In Sō We Trust

Eric Cha-Beach, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Josh Quillen of Sō Percussion.

Sō Percussion, Princeton’s Grammy-Winning Quartet, Marks Its 25th Anniversary

By Lori Goldstein | Photography by Andrew Wilkinson

How does winning a Grammy Award on your 25th anniversary sound? Better yet: issuing an eight-CD box set of completely new material — not a retrospective album, as most music ensembles might release to commemorate such an occasion. No — rather than look back, Sō Percussion decidedly looks forward with 25×25 — 25 composers writing pieces for a 508-minute listening experience. Indeed, the quartet’s name is derived from the second character in the Japanese word ensou, meaning “to determine a direction and move forward.” For a quarter-century, Sō Percussion, Princeton University’s Performers-in-Residence, have been advancing the progress of contemporary percussion chamber music from the moment Sō was conceived.

Jason Treuting, center, with Sō Persuccion Summer Institute (SōSI) students at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

All four percussionists — Jason Treuting, Adam Sliwinski, Josh Quillen, and Eric Cha-Beach — were graduate students in the Yale School of Music. The ensemble’s genesis was the Yale Percussion Group, to which Treuting was assigned with three other students by their professor Robert van Sice in 1999. What Treuting learned from van Sice were “the concepts of how to play together, the chamber music concepts of percussion. I think he treated contemporary music very seriously, the idea of commissioning new pieces for percussion, that kind of approach, Bob really brought that ethos and ethic.”

Quillen believes “one of the driving forces behind Sō is who we work with, or why we work with folks — they’re often our friends, or we’ve crossed paths many times, or seen them at a festival … 98 percent of what we play is by people who are alive. That’s how van Sice operated …. He was a big proponent of contemporary music for the reason that you can talk to the composers — you can’t talk to Webern, Bach, or Beethoven. You can read about them. But getting in the room with living composers was a big takeaway from my time at Yale.”

They named themselves Sō Percussion and got their first gig in 2000, with Treuting demonstrating innovative drumkit and compositional skills, eventually writing the music for their first self-composed album, Amid the Noise. Sliwinski was a second-year student when one member decided to leave the group in 2002, and he was asked to join. “I really didn’t have enough imagination to think that something like this could be a full-time career,” says Sliwinski, who specializes in marimba and other keyboard instruments. “The received wisdom at the time was a percussion chamber music ensemble is what you do on the side when you have a ‘real’ job in an orchestra or teaching at a university.” He managed to complete his percussion performance doctorate while performing full-time with Sō Percussion.

Like a rock band in its formative years, Sō experienced two more personnel changes. Quillen, a steel pan specialist, had the good fortune to join Sō directly after graduating from Yale in 2006. “It was awesome but terrifying at the same time,” he recalls. “You’re joining this thing that’s in active lift-off, and you’re like, ‘Where ya going?’ and Jason’s like, ‘I don’t know! Let’s go!’’’ By 2007, Sō’s final lineup was formed with Cha-Beach, who attended both the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where van Sice also taught, and then Yale. Over the years he’s developed a penchant for learning new instruments, experimenting with electronics, and composing.

“This commonality — of all of us being from the Yale percussion program — that really is the thread connecting it all,” Sliwinski points out. “One of the reasons we kept recruiting from Yale was not just studio incest. It was also because the skills required to play the music we were commissioning were being developed with our teacher.” Their definition of percussion music is quirkily broad; in addition to traditional instruments like drums and marimbas, they’ve been known to use clinking wine glasses and snapping twigs to produce sound.

Because percussion chamber music has such a short history, peopled by minimalist composers like John Cage and Steve Reich, Sō Percussion early on realized new music would be their terrain. Their first commission was the result of a $7,500 Presser Foundation award to former member Tim Feeney. “It was really funny at the time,” recalls Treuting. “We actually thought we would commission three composers with that amount of money. We were inspired by the music of David Lang, whom we knew had gone to Yale. We loved Bang on a Can,” the new music collective Lang co-founded.

“I remember calling David and saying, ‘we’d love to commission a 10-minute piece from you. We have $2,500 for a 10-minute piece.’ He said, ‘To tell you the truth, this commission fee isn’t enough for me to write a 10-minute piece. But if you’re willing to give me the whole Presser grant, I would write you a 35-minute piece and it’s going to be very hard. I would love to write you a very virtuosic, three-movement piece.’”

Before the piece was completed, Sō Percussion played the first movement of Lang’s the so-called laws of nature in 2001 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) during a Bang on a Can Marathon concert. They premiered the entire piece in 2002 at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, earning them their first New York Times review. Treuting remembers sending out hundreds of emails to every presenter, every percussion professor … pulling that quote from the Times review: “David Lang’s piece is awesome. It has flower pots and teacups, plumbing pipes and drums … it’s consistently impressive.” The composition became their first CD.

