LA Phil to Bonnaroo - A So Percussion Year in Review

I. man made

We are standing backstage at Disney Hall in Lost Angeles just before going on. The entire LA Philharmonic is waiting for us, the hall is full,  the NPR live broadcast machinery is revved up, and we are commiserating with the Phil's artistic director Gustavo Dudamel.

"Why don't we all just get up and go to the bar right now," he quips, accompanied by a mischievous smile I am accustomed to seeing on a 9 year old boy right before he wreaks havoc. Peals of laughter explode, as that's about the last thing you expect somebody in that position to say right before walking onstage. Any performer who is honest will admit that some variation of this thought goes through their head every time they are about to play a big concert. It was exactly the tension release we needed, just imagining the world-famous Gustavo Dudamel and moderately well-known So Percussion tossing back Negronis at the bar while the entire orchestra and audience sits there waiting.

This sense of dread morphing into excitement is a ritual, and I think it's a healthy one. If you're not a little bit afraid, are you really expecting to do something urgent and risky on stage?

The piece we were about to play was David Lang's man made, his new concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra.  The work was co-commissioned by the LA Phil, and this was the North American premiere.  Risk is built into the piece on multiple levels.  Aside from just the challenges of performing, there are aesthetic unknowns - we were about to kick off the LA Phil's subscription season with 7 minutes of snapping twigs. Most of the audience had undoubtedly come to see Dudamel and the orchestra masterfully tackle Mahler's Fifth Symphony, but that was not what they were going to get at first.

Beyond aesthetics, there were substantial performing challenges.  Snapping twigs in precise rhythm is surprisingly difficult, and the second movement involved delicately navigating a row of tuned wine bottles. One wrong move and a bottle can go flying, clanging onto the floor and shredding the placid texture of the piece. 

Here's a video of us with the orchestra during rehearsals: 

The opening night was a smashing success. We received positive feedback from the audience at Disney Hall, the listeners online, and the LA press. This has been our first major foray into the orchestra world as soloists, and we left the experience in LA feeling like we had established an important presence. 

"The program is profound...in ways deep and meaningful [Lang] question[s] progress while embracing it."

- Mark Swed, LA Times  

This year, man made received further performances in The Netherlands, Denver, Cincinnati, Ireland, and Finland. Although the novelty value of the instruments we play in the piece is high, the work seems to reach audiences on a more fundamental level, drawing a meaningful connection between the sophisticated violin and a simple twig. This habit of flinging ourselves headlong into unknown territory is the consistent thread that defines what So Percussion is about.  Our activities now spread across the realms of contemporary music, education, presenting, recording, and even social service. But that risk is always there. 

II. Music for Wood and Strings 

"Percussion" is not actually a thing - it is more like an open-ended proposition. A long time ago, we abandoned the idea that we should only play instruments which are already categorized as percussion instruments. Whenever we begin working with a new composer, the first question is always "what shall we play?" In no other kind of ensemble can I imagine this question being so pervasive and fundamental to their identity. 

With most of the pieces written for us, the answer places us somewhere in the ballpark of traditional percussion instruments - after all, that's where we received most of our training and honed our skills. With Music for Wood and Strings this tendency is abolished. In conceiving the piece, Dessner actually pulled us closer to his world of the electric guitar by designing a new instrument called the "Chordstick." Resembling a kind of electric guitar/hammered dulcimer hybrid, the instrument design deftly calls upon the sound of a stringed instrument while employing mostly percussion-related playing techniques. 

Bryce is best known to the wider world as guitarist and songwriter for the rock band The National. This helped enormously in getting the music out there, but had very little bearing on the content of our collaboration. We have known Bryce since we were all students at Yale. His experience as a classical guitarist and composer runs as a parallel thread along with his career in pop music, so there was really no moment where any of us were trying to "cross over" from any one style to any other.  

After the Carnegie Hall premiere in November 2013 and many subsequent performances, we released Music for Wood and Strings on Brassland Records in May of this year. We were incredibly pleased at the reception it got, especially its debut as number 15 on the Billboard classical charts in its first week of release! 

The piece seems to have the ability to reach different audiences who enjoy the chordstick's connection to the electric guitar, the originality of its design, and the visceral excitement of the work's driving rhythmic patterns.  We toured it far and wide this year: Brooklyn, Paris, London's Barbican Centre, Arkansas, Dublin, and so many more.  

