So Percussion is wild fun (review)

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Percussion ensembles generally play new music, because that's generally what there is for percussion ensembles to play. But Monday night at Kaul Auditorium,

-- who appeared courtesy of

-- dipped into the classic repertoire going all the way back to the dawn of percussion-ensemble time in the early 1940s. Perhaps surprisingly, alongside newer works it all came across as seamless, not to mention electrically experimental and wildly fun.

The quartet -- Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting -- emerged on stage one by one for Steve Reich's "Music for Pieces of Wood" (a guest whose name I didn't catch joined them for this first piece). From 1980, it's vintage Reich, a brilliantly simple exercise using mallets and pitched pieces of wood; the members took repeated rhythms (the second player came in with the rhythm from Reich's "Clapping Music"), and the musical material arose from changing patterns.

Reich's "Mallet Quartet," a 2009 co-commission from So and several other ensembles, hewed surprisingly close to that sound of that earlier work, with its narrow range of timbres, simplicity of rhythmic recombination and the playful feel of discovery in the abundance of shifting rhythms. The sound was seductive -- the piece was scored for two vibraphones and two marimbas, and not just any marimbas, but five-octave instruments that have a hypnotizing power in their lower range.

Before John Cage's large-scale 1941 "Third Construction," Quillen came out for a solo, Cage's "Child of Tree" for plant material. The focus of the piece was a potted barrel cactus that by performance tradition had to be named before being played. (Someone shouted "Beth," then someone else cleverly offered "Pilar," but the first listener would have none of it, so "Beth" it was.) The plant was miked, and Quillen started by touching its spines; before long, sounds of mallet instruments and shamisen began to emerge. The rest of the piece involved crumpled seed pods of some unidentified plant, which produced a dripping-water sound as the seeds struck the cactus, crumpled leaves and huge poinciana pods used as rattles.

"Third Construction" itself called for 20 tin cans and a host of unusual instruments including conch shell, lion's roar (a drum that produces a growling sound as a cord is pulled through its head), claves, cymbals and bass drum. The performance was guided by proportions derived from square roots; the logic may have been intelligible to the performers, but on a first listen it came across as happy mayhem involving a vast tonal palette.

So also offered some of their own music in the form of excerpts from their "Amid the Noise" and "Imaginary City," and it was similar in spirit: instruments ranged from toy piano to chalkboard to taped voice, and in the former piece the audience was invited to hum and shake their car keys. It was emblematic of the strange, anarchic, high-energy sound world that percussion ensembles inhabit, and it was a privilege to be invited in for an evening.

After lengthy applause at the end, the four came out and clapped right back, with "Clapping Music" as an encore.

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