quietly at a desk stage left, listening and watching.  When it strikes her, she writes notes down on little scraps of paper and hands them out to any of the other performers during the show.  We offered her complete latitude with regard to what instruction she might pass, and when.  

We also gave ourselves a rule:  to acknowledge and attempt whatever she asks.  The trust we place in her to perform this task is immense, because she now has the power to balance the dynamic and flow of the show, or possibly to completely derail it.  

These instructions can range anywhere from the very concrete ("walk to the back of the hall"), to the mysterious ("believe").  They are designed to create unexpected dynamics and relationships among the performers in real time, while also revealing new possibilities for the arch of the theatrical situation.  

As such, there's a kind of improvisation happening, although our musical performance is quite fixed and rehearsed.  Far from freeing us of the burden of tight preparation, this embedded x-factor actually requires us to labor even more heavily at knowing the material.  

Of course, anybody who works with improvisation or flexible elements in performance will tell you how very much preparation is actually necessary.  

So Emily has omniscience, and also agency.  She alone knows what instructions each performer has received (we are not privy to each other's notes).  

As if Ain didn't have enough to keep track of at this point, now he has somebody making unplanned decisions in real time affecting every aspect of the show!  

I asked Emily and Ain to talk about their roles in Where (we) Live.  Grey contributed his own short description of what it is like to have this "note giver" in our midst.  


Emily:

I think of action all the time. And stillness. I think about how action and stillness intersect with our thoughts, bodies, curiosities, values, needs, wants... In WwL I listen. I look at the house we are in. Empty space and full space. I see, hear, and feel Jason, Eric, Adam, Josh, Grey, and Ain and I think my role is a link in the space: between them; between now, what just happened, and what is coming; and between where they are and where the audience is. I try to make that space smaller somehow. Or maybe smaller is the wrong word. Maybe the word is thicker. I offer action or stillness or thought or a million other things as choice on little bits of paper and sometimes I demand something, too. I know where we are trying to get to but I always have to find a new way. I have to be ready for sound and space to jolt me into writing something down; I have to trust it immediately or wait a bit and see where it fits in. It's terrifying and it's the best thing. I try to: make us all (performers and audience) feel at home or for a moment lost, dig something up or reveal something we forgot. When I see one of them doing or attempting to do one of the directions I gave them I get a sense that many things are happening at once. There's the thinking about the action/stillness and there is the doing. We are doing what we know and at the same time making something we don't know yet. These moments jump through space and make me feel super alive and I hope they do that a bit for the audience, too.

Ain:

“Directing” this project is an accurate title and a nutty word for the task. I am there to uncover the work’s core intention and shape options to constantly re-reveal that core while constantly defending the performer’s ability to choose another “option.” So, we honed a mutually agreed upon “script” with a million options to step off that grid and clear imperative avenues for returning – at least, that’s all true when it works. I feel a kinship with Emily’s role because I am the offstage her or she is the onstage me. We are using different lenses and timelines to coax out the molten core – at least that is how I think of it.

Grey:

Whenever I'm alone for a stretch, I will inevitably confront the thought of how I'd like to be, or I'll ask myself how I'm doing being what I hope I am, or more specifically, what the time-spending-activities are that I wish I would do to be more like the perfect person I can imagine. In other words, I find myself detaching and looking at myself, so I can imagine I'm less alone. Of course, when I don't detach, I am less alone. When Emily hands a note to me during the performance, no matter how I think I'm doing, or how I'm doing trying not to think about how I'm doing, I devote full attention to her written instruction / request / demand / hope-for-a-better-performance note. If I bump into an unknown someone on the street, I get out of my head the same way. Some notes induce strange movements, others hopeful thoughts, but no matter the content, Emily's free compositional sensitivity always takes me away from myself when I might be fading-in, and places me back where I am. Her words-on-scraps are my healthy aloneness. I would do better if I got her notes everyday.

Here's what I mean...

