So Percussion, So Persuasive

As an aggregate, So Percussion’s performances at Miller Theatre over the past few years constitute a remarkably compelling argument for modern music. Combining intelligence and virtuosity with enthusiasm and unpresumptuous accessibility, the percussion quartet consistently succeeds in delivering exhilarating, highly-enjoyable performances.

The members of So Percussion each have nearly-flawless technical command of percussion technique, but this can only partially account for their genius. After all, most performers of modern and contemporary music at their level can boast similar skill. Similarly, their familiarity with each other—the four met in Robert Van Sice’s studio at the Yale School of Music, and have been a group since 1999—is important, but not peculiar. What sets So Percussion apart is the intelligence that it brings to both the musical and non-musical components of performance.

More often than not, these components—the manner in which performers enter and exit, the arrangement of performers and instruments, the lighting of the stage—are determined according to convention. This convention helps focus the audience onto the music itself, rather than interfere with it.

In its performances, though, So Percussion adds its own deliberate, subtle modifications, which are always linked to the specific demands of the piece. The group’s performance of Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” which I heard in spring 2005, is just as visually electrifying as it is aurally enticing. So Percussion’s version starts quite simply, with two members of the group standing across from each other at stage center, a series of bongos between them and all the various other instruments that the piece calls for scattered about the stage. The two begin playing. Minutes later, after the music has progressed past its first section, the two remaining members of the group enter, pick up mallets, and join in. When the piece transitions between different instrument groups in this theatrical rendition, it is perceived first visually, then aurally: one or two of the members leaves the bongos, for example, walks over to a marimba, and begins playing. Moments later, another joins him. Only after the remaining bongo players are well into their decrescendo does the entering marimba part, which has been visually perceptible for some time, become aurally perceptible. So Percussion executes this impressive dramatic feat from memory, and without sacrificing musical perfection, and this only heightens the pleasure of the experience.

So Percussion’s consciousness of the non-musical never upstages the music, but rather complements it. The group’s 2007 performance of Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” (joined, of course, by other musicians) featured lighting cues: as the piece moved slowly from one mood to the next, so too did the lighting, from red to blue hues, bright and faint, creating a chromatic commentary to the music reminiscent of Herbert Wernicke’s extraordinary production of “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.” Earlier this month, when a subset of the group took on George Crumb’s “Idyll for the Misbegotten” (with a guest flautist), they came startlingly close to the composer’s performance directions: “to be heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” The stage lights were off for the entirety of the piece, the music stands lit only by black lamps. Although their configuration was taken from Crumb’s recommendation in the score—flute center stage, large bass drum at back of stage center, the smaller drum kits flanking the flute—the decision to have the flanking drum players enter ceremoniously (from the sides of the house, and only after the large bass drum and the flute were well into the idyll) is So Percussion’s own unique modification.

Such variations, present in every piece So Percussion performs, envelops each piece in a specific ambience, transforming it into its own self-contained universe. Through this process, So Percussion doesn’t just play the music, it performs it—and the difference is palpable.

So Percussion is based out of New York and is playing a series of dates through February. Check their website www.sopercussion.com for information.