The chamber ensemble So Percussion has a straightforward name, but like this quartet itself, it has a way of revealing more than what may be initially apparent.
“So” is derived from a Japanese term translated as “to play music.” It also has other meanings, including “to move forward.” Similarly, the percussionists came together as graduate students at Yale School of Music in the late 1990s but developed their own ideas and instruments outside of the academy. While they studied the 20th century classical repertoire, member Adam Sliwinski said, the group took off when they rented some cheap studio space and worked “like a garage band.”
After a move to New York and personnel changes, the ensemble has commissioned new classical pieces for percussive instruments, composed experimental pieces and collaborated with a range of artists, including jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas. Still, the group’s early model was the traditional string quartet, and it continues to follow this template.
“We loved the idea that string quartets played together for hours and hours to cultivate a unified group,” Sliwinski said. “We wanted very badly for our group sound to have a distinctive character and hallmark.”
Many of So Percussion’s performances feature repeated motifs that change subtly, an idea that has been termed minimalism. Composer Steven Reich helped conceive this concept, and So Percussion will perform his “Drumming, Part 1” in its show Monday at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.
“A lot of Reich’s music is about suggesting things to the audience and allowing people to hear the same piece of music, but hear it in completely different ways,” member Eric Cha-Beach said. “As a performer playing minimalist music, I’m always extremely on edge because you have to be totally locked in all the time. You feel a lot of responsibility to every single note because there are so few of them.”
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So Percussion also recently recorded Bryce Dessner’s “Music for Wood and Strings” (Brassland) and will perform this piece at the Pritzker. Dessner, who is also a guitarist in The National, emphasized lilting melodies that suggest rural American folk music, and kept the harmonic progressions basic. And besides performing the demanding underlying complex rhythms within the score, the ensemble also had to build its own new hybrid instruments, called chordsticks.
“We’re not professional instrument builders,” Cha-Beach said. “We can cut a length of pipe and get a different pitch out of it, but a lot of times it’s trial and error. But the instruments in Bryce’s piece are totally refined and completely conceived from taking instruments that are already out there, a guitar and hammer dulcimer, and combining those things to make something new.”
Cha-Beach’s own composition “Music for Trains” is the result of the group’s residency in the old industrial town of Brattleboro, Vt. But he says all the ensemble members write for another reason.
“One of the biggest challenges we have as a percussion ensemble is finding instruments everywhere we go; we have to borrow stuff all the time,” Cha-Beach said. “We have to adapt when we show up at a venue and they don’t know what a vibraphone is and they got us a glockenspiel instead. If you wrote the music, you can always say, ‘Here’s the core musical idea, let’s change it and do it this way.'”
While such experiences naturally draw the members of So Percussion closer together, the group — whose remaining members are Josh Quillen and Jason Treuting — also has inspired a movement on behalf of their instruments. Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion ensemble will perform as part of the Downtown Sound series in Millennium Park on June 25. Since So Percussion also organizes educational workshops at such institutions as Bard Conservatory and Princeton University, more musicians may be following the group’s lead.
“It’s rewarding when you see a student make a breakthrough in real time,” Cha-Beach said. “You’re talking to them and then that time comes when you see somebody’s open a little wider when they totally get this thing.”
Cohen is a freelancer.
When: 6:30 p.m. Monday
Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.
Tickets: Free; cityofchicago.org