This morning, I was privileged to talk at Northwestern University about John Cage.  The 30 minutes of the talk was just enough time to scratch the surface of what his work means to me and to my group.  The over-arching point of my talk was that to many, Cage is still an outlier, a kind of prophet in the wilderness who we all agree was singular and important.  But to us as percussionists, he is foundational. He actually created the artistic world that I now inhabit.  

While preparing for this talk, I experimented with writing a lecture in Cage's style, using chance operations to cut up material.  I hoped it might reveal connections and new ideas that I hadn't thought of.  It certainly did that.  

In the end, I thought it would be more interesting for the group at the conference to hear about how So Percussion uses Cage's music to stimulate creative programming and recording.  But I wanted to put the text down on e-paper, as I've been doing with other writings recently.  

During the effort to emulate Cage, my text became very personal.  For as much as I proselytize for him, I actually have a very complicated aesthetic relationship to his work.  I suppose I take him seriously enough to be troubled and provoked by some of his conclusions and directions.  

Those who dismiss(ed) Cage as a joker or clown are avoiding these issues entirely.  When you become intimately acquainted with his work, he is impossible to dismiss in this way.   

I may turn this text into some sort of performance piece, measured out in time and accompanied by tasks and percussion sounds.  But I'm going to leave it for awhile, and see if the unintended juxtapositions spark other ideas.  

Here's a video of my talk at NU:

Here’s what I mean…

If we take time and duration to mean structure as Cage thought,

Where do we place our emotions? 

I am not interested in Zen, although obviously I am interested in it. 

Duration contains both silence and sound,

Though silence does not exist here…

So duration actually contains the sounds

Intended or not intended

But the sounds “intended”

Are genus or species

And not the sounds themselves

For only the sounds themselves

Can be the sounds.

The intention of a sound

Is the intention of a generality.

And the question of emotion is trite,

As we all know. 

Placing emotion is manipulative

It is the bullwhip of corporations

Detachment is honest, trustworthy

But I have my emotions

And I like some of them

And I feel them when I play

John Cage’s music.

To speak of Cage’s originality

It is vast

But Art is social

And nobody creates in a vacuum

I found out that Marcel Duchamp made chance music

Decades before Cage.

It takes nothing away from him

Actually it enhances everything.

I plan to use chance in this talk

Because it is about Cage. 

But I will change it

If I don’t like the outcome. 

I am not yet at peace with the world

I do not accept everything as it is. 

I believe Art is freedom.

We percussionists had nothing to lose. 

We don’t tear down power structures

We brush them aside

And embrace freedom 

Melodies are sounds in sequence

I’m not tired of Schubert

Not at all

To speak of a melody

As pleasing or not

Is fine

But you can’t disqualify…

We hear sound on a line:

growing

shrinking

withholding

connecting

scattering

expanding

contracting

But if we say it is not “music”

We are caught defining music

For others

I simply think that chance may be better

At combining things

Than I am

And I tire of my own train of thought

Imagine if I subjected you to it as well! 

I desire urgently to communicate with you…

This discussion makes me uncomfortable.

Back to duration:

We feel experientially that we can measure it

Control it, quantize it

It is a hammer

Leveling the great arc

Beethoven died, after all

Trying so hard to make something different

It’s a worthy impulse

But why shouldn’t we be connected? 

Taste

The limits of our view

Sentimentality

All of a sudden our thoughts form

As objects

Weapons from the past

Cage penetrates the bubble.

To speak of theater…

I know nothing of theater

To speak of music

Is to speak of sound

And silence.

But to speak of silence

Is to be un-silent

And to be silent is merely

To move towards the sounds

You haven’t yet considered. 

Walk into a crowded room

Look intently at somebody else

Who doesn’t know you’re listening

As they speak. 

Their words come into radiant focus

In your mind.

So it is with the wall clock

The radiator hum

The birds

But to speak of Beethoven

As Cage did

Makes very little sense now

So I will speak of Cage. 

Back, tentatively 

Again to emotion

The theater is a box,

Just like the Silent Piece

What we call theater

I am totally unable to do

In terms of craft.     

As a box for examining life

I am enthralled. 