They didn’t expect the tremendous support Lang and his label, Cantaloupe Music, would provide. “All that we were hoping for was to be on a David Lang Composers Portrait CD and just have our name somewhere real small — that would be amazing,” remembers Sliwinski. “But David and Cantaloupe said ‘No, your first record is going to be called Sō Percussion. We’re going to get the guy who created the MTV logo to design the cover art for your album, and we’re going to announce you to the world: Sō Percussion is here.’” It was released in 2004, the same year Sō established a Brooklyn studio now called Sō Laboratories, where they host workshops and concerts.

Sō Percussion in concert. (Photo by Stefan Cohen)

The year 2009 was a prelude to highly productive years. The Kronos Quartet invited Sō to perform Terry Riley’s In C at Carnegie Hall, along with luminaries Philip Glass on piano and The National’s Bryce Dessner on guitar, to celebrate the work’s 45th anniversary. Sliwinski recounts how that connection was made: Treuting just walked up to David Harrington, Kronos’ first violinist, after a Kronos concert at Yale, “and said, ‘Hey, I’m Jason, I have a percussion ensemble. Would you come, David, and listen to us play something for you?’ And David, very much to his credit, came over to the dank percussion studio in the basement, after the concert! And he basically said, ‘you’re on my radar, I see what you all are doing here.’” It was also the year Sō Percussion performed Imaginary City, their first self-composed theatrical project for BAM.

A cascade of firsts marked the years 2010-2015. The year 2010 was a watershed: Sō Percussion’s solo debut at Carnegie Hall. “Not only was that a big moment for us, but it was a big moment for a percussion ensemble,” says Sliwinski. “People from our community came to that concert just to see a percussion quartet get its own concert at Carnegie Hall.” A few days later came a glowing review in the Times. Their 2010 concert was such a success that Carnegie signed them on for another, a John Cage centenary concert — an even bigger success.

“Carnegie has a way of curating artists — they want to see them develop through their time at Carnegie,” explains Sliwinski. “Of course, it felt to us like an enormous risk for them to take something that was still developing so much as a percussion ensemble. The composers that we’d worked with, like Steve Reich and David Lang, were the roots and the anchor of that trust. Having them vouch for us was a big part of getting into those institutions like Carnegie.”

“BAM and Carnegie were these two big pillars in New York, and they had both decided ‘we support Sō,’” recounts Cha-Beach. “They took us under their wings and said, ‘OK, we see it, we get you guys, we’re going to give you some opportunities.’” Since then, Carnegie has commissioned pieces for Sō to perform every other year, and the quartet composes its own music for a multi-evening series of shows at BAM every third year. They premiered their first commissioned concerto, Lang’s man-made, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2014.

Sō regarded the 50-year-young string ensemble, Kronos Quartet, as the model for where they were headed. While string quartets can draw on more than 260 years of music literature, percussion chamber music is literally a new genre of the 20th century, at least in the Western world. Kronos made its mark as the innovator, performing only newly commissioned works. Sliwinski observes, “In a way that was an incredible amount of courage that they had to take. I would say for our part, and not that we weren’t courageous, but we really had no choice but to focus on contemporary composers, contemporary aesthetics.… If we wanted this to exist it all had to be contemporary work except for some John Cage and Steve Reich pieces. So who had done something that looked like what we wanted to do in terms of the aesthetics and programming? Kronos was the answer.”

Cha-Beach’s impression was that presenters would book Kronos and be happy with whatever they wanted to play. When presenters would come to Sō, they would request a piece they hadn’t performed or a composer unfamiliar to them. “A few times we said no to people, which was tough when money was so tight … Kronos commissioned their repertoire, happy to play any of it. We were looking at that as the model. If people just trust Sō Percussion, if you get Sō Percussion, it’s going to be cool. Trust us, that was the goal.”

Cha-Beach recalls a period when multiple recording projects “had been in the pipeline and had got frozen up. We had this one big year in 2011 when six albums came out at the same time. To me, that represents this moment, because since then, we’ve never gone more than a year or two without a record coming out. Those releases, the Carnegie and BAM relationships — all these things started firing on all the cylinders at the same time.” Now Sō has more than 30 albums of commissioned works in its catalog.

While Sō forged their performance and recording identity, they also thought about how they could contribute to the next generation of percussionists. At the time, summer percussion camps focused on a particular instrument, but none were devoted to percussion chamber music. To make a percussion chamber music festival a reality, a location was required. Treuting contacted Steve Mackey, a Princeton professor with whom he’d played at Vermont’s Yellow Barn Festival, to see if they could run a program in the University’s music building. “Steve’s like ‘Cool!’ and in the span of 45 minutes, we all of a sudden had a venue.”

