>> Claudia Morales:
Good evening everyone. Welcome. My name is Claudia
Morales with the Music Division and I'm excited to welcome
tonight. Sō Percussion thank you for
being here today. [Applause] "For over 20 years, Sō Percussion
has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an
auxiliary blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam," The New Yorker. The Nonesuch
recording Narrow Sea with Caroline Shaw, won the 2022
Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In
fall 2023, Sō Percussion began his 10th year as the Edward
Tieken Performance in Residence
at Princeton University. [Applause] [Laughing] >> Adam Sliwinski:
We have some tigers here. >> Claudia Morales: We're
rooted in the belief that music is an elemental form of human communication and galvanized by
forces for social change. Sō Percussion a
range of social and community outreach through their nonprofit umbrella. So
Laboratories Concert series, a studio residency program in Brooklyn, and the Sō Percussion
Summer Institute. Very nice. So please welcome
Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason
Treuting. Did I say it right? >> Jason Treuting: You did. >> Claudia Morales:
All right, all right. >> Jason Treuting: Thank you. >> Claudia Morales:
So I'm super excited to have you
here tonight and I have so many questions
and I'm sure you do too. But let's take it one step at a
time. So you started almost around
1999, fresh out of college, Yale. Can you please take us
back to that, those almost 20 years, how did you guys
[inaudible] >> Jason Treuting: More than
20 years. Right? Yeah. Well, it actually 1999 was the
year that I got to Yale to study. So it even started a
little bit in school and we've changed a little
bit over the years. This group of the four of us
have been together for 16 years. We're going on 16.
This is definitely the band. Early on we changed a
little bit, but all of us went through the Yale School music
program, and there was a teacher there that we were all excited
to kind of learn from. And I think we all went
there because he was known as a soloist. This teacher's
name was Robert Vansice. He was known as a soloist. And we were all we thought we
were interested in soloing, I guess it's why I went
there. And then you discovered really
quickly that actually he was about chamber music. He was
really teaching people to play together. So 1999 was that
first year and then 2000, I guess we had our first show
where we had to name ourselves. Terrifying. We were just joking
around today about the first name was going to be
Flipping Coins. There was a moment that we were
going to be called Flipping Coins because when
we had to choose who was going to play a certain part in a
piece, we would flip coins. Or if we were like,
ah, you know, I really think we should use the red mallet. No, we should use the green
mallet or whatever. Let's just flip a coin. You
know, that was the thing. But luckily we didn't name
ourselves that. We named ourselves Sō
Percussion. And then, in 2001, we really started playing shows and moved to New York
soon after that. >> Claudia Morales: And can
you just talk to... Can you speak about the name, Sō?
What does it mean? >> Jason Treuting: Yeah, I
will speak about it, Claudia. And I will also point you to
our website, because my sister writes about it much more
beautifully than I can speak about it. And I say her name is
Denise [inaudible] and she lives in Japan. And when we were
naming ourselves, it was terrifying. I don't know, has
anybody had a name, anything? You know, name a group is
terrifying. Name a... It was kind of scary.
We were... Well, obviously Flipping Coins
was where we were at, so we were in trouble. And she
suggested this word Sō which has Japanese roots and obviously
also an English root as well. And the Japanese root, it
comes from the kanji, the picture letter.