We all have different tools.

The urge to ritualize

And frame life

Is all that’s needed.

Catharsis is obviously temporary

And I suppose that’s the point

But I can’t abandon my emotions

Because life…

But arrival at stasis…

I’m going to keep using this word “freedom”

Because I hope I can make it taste different in my mouth

After the 2000’s 

We are not supposed to worship the man

We are not supposed to do anything

That’s the point. 

I’ve heard some music dismissed as “derivative.”

I know I’m supposed to understand what that means

But nobody ever tells me exactly what it’s derived from

Or why they dismiss the source

Which was itself inevitably a complex derivation

Of something else

Modernism was a cleansing

In many ways healthy

But locked and trapped in the past it resisted.   

It must not have been original. 

It seems to me that the only original act

was the creation itself.

Everything else is a derivation

I only run into trouble

When I try to be somebody else.

But as myself

I create theater in community

I suspend the tiresome

But necessary rules

I am still myself.

This brings me back to freedom

Not lonely freedom from the community

But freedom together

We can all change the rules. 

Stasis need not be boring

It can be commitment

A small powerful thought

Penetrated

If my thought is powerful

Why leave it quickly?

What contrast do you require? 

Are you listening,

Or are you apprehending? 

I don’t mind either

But apprehending from a book makes sense

Because, temporally speaking

It is malleable.

Give yourself license

To hear the world as it is

Now to speak of pitch

Or really frequency

How slow or fast things vibrate

I still believe that sounding these vibrations at the same time

Can be divine

Mozart

Schubert

Chopin

You will build better connections than I

Or at least, I’d like to allow for it. 

I haven’t composed a piece of music until 33 years of age

Because of this thought. 

The question is not “this” or “that.”

When things vibrate at the same time

We are alive.

Cage wanted us to see it larger

And more clearly.

Every noise has frequencies

Sometimes many simultaneously

Cage said something new

Because of who, where, when, why…

And because he was courageous. 

He turned our ears. 

This is supremely social. 

My talk is derived from Cage’s methods

It is highly unoriginal.

I can’t believe that he meant for us to set him aside

With extreme permission

And just continue on as we were.

We don’t need to swing the pendulum

This way and that.

But I don’t know what that implies

Because it was fun. 

My emotions

Are overwhelmed

But Cage lets it be. 

I don’t reject the past.

In fact, I embrace it so well that I’m left inert.

I suspect it’s the same for some of you. 

I’m not overcoming anything

Because Cage doesn’t require me to defeat him

If I use chance, I simply use chance. 

If you consider me unoriginal

I enthusiastically agree

But I want to make sound.

And I want to speak with you. 

The consequences are not what you think…

I can’t proclaim revolution against him

Even if I wanted to

Which I certainly don’t

I am unworthy of this style

Of this voice

Of this courage

But “the only rule is work.” 

He stands, in a sense

For everything.

To be honest, I can

Understand those who think (and thought)

That it’s a little bit ridiculous to stand for everything

Duration is an illusion, to be sure

But it’s concrete enough for us

And I have no time for mysticism

I recently read

“Once the point (of 4’33”) is grasped

Do I really need to sit and listen to it?”

But then the point is surely not grasped

Back to freedom

It is of course another paradox

It can only be experienced within strict limitations

Such as duration. 

The “Freedom” of endless decision points

Endless duration

Endless spinning out

Is a tyranny. 

Pitches are rhythms…

My emotions are touched by pitches

Which is to say rhythms

My emotions are attachments

I am attached to the world.

I’m not fighting against anything…

But it needed to be done. 

There is nothing wrong with the keyboard per se

The keyboard is just a pattern

Any pattern becomes oppressive

When it’s enforced.

And so it is with new patterns

Built to replace the old. 

I won’t tell you what John Cage stood for

Because of John Cage

A cactus or a branch is a newfound instrument each time

And you paid, and I’m dressed up. 

What I urgently want you to understand

Is that this is not a joke

But it can be funny. 

I don’t want you to “get it.”

I want you to try it on. 

