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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Notes on a Collaboration - Steve Mackey's "It Is Time"

Notes on a Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time This article originally appeared in Avue Magazine, a new publication of Adams Percussion Instruments.  They asked us to write about an artistically gratifying and interesting experience.  I have been wanting for some time to document the creation of Steve Mackey's fantastic percussion quartet It Is Time, one of the most satisfying artistic collaborations we've ever had.   The series will run in four parts, where each member of So details the process of developing the unique sound world and techniques of this piece: first Eric, then Josh, Adam, and Jason.   Here is a link to the full video of It Is Time online, if you want to see what we're talking about in action.   Part I   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. 

            At our first meeting about the project, Steve explained over barbecue chicken that he wanted to try something different for Sō.  He told us that although he admires works that demand uniformity of timbre and interpretation like Reich’s Drumming, Xenakis’ Pleiades, or Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, he was interested in doing something different for us. 

His first question to each of us was “what instrument do you want to play?”  It only makes sense to ask this of a percussionist, because if you are a violinist or a pianist, you’ve already answered it.  But the world of a percussionist – even four percussionists who studied in the same program – is diverse, and we each provided our own answer:  “drum set, steel drums, marimba, multiple percussion.” 

            During the course of the next 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. 

            This article focuses on Eric Beach and his one-man-band of sounds and timbres. 

First, Steve’s own description of It Is Time: 

“It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members of So ̄ Percussion to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini-concerto for one of the players. First Eric Beach leads the music in a multi-percussion set up composed of metronome with delay, pump organ, bells, china cymbal on hi-hat stand and a few other assorted toys. Josh Quillen follows on steel drums, Adam Sliwinski on marimba, and Jason Treuting on drumset.

It Is Time was inspired by my young son Jasper (now 30 months old). As an older father (now 664 months old) I felt, for the first time in my life, saddened by the immutability of time and the finite limits to how much of It I will be able to spend with my young family. It Is Time fantasizes that we might have agency with respect to time.”

Now Eric describes his process of working with Mackey: 

Working with Steve on It Is Time was a big challenge for me, and it was really helpful that Steve was so cool about being collaborative.  I really didn’t have a strong idea going into the project about what specific instrument(s) I wanted to play, and I was worried that he wouldn’t be inspired to do something wonderful if I didn’t already have an idea for him.  But the discussion with Steve about what exactly to write for turned into an incredible conversation, and I think it inspired Steve in a different way than would have been possible otherwise.

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I still have the list of instruments that I suggested to Steve.  For each one I wrote a little description and recorded myself playing it for about a minute.  He used almost all of them:  glass bottle, china cymbal/hi hat, Estey child’s organ, frame drum, metronome, noah bells, and small bells.  I also recorded a little concertina, some other drums, and a stack of poker chips – those three things were the only instruments I sent him that didn’t end up in the piece.

I was really excited about the way that Steve latched on to the metronome as a building block for creating elements of the piece.  I had already bought one of those little analog metronomes – tick, tock -  for a piece I wrote, because I liked the way it looked, and that it could be started by the performer carefully pushing the weight at just the right moment.  When I first got it and took it out of the box, I was amazed at how cool the metronome sounded.  I actually wound it up and just let it click for an hour while cooking dinner.  The sound was fascinating, so I recorded it and sent it to Steve.  I also told him about a Mauricio Kagel piece where the pianist places a metronome on a little stand that can turn on its side so that the metronome ticks unevenly.  I had never actually heard the piece at the time (I found out later that it was a piece called ‘MM.51’), but it seemed like an interesting idea.  I don’t know whether Steve had already been thinking specifically about ‘warping’ time before that conversation, but something about placing the metronome on its side seemed to strike a nerve.  He even bought me an extra metronome so that I could take it apart and dissect the way that the sound was being created.  Two big sections of the piece ended up grappling with this idea of defying the inevitability of the metronome.