And kind of if you were to draw it out, there's kind of two hands, and the idea is that
it's offering sound. And so it really kind of
beautiful root to the word. Friends of ours who are
Japanese are like, I don't know if that's... it feels
like it's like old English. It's like a Latin root to an
English word or something. It's like an old word in
Japanese that's used in a lot of other Japanese words, such as
enso, or... >> Adam Sliwinski:
So we imagined ourselves being named, like Ye olde percussion
group or something in the way that the Japanese
think of that word. >> Jason Treuting:
In Japanese were named Ye olde. Yeah, but I think it
actually speaks to us pretty well. I think, because Sō
is so colloquial in English, but has a kind of deeper root in
another language, I think we, I don't know, when you see us
tonight, I think we kind of feel that we hope to present new
things in a pretty fun way and in a kind of non-scary fun way,
but have some kind of deeper essence to what we're doing as well, working on both
levels, you know. >> Claudia Morales:
And from your very beginnings, you started from as a group
figuring things out. This is 20 plus years, and now
you have a nonprofit with staff, with a board, with Summer
Institute, with studio touring. And how did that
happen in over 20 years? That's a pretty short time to
make such a big organization and and such a short time in this
environment. How did that happen? >> Adam Sliwinski:
I have absolutely no idea. [Laughing] I will say that, I mean,
we did have a big vision that I mean, ultimately, the real
singular vision was to look at a group like the Kronos Quartet
String Quartet, who is specialized entirely in doing
new music, which actually was a great leap of faith for a
string quartet because they had so much other repertoire they
could have also been playing from the past. We did not have
so much other repertoire from the past that we could be
playing, but that's why they were so inspiring to us,
because they just took the leap and said all contemporary
music, commissioning new pieces, full time quartet.
And they had already been doing that for 25 or 30 years by the time we started. There were
many other inspirations, but we look to them all the time
and they just celebrated their 50th anniversary.
So it's super inspiring for us. And so the singular vision was
kind of full time percussion quartet, almost entirely new
music, with the exception of some John Cage and Steve Reich,
Lou Harrison, a few other great composers who really started
the percussion revolution. And then with that in mind, we
kind of took it step by step when we were in our 20s. I don't know, how far can we
take this? Let's try it for a while. Oh, some cool concerts are
coming up. Some people are interested in
us. Some of these composers like Steve Reich, who's still alive,
who is somebody that we're very close to now and has written music for us. We're very
encouraging early on in our career. They said, yeah, go
for it. This should happen. This
should... so many people, David Lang, so many
other people who just said, like, this is it's time for
this to exist right now. Go for it. And we just took
their encouragement. We took each gig that came and
we just kind of kept building it. But then that's where I
also say, I have no idea, because it seems astonishing to
me that it has been what it has been because we didn't really
know. >> Josh Quillen:
I would say just to tag on to that, like when I joined the group, this is my 17th year
when I joined the group, it was one of the sort of first things
that was imprinted upon me about, like the ethos that was
driving this ensemble was relationships and how
you value those no matter whether it's working with a
composer like Natalie Joachim or Angelica Negron, like tonight
or Shoda K. Taliferro, that doesn't stop at whenever the
business starts. Like, who it is
that is your accountant is a friend of yours. And like, if
you have that relationship, we didn't know how to
start a summer festival. We were just really good with
some really good friends, with folks who were at universities
that like Princeton. And we said, hey, we'd like to
do this crazy thing. They were like, oh, well,
here's five people you can call. Here's how I can help. Here's
how they can help. And like that sort of snowball
effect of just constantly returning to the well of the
relationships we have is, I think, due in large part to our
approach. But it is, I think, what feeds
us, like, you know, any weakness that we have, every time we run
up against that weakness, I can immediately tag Adam in and
then he can pick up from there and go. And it's like that, I
think sort of seeps into every aspect of what we do. >> Claudia Morales:
And for tonight, for tonight's program, you
collaborate with so many artists around the world, and you have
a very special program tonight that opens with Angelica
Negron's piece, which is a fascinating piece to me that
takes the mechanical instruments to another level.
And it has so many visuals. It's just so incredible.
What is... can you speak to the role,
the mechanical instrument in that piece and what is
the how was the creative process, the rehearsal, the
working together, coming to that piece? >> Eric Cha-Beach:
Yeah. So you'll if you all come to the concert, you'll see that the robots are called
the Bricolo Robotic Instrument system. So they're controlled
by a computer. And on [inaudible]
programs them using Midi, which is this really
common music language. And so she kind of... there's a
couple of different things that the robots can do, but mostly
they just they have a little arm and they just tap things so you
can put different stuff on top of them and they can tap. And
then there's another setting where they can, essentially
vibrate at the speed of a pitch. So what you can put in, you can
put a book or a plate or something on top of it, and
it'll play a particular pitch that you're looking for on that
object. And Angelica just uses these
all the time in her practice. So Angelica grew up in San
Juan, Puerto Rico, and she played in sort of pop bands
there, like reggaeton bands. And she has an ambient group
called Arturo En el Barco. And then she also studied,
was it viola or violin? She studied classical
music there, and she talks a lot about how she always kept those
two things very separate in her musical life there.