Two of our opportunities to perform Music for Wood and Strings this year best exemplified the broad appeal that it has. First, in May we were invited to participate in a live broadcast of the hit WNYC show Radiolab. We collaborated with the host Jad Abumrad on a fascinating story about a woman who happens to have an unnaturally loud heartbeat. This performance to a sold out BAM Opera house in Brooklyn included a segment where we performed an excerpt of Music for Wood and Strings. The crowd's reaction was incredibly gratifying, and we were even tickled to learn that 80's movie icon Molly Ringwald was getting into it from the audience as well. 

Our Radiolab segment made it onto the podcast: 

Second, we were invited to perform a set on the gigantic Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. Normally reserved for major pop acts like Billy Joel and Mumford and Sons, we were somewhat flummoxed but obviously also ecstatic to participate. Bryce's piece was the perfect fit for this outdoor festival. Curious listeners started to flock from all over the festival grounds, and by the end of the set, we had a huge but also perfectly respectful crowd checking out our 20 minute long pieces.  

I managed to get one photo in during our performance of Steve Reich's "Drumming." 

III. Princeton University 

When I was a college student, most performance majors were actively discouraged from pursuing a career in contemporary music. This reflected the economic realities of the music world at the time: orchestras and other classical institutions were seen as stable and relatively popular, while composers and contemporary music ensembles operated on an exciting but impoverished fringe. The greatest legacy of groups like the Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can organization is that they actually achieved so much in the face of a heavy cultural crosswind, a fact that is difficult to fully appreciate today. Many performers moonlighted in contemporary music, but very few did it full time.  

Part of that long-standing structure is the centrality of the string quartet at the top of the chamber music heap. Let me state the obvious, which is that the prestige of the string quartet is extremely well-deserved. When your pioneer is Haydn, your apex is Beethoven and Bartok, and you have had a steady stream of excellent ensembles for 250 years, you have a good thing going. As a result, having a string quartet in residence at any music school has been the standard model for years. Though we dreamed of such a residency for ourselves, it seemed far-fetched if not impossible. Percussion is the late blooming hanger-on in the great classical music tradition. Who would ever be willing to invert this pyramid?

In 2014, the faculty and administration of Princeton University took a chance on a new model, and they asked So Percussion to be Edward T. Cone ensemble-in-residence. Although we had been building our experience up to a point where we were ready for this move, I still couldn't quite absorb the paradigm shift that allowed it to happen.  It reflected not only our work as an ensemble, but also the contributions of countless other artists and advocates towards appreciating percussion's role in refreshing the culture of classical music and pushing it forward.  

During our first full year in the position, we dove in head first. Our two major concerts at the Richardson Auditorium were extremely well-attended and successful. We commenced a number of new projects with Princeton faculty and student composers (premiering 10 new student works), coached undergraduate chamber music from Mendelssohn to Faure, collaborated with other guest ensembles on campus, and taught a semester of writing for percussion in the music department. In the 2015-2016 season, we'll be performing Lang's man made with Princeton's undergraduate orchestra, workshopping our new show for BAM's Next Wave Festival in their blackbox theater, and continuing to develop new work with composers and working with undergraduate performers.  

Princeton is also the site of the So Percussion Summer Institute (SoSI), an annual program for performers and composers that just wrapped up its seventh year. This year, we had 25 percussionists and 10 composers from all over the country and as far away as Brazil and Australia.  This year's theme was "Percussion, Staging, and Movement," and we immersed the students in sessions with world class directors, choreographers, and performers to focus on how we present our craft onstage.  

Although we initially imagined that SoSI would be more like a summer retreat, there are just too many interesting things to do! This year we and the students performed a blistering 11 concerts in two weeks, extending our annual tradition of performing all around the Princeton community. 

IV. Brooklyn Bound and A Gun Show 

When we first landed in Brooklyn in 2004, opportunities abounded to experiment and try ideas around town. Many of these gigs, at venues like the now shuttered Galapagos, flew just slightly under the radar. Failure is an important part of creativity, and - especially in the performing arts - you need to fail in front of people to really know what's working and what is not - it just isn't the same as in the rehearsal studio. These days, we are very happy to have higher profile gigs, but this window for failure shrinks as your work becomes more known and presented more widely.  

