There will be much clinking of crystal glasses on stage at Richardson Auditorium the weekend of March 8 and 9. Yes, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra is still celebrating conductor/music director Rossen Milanov’s 60th birthday, all season, in fact.
But this is particularly musical clinking: it’s part of the orchestration for the first movement of “Re(new)al,” a concerto for percussion quartet by Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong, and it will be performed by Princeton University Performers-in-Residence Sō Percussion, with the PSO.
Composer Cuong, a 2021 Princeton University graduate with a master’s of fine arts and PhD, who studied with Sō Percussion, loved the sound of crystal wine glasses filled with different amounts of water, creating different pitches. In crafting “Re(new)al” for a percussion quartet, he utilized the goblet-clinking in a gentle, rhythmic manner, making for an ethereal introduction to the piece. As the rest of the orchestra comes in, the sound of the glasses is somewhat buried but remains a steady presence.
“We teach Composing for Percussion, a yearlong course, and Viet took the course, so this (first movement) actually grew out of the class,” says Jason Treuting, a founding member of Sō Percussion.
Sō Percussion teaches “composing for found objects” as part of the course, and encourages their students to use anything — household items like frying pans, garden thingies like flower pots, stuff you might find at a yard sale, etc. Treuting says some budding composers become almost obsessed about their favorite object.
For Cuong, it was crystal glasses.
“(Viet) got so excited about clinking glasses, and sketched some ideas for the first semester, then (polished the work more) in the second semester,” Treuting says. “He got so many cool sounds, and he took those ideas and spun them into the concerto. (The motif) becomes an underlying melody.”
“Re(new)al” is just part of the program. The PSO will also perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major “Pastoral” and Carlos Simon’s “Four Black American Dances.”
And Treuting is just one part of Sō Percussion, which also includes Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, and Adam Sliwinski.
The quartet recently won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, “Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch),” the most recent album they co-created and co-produced with composer/violinist/ vocalist Caroline Shaw.
Sō Percussion’s relationship with Shaw began at Princeton. Like Cuong, Shaw took their Composing for Percussion course and was especially energized by the segment on creating music for found objects.
“The first quartet that Caroline wrote came about through this class,” Treuting says, noting that flower pots became Shaw’s favorite object to compose for.
Some of the ensemble and Shaw’s earlier collaborations had their seeds in the Princeton Sound Kitchen, where graduate students and faculty composers within the university’s Department of Music collaborate with contemporary performers and ensembles to present new works.
“Many of the things we do start off at the PSK, but these (pieces) on ‘Rectangles and Circumstance’ started at our studio in Brooklyn,” Treuting says. “Then we went to Vermont to a recording studio. When we want to dig in deep, we go there; we get away from the madness and really sink into the project.”
“Rectangles and Circumstance” is an album of 10 songs and follows Sō Percussion’s Grammy-winning Nonesuch debut, “Narrow Sea,” and their first record as a band, 2021’s “Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part.”
Listen carefully and you’ll hear some interesting instrumentation throughout various tracks, things like toy piano, kalimba, and antique cymbals called crotales, to name a few.
“We also bow the vibraphone,” Treuting says. “You can bend pitches on the vibraphone by putting pressure on the bar while bowing it, and you get this funky sound. You can also bend pitches by dipping the crotales in water. Debussy used them — they’re a chromatic set of circular discs. You hit them and then dip them in water. We’ve found this sound and so many others just from experimentation. That sound actually connects us with Viet; he uses this crotale technique, too, in his concerto.”
One composition on the album starts with a toy piano, another uses children’s toy bells, the one-scale mini-xylophone that’s usually painted in bright colors.
“They’re so easy and fun to play,” Treuting says. “We mix all these things together and get magical sounds. We’ve had a lot of joy working with Caroline, and this last album was the most collaborative yet, just passing ideas back and forth.”
Grammy Award-winning engineer Jonathan Low, who has worked with Ohio-based rock band The National and superstar Taylor Swift, co-produced with Sō Percussion and Shaw on both “Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part” and “Rectangles and Circumstances.”
“We met Jon through The National,” Treuting says. “Our group comes out of Yale, and Bryce Dessner from The National was at Yale the same time we were there. He’s written a piece called ‘Music for Wood and Strings,’ the first thing we did together, and Jon Low came in to record it.”
“We’ve also recorded some percussion for many of The National albums, like ‘Sleep Well Beast,’ and ‘I am Easy to Find,’” Treuting says. “Jon just had this unique approach to recording percussion instruments. We loved all the work we’ve done together. He’s often an engineer working with other producers, but for all three albums we’ve done with Caroline, he’s been the producer as well.”
Sō Percussion originally formed in 1999, when the members were students of Robert van Sice at the Yale School of Music. They began a summer residency program at Princeton University in 2009 and have since settled in the area.
The group is well known for their use of non-standard instruments and found sounds in performance and on recordings, such as scrap metal, rocks, flower pots, and even an amplified cactus.
The ensemble is celebrated for an array of work and collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater, as well as their work in education and community. Committed to increasing public knowledge of new work, Sō Percussion’s composition partners include David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Nathalie Joachim, Dan Trueman, and Kendall K. Williams, among others.
To mark their 25th anniversary, later this year Sō Percussion will release a boxed set (eight CDs) featuring 25 different composers’ works, all commissioned for them.
“This will be on Cantaloupe Music, the record label of Bang on a Can and a longtime home for much of our work,” Treuting says.
Getting back to the crystal glasses that open the Cuong composition: Is it difficult to rehearse or perform without breaking these delicate vessels?
“It happens less often than you’d think,” Treuting says. “But on airplanes, no matter how carefully we pack the glasses and carry them in special cases, we get off the plane, and quite often a couple are broken.”
“Everyone in the audience knows what it’s like to clink a wine glass, so like much of what we do, our audience can relate to doing it,” he says. “Then, as the music goes on, they say to themselves, ‘wow, they’re doing this in a virtuosic fashion.’”
Treuting and the other members of Sō Percussion are passionate about spreading the word that percussion is a serious art form in chamber music, not just a novelty. That message has been successful, he says.
“But with orchestra concerts and music, percussion is still seen as ornamental,” he says. “Being a professional percussionist is such a rich and thoughtful practice, but the audience often sees it as ornamental.”
“For the concertos we do, it’s about putting percussion in front of the orchestra and also highlighting the percussionists in the orchestra, who have a lot to do in Viet Cuong’s piece,” he adds. “The mallet instruments and the piano interact with the wine glasses, and they keep the motor running.”
“We want to give the audience a different sense of what percussion is up to these days,” Treuting says. “It’s a deep practice, not just a novelty.”
Sō Percussion & Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University. Saturday, March 8, 8 p.m., and Sunday, March 9, 4 p.m. $10 to $120. 609-497-0020 or www.princetonsymphony.org.
Sō Percussion on the Web: www.sopercussion.com.
Viet Cuong on the Web: www.vietcuongmusic.com.
