CONCERTS

77TH SEASON OF

national gallery of art | february 10, 2019
3

PROGRAM

2

Sō Percussion 

Eric Cha-Beach

Josh Quillen 

Adam Sliwinski 

Jason Treuting

The Keyboard Re-imagined

February 10, 2019 | 3:30 

West Building, West Garden Court

Elliot Cole (b. 1984)

Selections from Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone (2012)

Vijay Iyer (b. 1971)

TORQUE (2018)

Dan Trueman (b. 1968)

Selections from Nostalgic Synchronic, for prepared digital piano (2017)

I. Sinking Song

II. Sister Song

III. Summoning Song

IV. Seizing Song

V. Sad Song

Jason Treuting (b. 1977)

Nine Numbers 4 (2017)

Suzanne Farrin (b. 1976)

a diamond in the square (2019)

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)

Taxidermy (2012)

Donnacha Dennehy (b.1970)

Broken Unison (2017)

Photo by Evan Monroe Chapman
4 5

Rooted in the belief that music is an essential facet of human life, a social bond, 

and an effective tool in creating agency and citizenship, Sō Percussion enthusiastically 

pursues social and community outreach. Examples include their Brooklyn Bound 

presentations of younger composers; commitments to purchasing offsets to compensate for carbon-heavy activities such as touring travel; and leading their Sō Percussion 

Summer Institute (SōSI) students in an annual food-packing drive, providing as many 

as 25,000 meals for the Crisis Center of Mercer County.

Sō Percussion is the Edward T. Cone Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University, 

where the group offers educational work and annual concert series. The ensemble 

also codirects the percussion department at the Bard College-Conservatory of Music 

and runs SōSI, which provides college-age composers and percussionists immersive 

exposure to collaboration and project development. In 2018, SōSI celebrated its 

tenth anniversary.

“With innovative multi-genre original productions, sensational interpretations of 

modern classics, and an exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” 

(New Yorker), Sō Percussion has redefined the scope and vital role of the modern 

percussion ensemble.

Sō’s repertoire ranges from “classics” of the twentieth century, by such composers 

as John Cage, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis, to commissioning and advocating works 

by contemporary composers such as Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Steve Mackey, and 

Paul Lansky, to distinctively modern collaborations with artists who work outside the 

classical concert hall, including vocalist Shara Nova, electronic duo Matmos, groundbreaking Dan Deacon, legendary drummer Bobby Previte, jam-band kings Medeski, 

Martin, and Wood, Wilco’s Glenn Kotche, choreographer Shen Wei, and composer and 

leader of the rock band National, Bryce Dessner.

Sō Percussion musicians also compose and perform their own works, ranging 

from standard concert pieces to immersive, multi-genre programs, including Imaginary

City, Where (we) Live, and A Gun Show, which was presented in a multi-performance 

presentation as part of BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival. In these concert-length 

programs, Sō employs a distinctively twenty-first-century synthesis of original music, 

artistic collaboration, visual art, and theatrical production values in a powerful exploration of their own unique and personal creative experiences.

In the current season, Sō performs the New York premiere of David Lang’s man

made with Louis Langrée and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra; tours a new work 

by Caroline Shaw with Dawn Upshaw and Gil Kalish; returns to Carnegie Hall with the 

JACK Quartet in a program of new works by Donnacha Dennehy and Dan Trueman; 

and tours the United Kingdom with its original From Out a Darker Sea, which explores 

the community and culture of English coal-mining country.

The group’s recent highlights include an acclaimed “Trilogy” portrait at the Lincoln 

Center Festival; appearances at Bonnaroo, the Eaux Claires Festival, Mass MoCA, and 

TED 2016; international tours to Poland and Ireland; performances of man made with 

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Bryce Dessner’s Music for Wood

and Strings at the Barbican in London; and an original score for a live performance 

and broadcast of WNYC’s Radiolab with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich at BAM.

THE MUSICIANS
6 7

PROGRAM NOTES great bridge!), and their surface characteristics (sheesh, I love those ornaments and 

blue notes, wish I could do that!). 