We now have enough repertoire from nearly 15 years as a group to go out and play concerts with confidence that the work we are presenting will succeed. But we are itchy to keep moving forward, especially when composing our own music. It occurred to us that we could build these opportunities for ourselves at our studio in Brooklyn, while at the same time giving younger groups a chance to do the same. 

Brooklyn Bound was born out of this thinking. In six concerts this year, guest ensembles from around New York came to our studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to play for intimate audiences. We told them to come with their work in any state of development to try out in front of a trusted group of friends.  We seized the opportunity for ourselves, using the events as a series of workshops for our next show at the BAM Next Wave Festival, which we are now calling A Gun Show. 

As a work-in-progress, A Gun Show is still taking shape. It tackles - in a rather abstract way - the emotional resonance and lingering spiritual detritus that gun culture leaves in our society. We've decided that the work is not fundamentally political, although you can hardly strip such a fraught issue of all of its baggage. For this project, we are collaborating again with Ain Gordon and Emily Johnson, both of whom helped us bring our last project Where (we) Live to maturity. 

We've started to call these works, which along with Where (we) Live also includes the show Imaginary City, "multi-genre programs." They incorporate original music, artistic collaborations, theatrical production values, and visual art into an immersive journey through the 21st century creative experience -- or at least through OUR 21st century creative experience.    

V. The Future - Expansion and Service 

The "open-ended proposition" of percussion is an extraordinary opportunity, but it is also a remarkable challenge. We must constantly ask ourselves not only where we are headed, but why? What does all of this amount to?  Obviously we love all of the ongoing artistic adventures, the students whose lives we impact, and just generally having fun at our jobs. But at this moment we also feel that we as artists must engage directly with society through meaningful service. 

Music is not a trifle or a luxury -- it is a social bond and an effective tool in creating agency and citizenship. That is not the same thing as saying that art itself is "useful." It may not be, but the social act of creating and responding to art is meaningful. The habits that people develop out of making music together encourage them to think independently, work cooperatively, and share a kind of communion. Music has been the center of ritual life for eons. It is not a compartmentalized and specialized slice of industrial culture, but an entire way of being in the world.  

Musicians, as such, are not limited to being agents of advocacy for art in the world, but can directly catalyze social and environmental change. We have started to take our very first steps in making small but meaningful contributions in this way. During this year's SoSI, all of our students participated in a day of service, packing 25,400 meals for the Crisis Center of Mercer County through the organization EndHungerNE. 

Starting this year, So Percussion is committed to purchasing offsets to compensate for our carbon-heavy activities such as touring travel. Within the next couple of years, our annual budget will provide for 100% offset spending. This again is only a partial solution, but it is something we can do right away. We are currently rewriting So Percussion's vision and mission statements to reflect this increased emphasis on service. 

Artistically, there are so many activities we are looking forward to: newly commissioned pieces by Caroline Shaw, Vijay Iyer, Dan Trueman, Steve Mackey, a new collaboration with soprano Dawn Upshaw, return appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and much more. 

The Habits That Create Knowledge Part 2: The Prepared Digital Piano

The Prepared Digital Piano

For the last 8 months, I haven’t written anything new in this space because I’ve been working on a wonderful project: a new volume in the Cambridge University “Companion” series about percussion. Russell Hartenberger is the editor, and I was honored to contribute the chapter about percussion chamber music. It is titled “Lost and Found: Percussion Chamber Music and the Modern Age.” This was my first high-profile writing project in print, and I must say I’d grown used to the conditional nature of a blog…any second thoughts or changes, just hit the “update” button! Trying to address 100 years of history and articulate how my work fits into it was a great challenge.

Now that I’ve turned in my final draft, I want to address the issue that my last big blog article dealt with: practice. As that essay mused, my interest is not as much in how to practice your instrument as it is in the conceptual framework of what it means to have a practice. What do you practice, and why? How do those choices affect the body of work that you produce? Most importantly – to me—how does a musician’s actual performance practice affect compositional practice?

My just-finished writing project for Cambridge emphasized percussion not as a specific and separate category of practice, but as a new model of flexibility and curation. Underneath that umbrella are many micro practices as well, each with their own norms and similarities to other instruments.