You may find yourself a little lighter.

Where (we) Live - Finally

Over the past two years, I’ve written a few essays on “Where (we) Live,” So’s latest collaborative project. 

The project has surprised and impressed me in so many ways.  All we really had to go on from the beginning was a process:  to trust that we could bring many voices into the room, more than we ever have before. 

We premiered the piece last night in Minneapolis.  Here’s what I think I’ve learned:

Within a home, family, or community, it is possible to create a discreet world, to radically re-define the rules.  It is the sum of its parts, and any thought otherwise is our own illusion. 

This takes an enormous amount of effort.    

Understanding Cage better:

“Where do we go from here?  Towards theatre.  That art more than music resembles nature.  We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.” 

To create space for others is necessary.  

Understanding my friend Bobby Previte better:

“Our purpose is not to make things ‘work.’  We’re not making chairs: human beings aren’t supposed to work.” 

If you always remember that we’re barely capable of understanding each other, it’s easier. 

Your ability to perceive the world is hopelessly limited.  When asked to step outside the boundaries of your understanding by someone you trust, commit fearlessly. 

Find people to trust.  Make sure they are capable of showing you things you don’t already see.  This process is life-long.  Be grateful if you have the extraordinary luxury to pursue it in a school, but don’t compartmentalize the periods of your life into utility functions.   

As far as I can see it: the purpose of performance is to build and enact a ritual for exploring life. 

Notes on a Collaboration: Mackey Part II

Creative Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time Part II Time sits Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time

Several years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new percussion quartet.  Steve – Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America today. 

            During the course of a year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters.  We found the end result to be astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power. 

            Over this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason.  We’ll also talk about working with Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments. 

            Here is a link to watch the video of the piece.  

            This article focuses on Josh Quillen and several different ways of looking at the steel drums:    

It is Time:  New Ground for the Steel Drum

Our collaboration with Steve Mackey on the 2^nd movement (Steel Drums) of “It is Time” began with BBQ.  This is fitting, given that most things in the steel drum world happen over some sort of communal food experience in Trinidad and Tobago.  What struck me the most about Steve’s way of learning the instrument was his desire to hear me play the way I naturally wanted to play.  He was curious about my idiosyncrasies as a player because this was an instrument he had never written for.  I often wonder: if he had written this for another steel drummer, would it have turned out completely differently?  Maybe it wouldn’t be different at all, but once the music starting arriving via email bit by bit, I found that it challenged me like no other music written for the steel drum, while at the same time, somehow, showing obviously how I should make it my own.  Steve strove to push me as a player to interpret his music the way I would Calypso music, and it meant a lot to me that he was being so thoughtful about tradition while writing incredibly difficult music. 

It’s not to say that I didn’t have to practice or could just sight-read it all--quite the contrary!  His writing for double seconds, for the most part, kept to some version of a whole-tone scale, which allowed me to keep one hand inside each steel drum almost the entire time.  There were exceptions of course, but it allowed for easy flow while playing. 

The most difficult part of the double-second music is a passage that I really feel is a duet for drums and steel drums that alternates between running 16ths and dotted 16ths. The passage often has the feeling of going “over the bar,” even though the entire thing is basically in 5/8 time.  On steel drums, it’s incredibly difficult to play due to running lines passing rapidly from low to high in the range punctuated by high accented “melodic” notes.  Steve described to me that this music was his way of notating out the method of harmonic/melodic “comping” that I employ when playing solo steel drums. (I played an arrangement of “What a Wonderful World” for him early on in the collaboration that uses this technique of arpeggiating chords and plucking out the melody at the same time). 

Along the way, I expected to have to tell Steve that things needed to be re-written so they would flow better, but his thoughtful obsession about what he was writing kept me from having to do that.  He had diagrams of my instruments at home so he could slowly “play” every note he was writing.  If he could play it slow, then in his mind, I could play it fast.  Well, it worked!   It kicked me in the pants, but it worked.

