So Percussion: complex and labyrinthine

Among a slew of high profile events, So Percussion’s back-to-back performances on the beautiful main floor of Heritage Hall may be PuSh Festival’s hidden gem.

Brooklyn natives Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting who make up this musical quartet, came together ten years ago while attending the Yale School of Music. The group uses a battery of conventional percussion instruments including marimbas and standard drum kits as well as everyday objects such as porcelain tea cups, earthenware flower pots, industrial piping and cast steel brake drums.

Introduced by Music on Main’s artistic director David Pay, the foursome opened the concert appropriately with the most basic form of percussion – the sound of eight hands clapping. Steve Reich’s brisk rhythmic exercise builds on synchronised hand-claps, starting in unison and then progressing to a variation of beats.

Next, another Reich composition, simply entitled Four Organs, which featured a six-note repetitive melodic fragment on four programmed synthesisers. An unadvertised guest appearance by principal percussionist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Vern Griffiths became a fifth member of the group on maracas. Extended percussion forms can get pretty tedious and at ten minutes duration, this piece was probably eight-and-a-half minutes too long.

Relief came with the orientally influenced Nagoya Marimbas, arguably the most pastoral piece of the evening’s selection and certainly the most affecting. Requiring only half of the quartet; Jason Treuting on the five octave marimba and Josh Quillen partnering on the four-and-a-quarter octave marimba performed this intricate soundscape with marked finesse. The marimba is a more complex instrument than the xylophone it resembles and might cost as much as a decent piano.

The trance-inducing Music for Pieces of Wood, as its title implies is played entirely with mallets tapping on small blocks of wood. The blocks, made from purpleheart wood selected specially for its resonant timbre, are all of roughly the same width but vary in length. Vern Griffiths was again called upon to add heft to the arrangement which felt as if it was entirely improvised, but in fact faithfully follows the noted score.

The band closed out the performance with David Lang’s curiously titled The So-Called Laws of Nature – Parts 2 & 3 - Jason Treuting, the quartet’s spokesman never bothered to explain what happened to Part 1. The first movement (part 2) was played with hammers striking rows of stainless steel tubes emanating vibrant sonic textures. In the second movement (part 3), the musicians resorted to extracting some extraordinarily intriguing sounds from ordinary objects, creating complex and labyrinthine routines.

Since the group’s inception their goal has been to enhance the percussive music form as a performance art.

So Percussion, presented by PuSh International Arts Festival & Music on Main, took place on 24 & 25 January 2010 at Heritage Hall in Vancouver. For more information get to the beat here.