Within each of those micro specialities, a percussionist learns how to rank or gauge himself within the field. For instance, I’d consider myself on the higher end of solo marimba capability, on the highest end of contemporary chamber music, and at a high level of orchestra capability (though not elite). On the other hand, my drumset playing is at a basic fundamental level, my steel drum playing is completely non-existent, and I’d be kicked out of an afro-cuban band on congas by the end of the first bar. You might say that nobody is good at everything, but it's quite surprising how much percussionists are expected to be able to do.

One of the instruments I’ve always loved is the piano. I’ve played since I was a kid, and even did pretty well in a competition in high school. But compared to the crowded world of ultra-elite pianists, I do not have the technical capabilities or breadth of repertoire of the best players. My wife Cristina is this level of player, and some of her close friends are top pianists like Ingrid Fliter and Vanessa Perez. I’m surrounded by them quite a bit, which I love.

For a long time, piano has been a fun extension of my percussion practice. Within this category, everything seemed to fit just fine. In college, I was the go-to pianist in the percussion group, sometimes even missing out on good drum parts. When So Percussion initiated our John Cage project in 2012, it only made sense that I’d tackle Credo in US, First Construction, and others part for piano within the percussion ensemble.

I would never play Bach or Chopin on piano in a professional context, so why was I comfortable tackling Cage? Well, it wasn’t really the instrument – the tool or organum - that defined my expertise and the limits of my practice. Viewed objectively, the piano can be considered a perfectly normal percussion/string hybrid instrument. It was the style and aesthetic purposes of the music that offered me a place to explore. I had never felt self-conscious about sitting at the keyboard anytime I was surrounded by drums. Those drums signified that I was in a comfort zone, an ecosystem that I understood and was identified with externally.

A few years ago, Dan Trueman showed me some experiments with a new software for a “prepared digital piano,” where an 88-key digital piano feeds into a laptop via USB. The concept was obviously an homage to Cage, but his inventive preparations were only possible with the latest dynamic technology. I was astounded by what it could do, and also tantalized by how the first few pieces were shaping up. For some reason, I was gripped by the conviction that I could play this music.

Actually, that reason was not hard to identify: I was not primarily motivated by a vision of myself as a pianist, but by my deep understanding of Dan’s work and of what he was trying to accomplish. So Percussion had just released the recording of a 5-year project with Dan entitled “neither Anvil nor Pulley,” a kind of sprawling magnum opus that defined Dan’s work up to that point (video below).

 

nAnP doubled down on two major strands of Dan’s work: folk influenced fiddle music and newly created software instruments. In 120bpm, the second movement, contact microphones attached to woodblocks constantly trigger and reset metronomes. The outer movements are quirkily orchestrated fiddle tunes, standing in stark relief to the mechanized chaos of the larger inner movements.

Dan called his piano etudes "Nostalgic Synchronic," after the primary effects of the preparations.  "Nostalgic" refers to the ability that the computer has to play back notes right after the pianist plays them, reaching back in time to the initial attack.  "Synchronic" refers to the many ways in which pulse and rhythm can be manipulated and multiplied after the pianist plays a note.  Within his program there are also endless possibilities for alternate tunings, sometimes changing within only one piece.

The first bar of etude #1 announces itself with exactly the same kind of metric ricochet that I had mastered in 120bpm. I understood immediately how he had transferred this idea over to the digital piano…actually I should say I understood why he had done it. To this day I have no idea how he did any of this. Our video of the Prelude from I Care If You Listen is below:

Nostalgic Synchronic Etude 1 from Troy Herion on Vimeo.

I begged him to let me download the instrument to my laptop and tackle this first piece. To Dan’s credit, I’m not sure he’d ever heard me play piano before, but he said “sure.” I discovered quickly that many of the compositional ideas he was exploring fit my playing like a glove. Actually, I took pride in the fact that the tricky aspects of rhythmic timing were second nature. I’m sure most classical pianists have never had their own sound fired back to them in rapid, precise metric quanta, which they then needed to play off of, but I had.

Just as quickly, I ran into a problem that in my breathless enthusiasm I hadn’t really stopped to consider yet: I’m just an ok pianist. The many years that I’d spent in the conservatory progression of acquiring percussion skill only translated up to a point with this instrument. I hadn’t had to sit down and slowly solve a knotty technical playing problem in about ten years. My brain knew exactly how this music should go, but my fingers pushed back.