Another great part of the collaboration was the China Cymbal/Hi-Hat.  I came up with the idea for this instrument while I was studying in Freiburg, Germany and my professor assigned me to write a piece for only two metallic instruments.  At the time I wanted to figure out a way to get the greatest number of different sounds from a single instrument, and I came up with the idea to put a china cymbal on a hi-hat stand with a mute underneath in place of a bottom cymbal.  I wrote a long, slow “process” piece for this china cymbal and large almglocken.  When I was recording the new cymbal-contraption for Steve, I realized that the proximity of the microphone to the cymbal made a huge difference in the sound –  the bass frequencies were only audible if the microphone was right next to the cymbal.  I imagined that it could be a functional instrument for big gong-type notes in the piece.  I had no idea that Steve would take that instrument and utilize it for one of the fastest and most virtuosic sections!  It was one of the best examples of how something new came out of the collaboration at every step, something we never would have achieved independently. 

Other instruments yielded interesting moments, too:  The frame drum sound turned out radically different with microphone placement, so using close microphones became an important part of the piece.  Steve was fascinated by the way that the foot pedals of the Estey organ made the volume swell and fade in a rhythmic way, and that inspired a section of the piece where the organ pumps rhythmically while alternating with the china cymbal.  The tuned wine bottle sound I sent him turned into a short gesture based on the Doppler effect - the acoustic phenomenon where a sound changes based on the perspective of the listener, such as the way a siren lowers in pitch as a fire truck goes by on the street.

The “musical saw” was the one complete instrument that Steve asked me to learn how to play from scratch.  He toyed with the idea of a Theremin as well, but his first inspiration was the saw and I agreed to learn how to play it.  I had never played saw before at all, and when I looked into getting some lessons they were a lot more expensive than I could afford.  So I bought a cheap instrument and committed myself to practicing at least 10-15 minutes every day.  At first I just tried to get any sound at all, then I started to find pitches, and then I tried playing along with whatever music I was listening to.  I distinctly remember that one day I could suddenly play along with a bunch of Beatles songs. That’s when I realized that I was starting to get it.  In fact I only had to learn a short melody for the piece, and I’m still far from qualifying as a professional musical saw player.  But it was a great experience, and since then I’ve incorporated the instrument into several other projects.

A brief description of the instruments used in my setup:

Estey Organ: This is a bellows reed organ that used to be made by the Estey Organ company in Brattleboro, Vermont.  The one I play in It Is Time is actually a children’s version – it’s a miniature that is only three octaves.  Before electric keyboards, middle class families in the United States used to buy these organs to teach children music if they couldn’t afford a piano at home.  When Sō got one through a project we did in Vermont, we became obsessed with the sound and have included it in all kinds of projects.

China Cymbal / Hi-Hat: This is a simple setup of a hi-hat made up of a china cymbal on top and a mute on the bottom – in this case, the mute is actually a smaller cymbal that I’ve wrapped in a few towels.  When the pedal is down, the outer edge of the china cymbal still vibrates and the only way to completely dampen it is with your hand, so there are three playing positions: open, closed, and closed with hand dampening.  Steve also asked me to tape a small coin to my pinky finger so that when I dampen the cymbal with my hand it provides an extra click.  The cymbal is amplified with a microphone that is placed as close to the cymbal as possible.

Frame Drum: This is a standard frame drum mounted on a snare drum stand so that I can play it with one hand.  It is also amplified with a microphone as close as possible to the drumhead, which brings out the huge range of overtones coming off of the head.  We experimented with different frame drum skins and found that natural hide had a much richer sound.  I play on the head and the rim, and also bend the pitch by pressing on the head.

Metronome: This is an analog Wittner metronome that I amplify with a contact microphone and run through a digital delay pedal.  Steve figured out the exact delay setting to get a specific rhythm that much of the opening of the piece is based on.  Also, later in the piece I put the metronome on a piece of wood that is set at a specific angle such that when the metronome swings back and forth it clicks in two uneven beats with a 2:3 relationship.  So the meter that results is close to 5/16.

Noah Bells: These are simple copper bells that traditionally come from India or Pakistan.  I found out about them for the first time while playing Toru Takemitsu’s beautiful piece From Me Flows What You Call Time.  I only had two of them, and Steve wrote for them in a way that was very different from what I imagined.

Wine Bottle: This is a wine bottle filled with an amount of water that tunes the bottle to a specific pitch.  One of the interesting things I discovered through this process is that the pitch created by the water in the bottle is different depending on whether the bottle is standing upright or turned on its side.

Small Bells: These are traditional celebration bells from India.  They come on a string that includes many different sized bells, and I simply lay them out on a table so that they can be played from low to high.