BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Music Center's new Season Guest Concert series continues Saturday, Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m., in the BMC Auditorium with So Percussion, a group dedicated to promoting the power of music to unite people and forge deep social bonds.
The groundbreaking Brooklyn-based quartet redefines the meaning of the term “percussion ensemble.” Though established in 1999 to play contemporary classical works, they have worked with a wide range of composers, musicians, and recording artists to play everything from tea cups and walnut planks to flower pots and an amplified cactus.
This benefit concert, sponsored by Guilford Sound, will support the BMC's Make a Place for Music capital campaign. The performance also celebrates completion of the BMC's new percussion studio and the launch of the first full-fledged, year-round, percussion program housed at the BMC.
So is Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting, who create innovative multi-genre original productions, interpretations of modern classics, and an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam,” (The New Yorker).
The group's repertoire has ranged from classics of the 20th century by the likes of John Cage, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis to commissioning and advocating works by contemporary composers such as David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Steve Mackey, and Caroline Shaw, to distinctively modern collaborations with artists who work outside the classical concert hall, including Shara Nova, the electronic duo Matmos, and Wilco's Glenn Kotche.
Included in the evening's program will be works such as Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich; Living Room Music (excerpt) by John Cage; Taxidermy by Caroline Shaw; and Selections from Amid The Noise by Jason Treuting.