And actually, one really cool connection with Angelica is that when she was still living
in Puerto Rico, there was an early Sō Percussion album of Jason's music called "Amid the
Noise. And she found it in a
record store there. And she says that it sort
of completely changed her life as a composer, and actually was
part of this process of opening up the idea that, wait a
second, I don't have to keep these two sides of my artistic
life separate. Classical music can sound like
the music that I'm playing in my reggaeton band or things like
that. And so actually, we had talked
for years and years and years with Angelica. We all just
admired her work a lot and wanted to just do a project
with her when she was ready to write something, and when it
was the right time for us to be able to play it at a bunch of
places and just we always try to be inside the language of a
composer. So when we work with a
composer, we want to know what do they value in music, what do
they care about and what are the resources they use? So the
Bricolo robotic instrument system, she just plays it in
her band. So we said, "Well, that's cool. Do you want to put it in the
piece for us to?" Yeah. How do you use it in the
band? So how do you play with it when
it's playing something to you? How do you play back to it? And
so she's basically like teaching us how she uses it. And you know, she's not a
percussionist. So we hear it and we play back
to it differently than she does, but we can kind of get inside
her brain a little bit. >> Claudia Morales:
And there are certain elements that each movement has the magna-tiles for children,
the pots and pans, and each one of those has a different
meaning for her and takes her to her inspiration to write these
pieces. How do you connect with those
elements? Do you see them as an
instrument, or do you connect with them in a similar way that
Angelica does? >> Jason Treuting:
Well, I think Adam mentioned some of the older composers we
play in the beginning of this percussion revolution, John
Cage, somebody like John Cage being very important to us. I mean, for him, I think the
difference between an object... there wasn't really a
difference between an object and a musical instrument. Those two
things came together and we joke around a lot. I mean,
so many years of our career have been kind of convincing folks
that you can make music on anything. And now maybe we're a
little bit like, you can make music on anything, but maybe
you shouldn't on everything, but we're pretty much still in that
world of like, you come to our studio in Brooklyn and it's
just like objects everywhere, you know, sounds everywhere. When Eric was talking
about our relationship with Angelica, I mean, I first met her, my partner played in Arturo
El Barco, played in her band. But then Angelica would
teach in Brooklyn to pay her rent. She ran these classes
for kids. So she was my kids first music
teacher. And you would show up and sing
songs and play sounds on little desk bells and a lot of kids
toys. And for a while, I think
Angelica got a little frustrated that people would peg her as
the kind of she makes music on kids toys because
she... I don't know, she has a spirit of she has a wonderfully
kind of young spirit. And then I think for a long time
was just kind of pegged in that world. But seeing the way
she's taken those instruments into this piece, which is a
very grown up piece, so to speak, you know, it's a very,
sophisticated piece in so many ways. But then she brings
in, yeah, these magna-tiles. So anybody who's my age
that had kids and I don't know how long magna-tiles have been
around, probably. I don't know if anybody has
forever. Right? So, like, we all
know what it's like to be on the floor with your kid, putting
together those magna-tiles. And so the idea that you can
put all different objects on top of this bricolo and get
different sounds, one really cool thing about the
magna-tiles is that as you build them up, that sound changes a
little bit because what's being resonated is changing, and
especially when you close it, there's a big difference
between it being open and closed. And so she had a
really fun time playing off of that. But the pots and
pans, the what's now the last movement, it was the second one
she wrote for us. But the last movement are these
pots and pans that she cooks with. The first one she brought
in was just her kind of soup pot, you know? And it
has a wonderful sound when the brekalo hits it, and it has a wonderful sound
when you hit the top of it. But I think it really she
was connecting with the sounds of the streets in San Juan when
she was growing up in that movement, and the sounds that