In the process of writing this piece for possibly the most incredible contemporary 

music band imaginable — Sō Percussion and the JACK Quartet . . . combined! — I found 

myself thinking about “songs” in all of their mysterious and wonderful facets. While 

I think most of these pieces will be hard or impossible to sing, my hope is that they 

feel like songs in various ways, like something we might be able to sing in a parallel 

universe, or, more ambitiously, that they leave us wanting to sing them, even if we 

can’t. Perhaps Yeats was on to something when, in his penultimate poem “Cuchulain 

Comforted,” he tells us, “Now we must sing and sing the best we can . . . Or driven 

from home and left to die in fear.” Program note by the composer Dan Trueman

Nine Numbers 4

Nine Numbers 4 is a mallet quartet for two marimbas and two vibraphones written for Sō 

Percussion. Inspired in some ways by Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet, this three-movement 

piece explores the bowed and struck sounds of these keyboard instruments. This piece is 

the fourth in a set of nine, which are sequenced from solo percussionist to nonet.

All of the pieces in Nine Numbers translate the 9-by-9 solutions of Sudoku puzzles 

into notes and rhythms. The number nine, with its three sets of three, contains many 

wonderful symmetries and fractal-like characteristics. It allows for nesting structures 

at the largest and smallest levels.

In the pieces for fewer players, I sometimes ask the performers to help generate 

the score. In the solo, duo, and trio, the performers find their own puzzle solutions, 

and the score is a set of instructions to translate the numbers into music. In this 

quartet, I present the ensemble with a finished score based on my realization of the 

Sudoku. Different scores will exist for different ensembles. Most of the recognizable 

elements of the pieces will remain fixed, but surface details can change depending on 

the Sudoku.

The Sudoku for Sō Percussion’s version of Nine Numbers 4:

192 456 378

734 928 156

658 731 924

247 695 831

386 147 592

915 283 467

421 369 785

569 874 213 

873 512 649

Program note by the composer Jason Treuting 

Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone

Postludes is a book of eight pieces for a familiar instrument played in a new way. Four 

players, with eight double-bass bows, play interlocking lines on a single vibraphone. 

The interplay of bows and hands tapping, muting, and touching harmonics, weaves 

an intimate and intricate counterpoint that is as beautiful to watch as it is to hear — 

fragile, tender, and haunting. Program note by the composer Elliot Cole

TORQUE

At the piano, I listen for how the contortions of the hand can suggest the surges of a 

body in motion. In my trio music, I’m often evolving rhythmic shapes, shaping gestural 

patterns with an embodied resonance, and striving to evoke specific qualities of 

movement with our performed rhythms. Someone once compared us to the Flying 

Karamazov Brothers, with their coordinated, cyclical, antiphonal actions. I see the 

work of the rhythm section as a ritual of collective synchrony, aiming above all to 

generate a dance impulse for everybody in the room.

Torque, meaning a twisting force on a body, seems to appear for the listener at 

music’s formal boundaries, when one movement type gives way to another. This piece 

for Sō Percussion invites the musicians to perform transformations that twist the 

music’s temporal flow, bringing the micro-relational art of the rhythm section to this 

virtuosic quartet. Program note by the composer Vijay Iyer

Nostalgic Synchronic, for prepared digital piano

I. Sinking Song

II. Sister Song

III. Summoning Song

IV. Seizing Song

V. Sad Song

Some of my favorite songs and tunes are terribly hard to sing. They seem tuneful but 

defy my efforts to sing them, leaving me in a somewhat embarrassing and inarticulate 

heap of grunting and muttering, with an occasional, sustained high note. I could make 

a list, but I trust (perhaps naively) that I am not alone in this experience, and that you 

all have songs that are similarly enticing and beguiling. Apart from the sense that these 

tunes are “melodic” in some way — even if they are hard to sing and their melodies 

perhaps even impossible to fully identify — they have other features that are enticing: 

their formal repetitions (one more chorus, please!), their singular moments (what a 
8 9

a diamond in the square

The diamond in the square is a quilting pattern consisting of two objects. The inner 

square is rotated 45 degrees to become a diamond, while the other one forms its 

border. In Amish communities, the colors are usually bold and solid, giving way to 

intricate, nearly invisible stitching patterns that loop and connect the entire piece. 