At this point I experienced my first (though certainly not my last) dip in confidence. I was still having fun, but was I doing service to Dan’s vision? Should I continue to pursue the project, premiere subsequent pieces, record them? Or should I do my part to get them in the hands of a real pianist – a poisonous thought that I’ve since banished from my mind. Dan was extremely encouraging, as I think he sensed that a performer’s enthusiasm for a composer’s work goes a very long way in bringing it to life.

I knew that I had one card up my sleeve. My wife is a dazzling pianist who studied for years at the elite Academia Pianistica Imola in Italy, first privately and then on a Fulbright fellowship. I’ve included a video below of her playing Carl Vine’s “Sonata #2” to give you a sense of her skill. She is also an experienced teacher, so I knew that she could help me when I bumped into my own inevitable limitations.

All of a sudden, I felt like a 16 year old student again, plodding carefully through exercises while my technique slowly improved. Her initial diagnosis, along with a few lessons in posture, muscle efficiency, and finger position, was simple: “you need Bach.”

Who doesn’t? But, since I told her I wanted the real deal, no sugar-coating, she turned to the D-major prelude from book one of the Well Tempered Claviers. “I played this forte and slowly every day for 3 months. That should get you going.”

What was I getting myself into…

With a punishing touring schedule, increased teaching responsibilities, a family to think about, why would I start up this whole new phase in my practice? As it turns out, the major advantage 33-year-old me had over 16-year-old me was experience. I could see my slow fingers improving only incrementally, but I knew exactly why she had me doing that prelude, and I had a general sense of how long it would take for that skill to improve.

I knew that it would seem to stagnate for awhile, then I could leave it alone and go on to something else, and when I came back it would magically have leaped forward. I knew that if I stayed relaxed and played slowly with a big sound, my muscles would learn the deep relationships of the key spacing and be reminded of the sound I was always looking for. I felt in my mind that my obstacles were just piles of junk in front of me that I could see clearly over. A young student has to trust their teacher blindly about these things, but I saw how it would play out if I persevered.

Many times, when she corrected me or instructed me on aspects of technique, I’d realize how similar her piano technique was to the way I teach percussion: the largest and smallest muscle groups work together as a unit in the most efficient way possible, never isolating themselves, but rather transferring energy one to another when the music demanded. Torso, shoulder, and arms worked together to provide sound, wrists fed energy to fingers to make their work lighter.

The idea of technical problems as inconvenience rather than impassable barrier was exhilarating. Many times, I’d find that I was projecting into my body certain ideas I had about what it meant to be a pianist, only to have Cristina show me that the solutions were much closer to my familiar percussion practice than I had ever imagined. Gradually my technique improved. Spurred partially by my investment in the project, Dan churned out 8 fascinating, wildly inventive etudes. With each one, a similar process played out. Dan’s musical conceit was familiar, but I had to work to extend my technique in order to play each piece.

But this is when I started to drop my hang ups about being a real pianist…this process is what etudes are supposed to be for! I just happen to be able to develop my skills in varying tuning systems, with digital metronomes hounding me and the occasional need to wait for a reverse playback note to catch up before moving on. After my initial interest in this work, Dan started writing more and more etudes, constantly upping the ante on inventiveness and challenge.  Some of the pieces, like the 4th etude entitled Marbles, work my fingers to their last.  Others, like the 7th etude Systerslått, test my musical skills with mirrored asymmetrical underlying metronomes or slowly enveloping reversed chords. Dan is very generous to credit my involvement as spurring him to work harder and harder at developing this instrument, all the while keeping in mind my willingness to tackle the strangest and most thrilling challenges in the music.

I’ve since premiered and recorded these pieces, which Dan and I are releasing in fall of 2015 on New Amsterdam Records. It feels strange to me that my first solo record will be as a pianist. I have all my degrees in percussion performance, but my thinking has expanded to imagine that a practice is not only about an instrument. It is about the context of style and the particular demands of the work that you want to do.

In this sense, my conflict about daring to be a pianist was not the piano’s fault – it just sits there. It was my lingering awe at the tradition that the instrument and its forbears represent. I was aware that I’d never have enough time left in my life to play the Chopin etudes or a Beethoven sonata at a world class level. But the piano is not just about that music, it is a tool. Furthermore, Dan’s digital piano was a related offspring of the piano, the same way that the fortepiano was from the harpsichord. Why could I not use that tool to say something new?

For more information about the Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes and the Prepared Digital Piano:

http://manyarrowsmusic.com/nostalgicsynchronic/