she was hearing in a really wonderful way. The first
movement is much heavier, and it was written right
after Hurricane Maria. So it was a much kind of
heavier thinking back to her family at home who was going
through something really tough. And she uses the... but
she always has a way of lightning the mood in a certain
sense, like, because it's also a really fun and beautiful
movement. And I don't know how much we should be wrecking the
surprises for you all. She does some really wonderful
things in that movement. She deals with color so
much of the time when she's on stage, she's dealing with
really beautiful colors. So she's found a way to bring
that into all the objects that we play, and some really fun
ways that are more surprising. >> Claudia Morales:
One thing that I'm connected to that piece with the pots and pans, is that she uses the
word casserole. And in Latin America there is a
thing about cacerolazo, which is a protest that people do with
their pots and pans, that you bang it and you go out in the
street and you bang it, and people do marches and that. And during the pandemic, when
in my home country in Peru, people were in lockdown
and we were going through a big political situation and people
were not able to go out to protest. So they
did a cacerolazo and they will be banging the pasta pans from the windows and
the balconies and they will set up a time and it was
at 6 p.m. every day. And you
will hear people banging on the pots and pans. So when
I read that work, I said, Ola. So to us, because this is a
commonality in Latin America, I was like, oh wow, that's so
interesting. Yeah. So moving on, your
piece, "Extreme." Tell me about that piece. I'm interested that you made
the piece, and I know that the piece is flexible in terms of
instrumentation. It can be played with different
instrumentation, but the one to go is the concert drum. And so you are limiting the
space of these four players in this particular around
this instrument, is that what you wanted when you wrote
the piece? >> Jason Treuting:
Yeah. I mean I guess we do think a lot. And maybe you'll see tonight I
think we think music as a pretty communal. We're not just
doing it for ourselves. Right? We're doing it with an
audience in mind. And that comes with the visual
as well. Right? Like when we're spread
out and when we're gathered and when we put together bigger
shows, that's a really big way to organize the show. Is that when we're, yeah,
when we're gathered in one place, when we're spread out
across the stage, when we're in a line facing the audience and
not able to see each other, versus when we can really see
each other in more of an arc or a square, the way you'd
see a string quartet play. Actually, Angelica has a
stand in a way that we've never played music before, kind of in
a line. I'm just looking at Josh's back
and Adam's looking at my back, a very different kind of way of
organizing. So with extremes, it was part
of it to really gather around this drum. And it is a lot
of the music we make for ourselves, and a lot of the
music I write is flexible instrumentation, meaning
kind of like we were passing through the hall here and
seeing a lot of scores that were written and a lot of percussion
scores, which was really fun and a lot of scores that we were
involved with. But a lot of time the act of
writing music, I think, as a composer, is like organizing
the notes and organizing the structures and then
orchestrating them, choosing what you're going to play those
notes on. And a lot of times I like to
just do the first part and then say, like, hey, we're a group,
let's do the second part together, or, hey, there's
another group that's going to play it. You all do that part
on your own, and you're going to come up with something very
different than we came up with. And that's kind of... that's
almost built into our lineage of experimental percussion music.
Folks from the beginning, like John Cage, were really open with that. So we really do it in
this way around the drum most often. And of course, then
with video it gets recorded that way. And then a lot of other
people do it the same way. But we had a great
experience recently. We just went to
Burkina Faso. We went to Africa for the first
time and had a life changing experience, but we weren't able
to play it on a big concert bass drum out there. So each
time we played, we would find a different way to put the
different drums together and make that same kind of grouping
but on new instruments. And that's something that I
think all four of us really, really love to do. But that's the way that one
came together, at least the idea of the instruments. Yeah. >> Claudia Morales:
Can you talk more about your trip to Africa?
