Program Notes for Sō Percussion at Carnegie Hall - January 23, 2026
Four new works by American composers
On January 23rd, Sō Percussion is presenting a concert of new percussion quartets at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. The program will be repeated in Princeton at Richardson Auditorium on January 30th at 7:30pm.
American Flow, Volume 1
Music is almost always influenced by popular culture, whether it adopts those influences or opposes them. In the 20th century, classical musicians in the United States didn’t always know how to cope with its sprawling, multi-ethnic, rhythmically charged music. Some American composers kept Europe firmly in view, either clinging to its 19th-century aesthetics or pushing into modernist abstractions. Others like Aaron Copland and Steve Reich embraced the swirl.
Our title American Flow is a nod to the concept of “flow” in hip-hop, where the rhythmic placement and patterning of words define a rapper’s style. It also symbolizes the mixture of genres that proliferated in the USA, along with the complex historical contradictions that created them. The river of American culture flows into thousands of tiny tributaries, and never just from one source. Sō Percussion’s role in this branching landscape is to experiment with its elements – to find and create new kinds of music.
Tonight’s composers and featured artists float between worlds: Bryce Dessner through his band The National; Michael J Love as an ambassador of the tap dance art form; Caroline Shaw through her collaborations with artists such as Rosalia; and Kendall K. Williams through his engagement with the steel band tradition.
Bryce Dessner: Wood and Strings: Infinite Chorale
Sō Percussion’s history with composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner reaches back to graduate school at the Yale School of Music. Bryce was a classical guitar major before he was an international rock star with his Grammy award-winning band The National. He attended early workshop performances of our first major percussion quartet, David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature. We have stayed in touch with him ever since: Sō has opened for The National in New York City and contributed to a few of their albums.
When we asked him to write his first piece for us, Bryce came up with a novel idea: instead of writing something for the usual percussion instruments, he coaxed us into his world by inventing a new set of instruments inspired by the electric guitar called “chord sticks.”
These instruments, which were fabricated by Buke and Gase’s Aron Sanchez, lie flat, threaded with guitar strings and amplified. But instead of picking or strumming them, we play them like hammer dulcimers with pencils (originally the pencils were placeholders, but they worked perfectly and we had an inexhaustible supply). The four instruments function as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, with only the lowest bass string fretted.
He called his piece Music for Wood and Strings, and we played it here at Carnegie Hall in 2013. Although the instrument recalls the sound of the electric guitar, the writing is pure percussion: composite melodies bounce around the ensemble in tight rhythmic formations while driving grooves predominate. We have performed Music for Wood and Strings dozens of times all over the world, including at a memorable TED Conference in 2016, with Hollywood notables like Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford in attendance.
For Wood and Strings: Infinite Chorale, Bryce harnesses our familiarity with the chord sticks to create a darker, heavier piece with the perfume of early Minimalism. The instruments are re-tuned, and we complement them with bass drums, synths, and other electronics. Where the first piece explored many moods through quickly changing sections, this second piece builds and changes more slowly, with a relentless energy.
Writing for this guitar-like instrument allows Bryce to suggest American styles like folk and bluegrass, or rock, with the Appalachian hammer dulcimer always lingering in the background. The fretted bass string that Josh plays resembles any other electronic bass, except that he might be the first to ever use a #2 Ticonderoga to play it!
Micheal J. Love and Jason Treuting – A Better Genome
Afro-diasporic musical traditions have exerted an enormous influence on American percussion playing. The iconic American percussion instrument is the drum set, which has its roots as an assemblage of military instruments for keeping time in early jazz and vaudeville. We have sought specific collaborations to highlight American-born styles of rhythm-making such as with beatboxer and breath artist Shodekeh Talifero’s Vodalities, which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and presented in 2021.
Tap dance is distinctive as both a dance and percussion tradition. As a percussion art form, it stands alongside jazz drumming or beatboxing as a virtuosic art form with strong lineages of improvisational skill. We met the extraordinary tap artist Michael J. Love when he was a fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. We started to collaborate on a piece that would harness Sō’s teamwork while also unleashing the barrages of patterns in Michael’s performing style.
Jason’s composition for the piece started in an odd place: we were hired to perform at a conference for a Biotech company that had pioneered human genome research. For the three-minute piece we were going to perform, Jason used the four letters that represent the DNA proteins GCTA as building blocks for the rhythms of the piece. Ever since 2006’s Amid the Noise, Jason has used words and letter combinations to construct patterns by assigning different durations to consonants and vowels.