Writing for the steel drums is a difficult beast to tackle, but the two of us broke new ground together, coming across something that I am sure doesn’t exist yet elsewhere in the steel drum world.  I have a new “Invader-style” lead pan that I had been using to extend the high range of my double seconds.  Steve started asking me if I could re-tune metal bowls to have a few of the higher lead pan pitches “detuned” a bit by a quarter tone (ie. microtonally detuned).   I did mess around with a few of the bowls, but the setup started to get a little unwieldy to deal with, and they just didn’t sound as good as the steel drum.  It occurred to me that I had an older “Invader” style lead pan made by Cliff Alexis that was given to me by my high school steel drum teacher, Joan Wenzel.  It was really out of tune and beat up, but on a whim I called the tuner I was using, Darren Dyke, to ask him if he could tune the entire pan back into shape, but just leave the whole thing a quarter tone sharp of A440.  His response was, “well, I’ll just set the strobe tuner a quarter tone sharp and roll with it.”  When I got the pan back, it sounded in tune with itself, but as soon as I put it with the newer lead pan (tuned to A440), a whole new world opened up.  It doubled the amount of notes Steve could write for between middle C and the F above the treble clef staff.

After talking with Steve and playing it a bit for him, he decided to treat the two lead pans in a similar fashion as the double seconds.  Since the layouts of the leads were exactly the same, I could play them with one hand in each drum and linear scalar passages would be a mirror image of each other.  Steve described the microtonal section of the piece as needing to sound “nasally.”  It’s a completely unique sound in the steel drum world that I’m sure will take time to catch on, but not because it’s a bad sound:  It’s a beautiful sound, but once you tune a lead pan a quarter-tone sharp, you can’t use it with any other piece! (Unless the players on the gig you are playing for someone’s cocktail party at a wedding are cool with microtonal stylings on calypso tunes!)

As a player, collaborating with Steve Mackey on “It is Time” pushed me to augment my already existing skills as a steel drummer in ways I would have never dreamed.  He is an endless reservoir of wild ideas that seem to have no filter at first glance, but on second look are masterfully crafted innovations and a thoughtful flushing out of brilliant ideas.

I hope other groups play this piece a million more times than we do.  Every time I open it up, I find new things.  Thanks Steve!

--Josh Quillen

Where (we) Live - now

A year and a half ago, I posted a blog entry about our project Where (we) Live. At that time, it was in its earliest gestation. We knew very little about what we wanted to achieve, except that we were going to challenge ourselves to reach outside a collective comfort zone.

So Percussion was founded in the midst of a rigorous chamber music program at Yale. In order to focus on the skill of playing other people's music at a very high level -which is difficult enough to master on its own - we were laser-focused on what it takes to become an accomplished, cohesive group. We've never abandoned this core purpose, and those "10,000 hours" come in handy while making music.

The impulse to break away from the familiar and engage with other artists is inspired in part by two of our creative heroes: John Cage and Steve Reich. These famous composers are pillars of the American experimental tradition, but they achieved that status partially by having a social component to their work. Each of them did two things that we admire and emulate: start groups to play their music, and cast a wide net in their artistic community. Both worked with dancers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, writers, etc.

Although our group was not originally founded to play our music, it has since become such an outlet, starting with Jason's amid the noise project. We arrived at the same place as Cage and Reich, but slightly backwards.

We began to feel that our net could be cast much wider. Of course, there's always an organic element to expanding your community: chance or arranged meetings lead to new projects, membership in a larger community sparks a common interest, etc. We thought it would be interesting to formalize this process a bit, by explicitly inviting people to contribute something unique and personal to our creative process.

Where (we) Live is that formalized process. We have invited a small group of core collaborators (music, video, performance art), and a larger group of short-term collaborators to work with us on a new show.

The challenges are kind of obvious: how to bring so many voices into a room without creating an incoherent mess? I can't say for sure whether we have solved the problem yet, but one thing was absolutely crucial in tackling it: a development process, where we can try our ideas out in front of audiences.

