For instance, now my focus involves very little: a lecture on music. My music. But it is not a lecture, nor is it music. It is, of necessity, theater. What else? if I choose as I do music, I get theater, that, that is I get that too. Not just this, the two.
—John Cage, from Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. The extract also figures in, appropriately enough, a music piece just added to the Tiny Desk Concert series streamed by NPR. I’ve embedded the video above.
So Percussion, the Yale-rooted percussion quartet, weaved Cage’s words into the original work “24 x 24,” which celebrates the composer on the centennial of his birth.
I’ve followed So Percussion since before they were So. The group grew out of a subset of students in the Yale Percussion Ensemble that were especially into minimalist and modernist composers. The students took a lead role in an awestriking tribute to Steve Reich (with the composer in attendance), then banded together as So Percussion and commissioning works from, among others, David Lang of Bang on a Can.
Lang himself has a new theater/music piece, love fail, at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas June 29 & 30. Details here.
So, too, has always had a theatrical edge. They’ve always gone in for interesting spatial arrangements, such as when they used the John Slade Ely House on Trumbull Street to perform a piece involving a microphone pendulum revolving above a giant speaker cabinet. They’re also props-savvy. When they bang on boards, the boards don’t look like they’ve been buffed and prepared for orchestral exactitude; they look like boards from a production of Tobacco Road. For the NPR set, they involve site-specific elements relevant to the desk environment: a small potted cactus, a coffee mug, and (according to the NPR write-up of the event) “an empty padded envelope autographed by Tiny Desk alum, Wilco member and frequent So collaborator Glenn Kotche.”
The NPR page for the So video, which adds an option to download the 13-minute concert as an audio file, is here.