| Since 1999, So Percussion has been creating music that explores all the extremes of emotion and musical possibility. It has not been an easy music to define. Called an "experimental powerhouse" by the Village Voice, "astonishing and entrancing" by Billboard Magazine, and "brilliant" by the New York Times, the Brooklyn based quartet's innovative work with today's most exciting composers and their own original music has quickly helped them forge a unique and diverse career.
A blind call to David Lang, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, yielded their first big commissioned piece, the so-called laws of nature, which appeared with Evan Ziporyn's gamelan-inspired Melody Competition on their first album "So Percussion." In the following years, the thrill of working with amazing composers would yield new pieces by Paul Lansky, Dan Trueman, Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Fred Frith, and many others.So Percussion has performed this unusual and exciting music all over the United States, with concerts at the Lincoln Center Festival, Carnegie Hall, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Stanford Lively Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others. In addition, recent tours to Russia, Australia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Ukraine have brought them international acclaim. They won 2nd prize overall and the Concerto Prize at the 2005 Luxembourg International Percussion Quartet Competition.
With an audience comprised of "both kinds of blue hair... elderly matron here, arty punk there" (as the Boston Globe described it), So Percussion makes a rare and wonderful breed of music that both compels instantly and offers rewards for engaged listening. Edgy (at least in the sense that little other music sounds like this) and ancient (in that people have been hitting objects for eons), perhaps it doesn't need to be defined after all.
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