The thread seems to create an invisible language, the contrasts of which are created 

through subtle changes in texture rather than through color or pattern. You must 

adjust your eyes to see them. Diamonds in the square are found all over American folk 

art quilting. Probably like many others, I recognized the image before I knew how to 

name it. And perhaps like many women, I was raised in the atmospheres of women’s 

work — the body hunched over a piece, the collecting and discussion of fabrics, yarn, 

and needles, and the meditation of the mind over repetitive tasks. I loved to participate 

in these projects, though I did not have the same skills as other women in my family. 

They could mend, create, and transform objects (and people) through interwoven 

fibers. In this work, the fibers are given sound. A collection of strings, from yarns to 

lobster cord, move through the piano as if on a loom. The workers are hunched over 

their art and slowing separating from their physical bodies, which is exactly what I saw 

my grandmothers do, as they sat in the evenings with their crocheting, their knitting, 

and their quilting. Program note by the composer Suzanne Farrin 

Taxidermy

Why “Taxidermy”? I just find the word strangely compelling, and it evokes something 

grand, awkward, epic, silent, funny, and just a bit creepy — all characteristics of this 

piece, in a way. The repeated phrase toward the end — “the detail of the pattern is 

movement” — is a little concept I love trying (and failing) to imagine. It comes from 

T. S. Eliot’s beautiful and perplexing poem “Burnt Norton,” and I’ve used it before 

in other work, as a kind of whimsical existentialist mantra. Program note by the 

composer Caroline Shaw

Broken Unison

With Broken Unison, I took the opportunity — joyfully I might add — to reengage with 

questions of abstract compositional technique, following a period of writing more 

semantically charged music for operas and “kind-of” operas. The work is full of various 

ways of disrupting unisons, from antiphonal interchanges through staggered chorales, 

to a fairly dizzying use of canons of various hues, and from the airily spaced to the 

breathily close, so close that at times the canons veer towards a kind of fractured 

unison. I became even more ambitious with some of these ferociously close canons 

after hearing how well the Sō Percussion players executed them during early drafts 

of the piece. Paradoxically, perhaps, as the music tends more toward actual unisons 

in its latter parts, its mood becomes progressively broken and dark. Maybe there is a 

semantic undertone after all.

I think of the dialogue between pattern and texture in this piece as a kind of magic 

realism. I limited myself strictly to equal-tempered, pitched instruments, despite the 

fact that much of my recent music plays with microtones to create a kind of harmony/

timbre based on the overtone series. Here, instead, the very close canons transform in 

and out of something akin to a jingly-jangly, pulsating resonance, the overtones spilling 

over each other.

Strictly in nine sections, the piece really separates into three larger parts — each 

cumulatively made up of a greater number of smaller sections (two, three, and four, 

respectively — and each demarcated by the varied iteration of a type of material 

defined by the employment of very bright, close canons starting in C and then slipping 

away semitonally in a manner influenced by the harmonic language of Gesualdo’s later 

music. Program note by the composer Donnacha Dennehy
10 11

Upcoming Events of the SeventySeventh Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Lara St. John, violin

Matt Herskowitz, piano

Featuring works by Beethoven, Paranosic, 

Kennedy, Ravel, and Gershwin /Herskowitz

February 17, 3:30

Armonia Nova

Sound Sketches

February 22, 12:10

West Building Lecture Hall

Curtis on Tour: Curtis Opera 

Theatre Vocal Quartet

Featuring Liebeslieder Waltzes by Brahms

February 24, 3:30

Noah Getz and Friends

Absolute Art and Jazz between the Wars

Featuring works by Webern, Bartók, 

and Schulhoff

March 3, 3:30

Peter Vinograde, piano

J. S. Bach’s Seven Keyboard Toccatas

March 10, 3:30

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

and all of its programs is free of charge, 

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording 

equipment during the performance 

is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic 

devices are turned off.

—

Concerts are made possible in part 

through the generosity of donors to the 

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition 

of their support. Please contact the 

development office at (202) 842-6450 or 

circle@nga.gov for more information.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2019 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

Sam Gilliam, In Celebration, 1987, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the 

Smithsonian Resident Associate Program
NGA.GOV/MUSIC