SoPercussion
Dawn Chan
If classical musicians had their way, they’d choose to be invisible. For example, pianist Sviatoslav Richter performed his later concerts in halls that were almost completely dark, lit only by a single piano lamp that let him see the keyboard. While claiming roots in this "listen-but-don’t-look" tradition, new music also adopts the visual elements of multimedia and sound art. For every new music composition that flirts with spectacle, there’s another that flees. For every Kronos Quartet show incorporating masks and polyester outfits, there is a Tristan Murail quartet, performed by the usual unassuming huddle of musicians dressed in black. Thus, as with many new music concerts, the audience at So Percussion’s Whitney show had to wonder: which sights on stage were we meant to scrutinize? The video projections? Certainly. The cluttered landscape of found instruments? Probably. The performers’ personas? Maybe. Their clothes? Most likely not.
So Percussion, a four-man percussion ensemble founded in New Haven, performed a program of new music and multimedia compositions, as part of the "Whitney Live" series at the Whitney Museum. With a commendable mix of control and energy, So Percussion opened their program with a movement from Steve Reich: Drumming, Part One. Inspired by Ghanaian rhythms, Drumming demands extreme precision from its performers, who must each play at slightly different speeds, in order to create composer Steve Reich’s hallmark rhythmic phrases.
Historically, Reich’s own ensemble performed the piece. In their more mechanical rendition, the Reich ensemble perhaps did less to surmount the exoticism of Ghanaian drumming; one could accuse them of documenting coolly, as though creating ethnomusicologists’ reports. In contrast, So Percussion made the piece entirely personal, as if whooping with joy, as if appropriating without guilt. Against the backdrop of a multimedia program, the small visual gestures of Drumming became crucial and hypnotic, as when one drummer crouched down to reveal the other behind him, or when all four sets of drumsticks began to rebound in unison at higher and higher angles.
The tableau of found instruments became most important in So Percussion’s next piece, entitled Five (and-a-half) Gardens. Composed by Dan Trueman, Five (and-a-half) Gardens blended live music with prerecorded sounds and texts by poet Jennifer Resek. Artist Judy Truman set the excerpts to a projected video of animated images. Although the slow pace of her animated shapes enhanced the loping, meandering feel of the piece, they ultimately seemed trapped by the technical limitations of low-budget animation. Specifically, rather than mutating, growing or breaking apart, shapes tended to drift at the unsurprising pace of website Flash introductions, until you wondered whether a link would appear that allowed you to "Skip Intro / Enter Site."
More evocative was the array of found objects used as instruments, from the conch shells and rock drum kit, to the bucket of water that the performers encircled as the piece drew to a close. A toy piano, topped by an old-fashioned metronome, was a particularly moving reference to Matisse’s Piano Lesson; compared to the image of So Percussionist Douglas Perkins scrunched over a tiny piano, Matisse’s frail, subdued boy seemed all the more enshrined by the passing of time.
So Percussion abandoned animation for film footage in their next piece, entitled 8 Incidentals. Composed by So Percussion member Jason Treuting, 8 Incidentals involved various percussion instruments and electric guitar, set to video scenes. From the first scene, in which a silhouetted figure moves geriatrically across a faraway rooftop, to the third scene, of passengers waiting for a subway, the film conjured both the wonder and the foreboding of an impersonal city terrain. The accompanying music, alternately tranquil and ominous, developed around a four-beat motif, often voiced by the marimba. This delicately tolling theme intensified the inscrutably languorous motion of the video’s characters, as they made their way through urban scenes–scenes which seemed quite familiar in their landscape, yet foreign in their serenity.