That was one of my questions. I'm interested in knowing what
you learned. What was the
interaction over there? >> Adam Sliwinski: One of the...
so we went with our colleague Olivier Karpaga, who's
from Burkina Faso. He also teaches at Princeton. He's the director of the
African Music Ensembles at Princeton, also teaches in the
dance department, which is something you learn very
quickly about artists in West Africa, which is that very
often dance and music are so closely tied as to be virtually
inseparable. So it's actually very common to
meet somebody who's both a choreographer and dancer and a
musician and composer. This is the case with Olivier. So he wrote this piece for us
that uses ideas and inspiration from some West African music
and instruments, but in some cases is translated over to
things that might be more in the contemporary percussion quartet
idiom. So, for example, the djembe
hand drums that they play over, there is not an instrument that
the four of us have studied extensively. So what Olivier
did is we together came up with an idea of using
amplified tables with little contact microphones on just a
wooden table. But he teaches us the way that
he practices the djembe, which is sort of like with the heel
and the knuckle of his fingers doing really fast patterns. So there's a whole movement for
us to be playing on an amplified tabletop, but using some kind
of West African patterns. One of the other things we did
over there is, he wrote, a movement for us for a five
octave concert marimba. But of course, the marimba,
which is the wooden keyboard instrument with a beautiful low
tones on it, is descended originally from the African
balafon or Bala instrument. So when we went to West Africa,
they didn't have any five octave marimbas because they were
like, we don't need any five octave marimbas because the
original thing is here. So we took his piece, which was
written for marimba from ideas of balafon, and went back to
playing it on a balafon, of course, with his guidance with
him saying this works. That doesn't quite work for the
instrument. He was kind of guiding us the
whole way. So we did this kind of full
circle thing of like music inspired by the balafon played
on the marimba. We go back now in West Africa
and we play it on a balafon. And the circularity of that
kind of cultural exchange, again, with our relationship
with him, was beautiful for us on our first trip to
West Africa. >> Jason Treuting:
Adam, I remember after the first show, I think maybe the next day we were at breakfast, but I
think we had the same response of the feeling that every time
we play music here and I think we'll
feel it on some kind of subconscious level in a show
like this in a beautiful hall, chamber music halls where
string quartets play, that's the most logical thing
any kind of Western European sense of classical music is
the string quartet. And we're constantly advocating
for ourselves against the idea of the string quartet and
saying, well, you know how Joseph Haydn was
maybe the grandfather of the string quartet? Well, John Cage
was that for us. And we're
constantly comparing ourselves to a string quartet or the
techniques we use come from chamber music, even though we
may not sound like that. Right? But everything we do is
kind of in relationship to that lineage. And when we were
playing in Benin and Burkina, that was not present at all. The idea of percussion ensemble
being the kind of foundation was so crucial and was so
kind of permeated everything. It was kind of like, oh, we
know what you are. What are you going to do with that? Like, is it cool or not?
You know, like. >> Adam Sliwinski:
Which also meant that we were very nervous in a very... we were very honored to be playing
all percussion music for West African audience. And they were
very serious about listening to what we were doing. Like, okay,
like basically what do you got? And then we just had
a wonderful exchange with people about what we were doing there. Again, Olivier's music was the
kind of linchpin in all of it, because it was his hometown. It was his area, and people
heard patterns in the piece he wrote for us. That was from
their exact village, from right where they were. They were
like, cool, you know? So I don't think it could have
happened in the same way without the relationship with Olivier. >> Eric Cha-Beach:
Well, if I could sort of connect it back to talking about Angelica's piece, because
thinking about the way that Angelica uses each object that
she's using in her piece and mines it for creative
exploration. Right, Olivier and we did this sort of with
Olivier in the same way that he would say, well, here's the
things that I know how to do from my practice, but how do
those relate to the way that you guys do these things when
you're playing them on different instruments or different
objects? And we talk about this all the time, that percussion,
I think if you looked up a dictionary definition of
percussion, it would probably say anything you hit scrape or
shake. But the reality is that we
often do things that are not those. We play
musical saw or we play whistles, or we play lots of things that
don't get hit, struck or shaken. And the real essence of it
is just the openness, the willingness to be open to
new things and to figuring something out that maybe you
weren't initially planning to do and you weren't comfortable
with. So I kind of feel like in some ways what we
did with Olivier and what we do with Angelica or what we do
when we're learning Jason's piece, they're all part of this
same recursive element of just like being
in a certain circumstance and maybe making a couple of
decisions, like we're going to use flowerpots, or we're going
to use one big concert bass drum. And then, okay, now that
we've made that one decision, what are all of the options
that are left there on the table and who's making the music and
how are we involved with it as the performers? So it was really, really cool to do that
in West Africa. It's cool. >> Josh Quillen:
Yeah, I would say for me coming back, coming back from Africa, the thing that
dawned on me as a percussionist, but also just as a musician and
a human being, I think, you know, Africa was this place as
a drummer you hear about almost from day one. Then in
different parts of the news or whatever you hear about the way
stuff and as a... you become a little bit of a
historian and you think that it's frozen in time as this
thing that's just like, oh, African rhythms are this, and I
must do this, and I must have respect for that history. It's
like, well, my takeaway coming back is like, yes, have respect
for that history. But also it was one of the most
musically and artistically progressive places I've ever
been in my life. Like, not that there wasn't any
respect for the past, but the sacred nature with which I
approached it, like, you can't ever mess
with it. They were just kind of like...