Students at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute (SōSI) at Princeton University. (Continued right)

Thus, SōSI, the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, a two-week festival in July for percussion and composition students at least 18 years old, was born; it has yielded more than 375 alumni since its 2009 inception. During the program, students can interact with Sō, the composition faculty, and guest artists, as well as perform in masterclasses and numerous concerts. This summer’s SōSI featured special guest composer Steve Reich, as well as composer/performers Caroline Shaw, Angélica Negrón, and Clara Warnaar.

With the establishment of SōSI, the quartet’s connection with the University strengthened. Prior to this, Treuting had taught an undergraduate course in composition via a fellowship. Quillen points out that they annually performed doctoral candidates’ compositions in the Princeton Sound Kitchen series. In 2011, Sō conceived a year-long course where they would work intensively with composers, their collaboration culminating in a concert. In 2014 the Yale-Princeton connection came full circle: when the resident Brentano String Quartet moved to Yale, Sō Percussion was selected as Princeton University’s Edward T. Cone Performers-in-Residence.

SōSI students performing Steve Reich’s “Drumming” at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Instead of being shackled to a teaching job while trying to build a reputation as a performing ensemble, Sō first established themselves as a full-time quartet with an ever-growing catalog, and their new Princeton role was a welcome enhancement. “Having the institutional support and stability allows you to take some bigger artistic risks, and your moonshot’s going to be a little farther whenever you have some runway,” says Treuting. “The support, the trust that we’ve gotten from Princeton, gives us some security to sit and think and be experimental in ways I don’t think we’d be able to if we were just out grinding it every day trying to pay the rent on our studio. The way we symbiotically pay that back is through things like SōSI, where we’re bringing in people from all over the world to be on Princeton’s campus to see that this is a place where that sort of activity is happening.”

Sō’s alliance with the music department has resulted in the recording of works by Princeton faculty composers including Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, and Dan Trueman. Olivier Tarpaga, director of Princeton’s African Music Ensembles, acted as Sō’s guide during their 2023 West Africa tour. Recently, they’ve been collaborating with Barbara White, Dimitri Tymoczco, Tyondai Braxton and the newest faculty member, Nathalie Joachim. Moreover, Sō’s interaction with undergraduate and graduate students in their composition and chamber music classes has yielded results sometimes long after those students have left Princeton. “I just see so much music that would not have been written had they not worked with us,” says Treuting.

The most notable example of their impact on future composers is Caroline Shaw, who wrote the piece Taxidermy for Sō while she was a graduate student in their composition class. Sō co-composed Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part with Shaw, who sang the lyrics; they repeated this collaboration in their 2024 album, Rectangles and Circumstance, which resulted in Sō’s 2025 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. During the years 2015-2020, acting as a backing band, Sō Percussion branched out to collaborate with numerous other vocalists.

“COVID was a moment that really deepened our trust in each other,” says Sliwinski. I used to think playing hard music was scary, so I was glad to have my bandmates’ trust onstage. Having your whole career flash before your eyes, having to face the idea that this may not be feasible anymore was terrifying. But we four came together and figured it out.”

From left: Jason Treuting, Eric Cha-Beach, Adam Sliwinski, and Josh Quillen.

They forged new collaborations over the internet, sustained SōSI online, and Cha-Beach created a Sō record imprint. “The pandemic gave us an opportunity to look at a younger generation of composers and collaborators… diverse in their influences,” observes Sliwinski. “They’re eclectic musically, and that’s one reason why our 25×25 box set is new pieces by largely a young generation of composers.”

Some of the works are by composers Sō encountered within the Princeton music community, including Juri Seo, Donnacha Denney, and Nathalie Joachim. “Almost all of the pieces we had commissioned, premiered, and even recorded previously,” explains Cha-Beach. Since they had accumulated so many unreleased recordings, they wondered how to honor each one. Michael Gordon at Cantaloupe Music wanted to release “all of them, but said, ‘if you release an album every three months, you’re stepping on your own narrative. What if we find a reason to put all of these into a big box and … focus on the story of Sō Percussion,’” with a theme for each of the eight CDs to express different facets of their work. They have also made videos for each piece on the boxset. A different video will be released on Sō’s YouTube channel each week. A sampling of 25×25 was premiered at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on September 10 and at Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium on September 12. All of 25×25 will be available for streaming and purchase on September 26; it can be pre-ordered at Bandcamp before then.

When asked about what they would like to do in their next quarter century, Sliwinski replies, “We feel prepared to encounter lots of ideas from different places.”

They’ve all got wanderlust, with eyes and ears set on East Asia, to learn about each country’s culture and drumming traditions. Cha-Beach says, “Honestly for me, the reason I wanted to be a percussionist was I love that challenge of figuring out something new. Percussion presents that to you over and over again…. There are so many places in the world that we’ll try to get to with this mix of ‘we have our own whole life as our ensemble, and we’re always going to nurture that, and we’re always going to bring our pieces to places where we go,’ but also be a new student there at the same time.”