This method produces patterns that can be manipulated, creating canons, symmetries, and groove loops. As he started to adapt the “genome” piece into something we could use with Michael, it occurred to us that musical gestures and steps operate like strands of DNA in our work, helping to create future combinations. The “better” artistic genome is one that knows its history and seeks harmonious hybrids.
Jason and Michael also wanted to illuminate the visual vivacity of Tap. We lay out six smaller tap squares as platforms. Those platforms correspond to players, and Michael’s choice of which platform to tap on sometimes signifies what that player should do. The piece fluctuates between sections where we are interacting with Michael, and those where the percussionists’ role is more scripted and composed. In this way, we incorporate both flexibility and structured composition.
Caroline Shaw – Strange and Artificial Echoes
Caroline has been Sō’s most frequent collaborator for the last five years. We have made two albums of co-composed songs together, including 2024’s “Rectangles and Circumstance,” which won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.
This new percussion quartet, which was commissioned by the Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam, is a nod to Sō’s history of engagement with the experimental tradition of John Cage. It includes excerpts of him speaking on a cassette tape via a 1980’s-style boom box, as well as radio-tuning, mallet instruments, scrapping and tapping rocks, and further spoken excerpts from the British electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram, with a healthy dose of Mozart’s “Dissonant” String Quartet, K. 465 thrown in at the climax, as well as a beautiful poem by Ann Carson. Shaw was also specifically thinking about Bertolt Brecht, and the whole thing has a quality of staging and surrealism about it.
The recorded excerpts of Cage, Oram, and Morton Feldman all address the role of technology in their lifetimes, particularly radio and tape, while the performers walk around the stage tuning radio frequencies and toggling hand-held cassette tape recorders on and off. Caroline pre-loaded the tapes with recordings of her singing, of the Mozart quartet being performed by a string quartet, and of various drones. In this sense, the piece is about technology, but in a nostalgic mode.
Marimba, vibes, and glockenspiel balance the noisy elements with tonal color. We perform floating accompaniment to some of the recorded excerpts, a bit of atonal transition, and then we play parts of the Mozart quartet itself in a re-worked mini-arrangement where the harmonic sequences come briefly to life. The overall effect is of a multi-layered, complex, yet nostalgically enjoyable performance event that feels reminiscent and unique at the same time.
Kendall K. Williams – Panorama for Mallet Quartet
Kendall K. Williams’ new quartet features the mallet quartet configuration of two marimbas and two vibraphones. We asked Kendall to write for us in the style of the instrumental pieces of the steel band competition called Panorama. In 2020, just before COVID arrived, Sō Percussion traveled to Trinidad to perform in the Skiffle Steel Orchestra during Panorama finals. Kendall was arranging for the band at that time.
One of the striking features of playing in a steel band is that the music is taught by rote through oral instruction and demonstration. When we performed with Skiffle, our skills in reading music were useless – the musicians in Trinidad were much faster at picking up the music by ear than we were.
Panorama finals in 2020. If you squint occasionally you can see us in the back row!
When we asked Kendall to write this piece, we prompted him to recreate this process for us. For almost four years, we convened periodically with Kendall so that he could teach it to us note-by-note. The value in this experiment, impractical as it was, was that it gave Kendall ample time to compose along the way. He had no idea how the piece was going to end when we were learning the first notes.
Panorama pieces, like sonata forms, have standard sections that are expected by listeners. Kendall would often refer to “the minor section” or “the jam” as a shorthand for things that he knew would eventually exist in the piece, even if he didn’t yet know how we were going to get there. Something that all Panorama pieces have in common is that they are based on a theme from a popular song, but this Panorama is composed from scratch.
Steel bands have two main types of instruments: the melodic steel pans and the “engine room,” which consists of drums, congas, metal brake drums, shakers, and other non-pitched instruments. Naturally, performers play one or the other. In Sō’s Panorama quartet, Kendall assigns the engine room to our feet, so that we play hi-hats, bass drums, and even cowbells simultaneously with our melodic mallet instruments. This is a particular kind of virtuosic challenge, because marimba and vibraphones are usually meant to be played from a stable standing position (and the vibraphone has a pedal). In a nod to the percussion quartet tradition, we also break out occasionally to play tin cans.
Although this steel pan world would seem to come from beyond our shores, the genre has become important in the USA, particularly among the large Trinidadian population in Brooklyn, who celebrate their own massive Panorama festival during Labor Day (in Trinidad the festival corresponds with Lent and Carnival). Kendall represents a cohort of American-born pan masters whose style and sensibility is heavily influenced by New York.