Hi, welcome. Come on. Like, get over
yourself for two seconds and get in here and let's mix it up. And so now, like, I think my
and I would I think I can speak for us. Our takeaway is like
trying to view and not just Africa, this could be India. This could be any other place
that we've never been to have respect for the culture and the
history, but also not to see it as like a museum that you're
about to walk into and observe as a third party. We were part
of it, and it was a real honor. And it's still... I think we're
still trying to tease out what all of this means for us as a
percussion group, but also just as a human, how you sort of interact with all that
information. >> Claudia Morales:
In the same spirit of collaboration and working together. I read in the program
notes about your collaboration with Dominic [inaudible],
about the piece in which you all had to listen to what he
presented to you and work from that. So working backwards in a
way. Can you talk to that process? >> Adam Sliwinski:
And yes. And actually it's something we
did with Olivier's piece as well, which we hadn't mentioned
yet, which is something we're doing much more often, which is
working with people who compose in an aural process or from an
oral tradition we work with them in that process for a
very long time. And then at some point along
the way, we figure out if documentation and notation is
appropriate, and if so, how so? And it's all part of this
wonderful cultural exchange. So with [inaudible] it was
during the pandemic, and remote collaboration was all anybody
could do. During the pandemic, I think the four of us spent
eight months apart without seeing each other, which is had
never happened before. We had never not been in a room
together for that period of time. So we asked [inaudible] to
just send us something and he sent us, he composed this three
movement piece, which is pretty much exactly what you're going
to hear tonight is what he sent us on these mp3's. He sent it as a track with all
these multiple layered parts. And then he sent us what are
called the stems, which is the individual layers that were
recorded for each one. And he said, "Here. Do what,
figure something out with this and let's see what we come to
with it." So we initiated a process then
of taking those and transcribing them, in some cases
transcribing them down to the detail where you slow the track
down to like 1/20 of the speed and go... like you find
every little sound, in some cases more oh,
there's a vibe or a sound. Maybe this is sandpaper, maybe
this breath sound is sandpaper, maybe it's a little fan blowing
or so the whole idea was to translate breath art and vocal
percussion and beatboxing into physical percussion. So what
you're going to see tonight on our end during [inaudible]
piece is our physical percussion realizations of everything he
sent us on those tapes and actually, like, so kind of
brought it along. But this was maybe three or four
years ago now because it was during the pandemic. But for
the Library of Congress performance, we actually made
like a full kind of Western notation score of the piece,
which [inaudible] was excited about and wanted to happen. And actually, I believe it's
going to go into the collection at the library, I hope. [Laughing] And I mean, Shotoki is
not on the stage right now, but I feel comfortable speaking for
him in saying that... And this happened when we
premiered his piece at Carnegie Hall. I do think it is
meaningful to him that a score of his piece goes into the
Library of Congress, because I think for his whole life, he
has believed that the art of beatboxing and vocal percussion
should have a bigger platform and more of a sense of
legitimacy in mainstream culture. And I think to him,
doing a project like this, making a score and stuff feels
like a step forward along that path. So that's
something we're honored to be a part of. But I will stress
again that like, we just made the score and we made the piece
three years ago. So for us, when we're working
with somebody who works out of an oral tradition, we try not
to go there too quickly because there are a number of problems
or fallacies that can come into play when a Western trained
and Western thinking classical musician immediately
starts to translate ideas from an oral tradition into what
they already understand. And the way that many Western
scholars have dealt with West African music has been plagued
with this problem past 100 years or whatever. Like, oh, okay, I
get it. It's just this. And they're
like, no, no, no, no. Like, you're not even
beginning to understand what they're doing and how they're
hearing it. So for our part, there's like
this process where we're like, we're in it for a long time
before it's like, I think I feel now like, okay, I can put this
into this. And there's like a whole page
of explanation here of like, what's on the page is not
entirely what it is, but it's our best effort, that kind of
thing. >> Claudia Morales:
Before we open the floor for questions, I know four of
you are percussionists. Do you all have
specialties in one specific instrument? What is and if so,
what is it? >> Eric Cha-Beach:
Well, this is a... Yeah, this is a
funny question. We saw that it's so cool to see
these scores of pieces written for us in the hallway here. And one of them is this piece
by Steve Mackey called It Is Time. Steve also teaches with
us at Princeton, and that was maybe the first time many
pieces for the group before that were written in a way that the
composer would say, I want you all to play drums right now,
and then I want you all to play wood instruments now and all to
play flowerpots now. And Steve said, I want to write
things that each of you really enjoy playing.