For the performing arts, this is important, but scary. No matter how many times you try something in your studio, there is no way to tell whether it is working until people see it. Perhaps one of the appealing things about classical music is that the music itself has long since been "workshopped" - over countless performances and critical evaluations - and "all" we have to do (ha ha) is play it well. Of course, that task itself requires a lifetime of dedication and problem solving, especially as the performance level expected of the same music goes up over successive generations.

Vermont Performance Lab enters the picture just at the moment an artist needs it the most: when ideas have formed into material, but time, resources, and an engaged community are needed to pull it across the finish line.

So Percussion first worked with VPL in the summer of 2008, on the Music for Trains project: a gloriously sprawling journey of site-specific performances around the train stations of southern Vermont. It was a pivotal moment in our development as a creative group: far more ambitious and daring than anything we might have come up with on our own, with a force of vision and organization behind it (Sara Coffey).

That experience put us on a new path, which eventually lead to our first show at BAM, Imaginary City.

So VPL seemed to be the perfect place for another ambitious, untested idea. Sara helped us craft a ten day residency which we're currently in the midst of. First, 3 days at Guilford Sound's recording studio to assemble the core of the music, then a week of workshopping the live show. For each show, a different artist from Southern Vermont would be curated by Sara to appear as our "special guest," the final piece of the puzzle that will change at each venue.

Our time in the recording studio was incredible. The new studio at Guilford Sound is simply one of the best recording studios we've ever been in.

We've now completed two of three works-in-progress shows. Monday night we performed with Michelle Holzapfel, a wood artist and master seamstress. She brought her sewing machine, which we amplified and lit. Tuesday night the poet Verandah Porche joined us. On friday the potter Steve Procter will be our guest.

The process of recording and performing the show has lead to surprising results, but not even in the way we imagined. What started out as possibly the most experimental project we've ever embarked upon has slowly and surely become one of the most personal. The formalized process that I mentioned above gradually gave way to the real relationships of the collaboration. As we began to show it to people, they would tell us what it meant to them, and one theme kept coming up over and over again: home.

Below is our latest description of the project.  Enjoy!

Many thanks to Ain Gordon (director of the project), for this description.

-Adam Sliwinski


Where do we live?

For eight years, So Percussion has made our home in Brooklyn amid two million five hundred thousand others. In our city, each of the group’s four members has constructed a personal ecosystem we call home. These homes are bound by space, time, sound and image. Equally, these spaces house rewarding, frustrating, supporting, damaging, tangible and never understood relationships.

When we leave those homes, our four members unite to create another artistic home, with its own unspoken rules and expectations; its own rhythm of interaction, its own banalities and mystery.

Where (we) Live questions all these homes by purposefully inviting the unknown to “come on over.” We’ve asked video artists, songwriters, painters, choreographers, directors and others to substantively alter our process. The resulting performance contains a society of possibilities: composed pieces, chance elements, visual associations, and theatrical interactions.

Our collaborators:

Grey McMurray is a songwriter/guitarist. He has written a series of songs about our homes. So has worked extensively with Grey to on these compositions which will be featured on an upcoming Cantaloupe Music release. He will be performing with us onstage at each show.

Martin Schmidt is a video artist. His videos heighten our focus on ordinary elements, bringing us into different homes framing the un-noticed. These videos are projected throughout on rough found surfaces, scaled to a modest life size.

Emily Johnson is a choreographer. She will dictate secret instructions to the performers via an onstage assistant. These instructions will differ at every performance generated in response to the moment with the power to alter.

Ain Gordon is a writer/director. He functions as a dramaturg and director, a fifth voice in Sō Percussion’s decision-making process, threading the project’s purposefully diverse elements and desired resulting chaos into a portrait of something that cannot actually be “seen,” home.

A guest artist in each town will collaborate with us in a short residency. We are looking for people who are good at what they do -be it a musician, writer, visual artist, or some other kind of performer - discovered with the help of the presenter in each location. We welcome the unusual dialogue of the unexpected in these more immediate interactions, giving ourselves only one day in person to rehearse with and get to know this individual. Our hope is to harness the power of new friendships and impending performance to spawn a different type of creativity.


















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