So for that piece, we actually got together at his house and he made us grilled chicken and he
said, okay. He went around the table and
each one of us. So for Jason plays the last
movement of that piece and it's on drum set and it's like
crazy, amazing drum set solo. We all play the whole time, but
each of us is sort of featured in one of the movements. Adam's movement was on a
marimba solo, and with us kind of accompanying him and
actually a bunch of little toys on the ground and stuff like
that. Josh was playing steel pans, and Josh is actually an
incredible steel pan virtuoso, which, maybe is one of the
most unusual things in our group. You know, there
are actually, in a very cool way, other percussion ensembles
that are in the United States and around the world these
days. But I think we're the only one that has a really amazing
steel drummer in our group. And so that's a really cool
part of our repertoire. And then it got to me, and
I'll... >> Josh Quillen: Thanks, Eric.
I'll pay you 20 bucks later. [Laughing] >> Eric Cha-Beach:
And that was such an awkward conversation for me because I was like, I don't
really know. I just really like weird stuff. And I told Steve a bunch of
weird sounds that I was just excited about. So we have
this thing called an SD organ in our studio. There's sort of
these little reed bellows organs that people used to have before
folks could have an upright piano in their house. This
company, Estey from Vermont, would make these bellows
organs. And and we worked with the
people at that company for a residency we did in Vermont. And so they gave us two of
their organs. And I said, I would love to
play this in the piece, or I would love to play
these little, this metronome thing. And I showed him this
thing where you put a metronome on its side and it ticks
irregularly. And I kind of brought a bunch of crazy ideas. And then he asked me to learn
musical saw, for that piece. So I don't know what that makes
me. That just means that I maybe everybody in our group
really loves to explore new sounds. And I think I just, in
that case, claimed the mantle of, okay, give me something
crazy and I'll figure it out. >> Adam Sliwinski:
You are the guy who is willing to sort of get
overwhelmed with too many tasks and see if you can do them all.
And that happens with electronics too. And you'll see
in Angelica's piece, Eric is playing, but he's also managing
all the electronic files and stuff like that. He does that
quite a lot. >> Claudia Morales:
So now it's time. You have a question, please
raise your hand. >> You mentioned John Cage. But back in the 70s, I
studied electronic music, and one of the people that I
studied and did a workshop with was Morton Subotnick, who was also a contemporary of John
Cage. And there was a few others and wasn't sure if. >> Eric Cha-Beach:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually think we ran into
Morton Subotnick. Was it when we did
the NC thing? >> Adam Sliwinski:
We met him before. Yeah. >> Eric Cha-Beach:
When there was a big celebration at Carnegie Hall of the 50th anniversary of this very famous piece of Terry
Riley's called [inaudible] and we were so
lucky to be a part of that group. And every legendary
composer and performer that we knew about came to this big
concert. I was standing on stage five feet from Philip
Glass, and I had never met him before at that point. So he was like, and Morton
Subotnick was there. So we've been really lucky
that a few times we've been called on to be sort of the
rhythm section for these big group performances.
Anyway, he's a legend. Really awesome. >> So I loved you. I got to see you in Princeton.
Which was just... I mean, to me, it's a visual
extravaganza as well as a sonic cornucopia, whatever you want
to call it. So I'm wondering whether the
visual comes into play and how it comes into play. I mean, from the audience in
Princeton, I kind of got an idea that you are planning the
visuals as well as the sonic experience. And I was curious
about your take on the visual experience. Not to be a
synesthete, but it all factors in. >> Josh Quillen:
I was just going to say like I was joking with Jason earlier. Maybe he could speak to this
better, but like one of the things that imprinted on me
when I first joined the group, relationships. But then we
were at a soundcheck and I had just come out of grad school.
Right? And so I'm like, my music stand is up like eye level, and
I'm super comfortable. And Jason walks over and he's
like, why don't we just go ahead and put that down? And I was like, why? He's like,
I'll go stand in the third row. And I like went out in the
third row. And it's like, all you see is
just a three square foot music stand, and it's like somebody
paid 40 bucks to come see you play. They should be able to
see you, which is A, absolutely true. And then B, now I can't
see my music. What am I going to do? But
I think over time that sort of ethos has sort of seeped
into every concert we do. Every show, whether
it is an educational concert for kids or it's a show at Bam
or Carnegie Hall or here and there's a show we're
touring with Caroline Shaw right now with some new stuff
from a new alband we're sort of adapting the setup show to
show to be like, let's try this here. Now, like, this looks
bad. That didn't look so good It's really important to us how
you see the show, because how you see things is how it
affects how you hear them, and vice versa. And I think
little things that are interesting, we want you to be
able to see, to be a part of that and to see it
visually. So absolutely. And I think all
of the colors, like in Angelica's piece that you'll
see tonight, that's all like thought about and specifically
like the white tray towels are like, we did a video
shoot, like, yeah, it's really important to us because it is a
show that you're coming to see. It's like going to a museum and
like, or going to see a gallery opening. And they just left all
the ladders out, you know, you're like and they didn't
dust the floor like, no, it's like you really want to just
focus on the painting. And I think that ethos is something we think long
and hard about. >> So can I ask a follow on? Because in the analogy with the
String Quartet, the acoustics of the space matter, and I'm lucky
enough to come to a lot of these Coolidge concerts, and I try to
position myself in the room depending on where I think the
acoustics are going to be. So I'm curious about in your
rehearsal how you position and if you tuned your staging for
the acoustics. And where do you think the best spot in the auditorium
is for us? >> Josh Quillen: I knew that's
where this was going. >> Adam Sliwinski:
Let me just say first, you're not going to miss
us anywhere you sit. It's a good time to shout out our sound guy, Nelson Dorado is
going to be at the board. You're going to see a lot of
microphones. That doesn't necessarily mean that we think
you're not going to hear the percussion instruments, but it
all has to do with creating a balance and a mixture, because
there's so many different kinds of sounds being made. There's a
short, high sound, and then there's a low sound, and we
find that having a wonderful sound engineer helps to kind of
create the blend of the sound. So I'm not sure there's one
spot or another that's better. But if you think it's
sounding good, you can give Nelson credit. If you think
it's sounding bad, maybe it's our fault or something. I don't
know. >> Jason Treuting:
It's his fault. If it's bad, it's his fault.
I would just say I love when we walked into the hall, I
was telling Claudia that I love the raked seating is
just really wonderful. So I think you don't need to
feel like you need to be right up front either, because I
think if you sit back a little bit, the speakers are
going to take care of you. And having a nice view of
everything, is maybe what is what it's about. But this has been really
beautiful space to play. It's really, really nice. >> Claudia Morales:
Well, thank you so very much. We're so excited to have you
here. [Applause] >> Eric Cha-Beach:
Thank you all. Thank you. >>Claudia Morales:
I just wanted to share with you that they are doing a school
performance tomorrow morning. So we have them twice tonight
and tomorrow morning. So enjoy the concert tonight and we'll see you in the hall.
Thank you. >> Josh Quillen:
Thanks, everybody. [Applause]
