The San Antonio Chamber Music Society has been expanding their programming with surprising and delightful results. Last February, the society welcomed Brooklyn-based Sandbox Percussion, who brought an array of bells, drums, and woodblock instruments.
The program included newly-commissioned works, original material by the group, and one of seminal works in the percussion repertoire, Steve Reich's "Drumming."
"[That piece] is special for us because it was literally the very first piece that we learned when we started Sandbox," explained group member Ian Rosenbaum.
To hear the concert, use the audio link at the top of this page. Below, Rosenbaum tells us about the creative opportunities that come with performing in a four-person percussion ensemble, from commissioning innovative new music to performing in non-classical venues like dance clubs.
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Nathan Cone: First of all, could you give me a quick overview of how the four of you guys found one another to perform?
Ian Rosenbaum: Absolutely. So Sandbox was started back in 2011 and the four of us got together through the experience of going to grad school at Yale. Yale has a very particular percussion program in that, whereas many schools, it's changing a little bit these days, But many schools focus on the orchestral aspect of playing. Yale in particular focused on the chamber music aspect. The chamber music program was really central to the curriculum there, and it's a very small studio, so you get to know the other people very well. And we all studied with the same teacher. We're slightly different ages, so we went to school at a little bit of a different time, but we met through the experience of being in that program and just kind of had this desire to continue the work that we had started while in school. We really enjoyed the idea of playing in a small ensemble. We really enjoyed the idea of commissioning composers to write new pieces for us, and thought, wouldn't it be amazing if years down the line, we could create and develop something that could sustain us by doing this work.
And the name Sandbox, I'm guessing, comes from the whole idea of playing in the sandbox to create new things. Would that be accurate?
Yeah, that has a lot to do with it. I mean, hey, if you ever start a band coming up with a name is that is the worst part of it! So we struggled with it, but I think we were we liked the idea of what you just said, like the creativity and the joy of playing in a sandbox, which is truly why this group exists for us. We just have so much fun doing it. But also there was a nice aspect... I think was actually maybe one of the parents of one of the original members of Sandbox who came up with this that... You know, when a kid is playing in the sandbox, they're having a lot of fun. But you don't mess with a kid's sand castle when they're building it. Like, it's also a very serious endeavor, they're putting everything that they have into that task in front of them. And we really like the dichotomy of giving everything that we have towards this, while also figuring out a way to enjoy ourselves.
You alluded to this a moment ago when you were talking about the particular percussion program at Yale as compared to other universities. And so I kind of wanted to ask what are the unique challenges that come with being an a percussion group, a percussion chamber group, as opposed to, say, a string quartet or a piano trio or something?
Well, it's funny because the challenges I'm going to explain are also, I think, benefits... Or the things that really set apart this sort of ensemble. So for instance in a string quartet, the musical roles of each member are somewhat defined. Of course, a cellist is not relegated to only playing bass lines a hundred percent of the time or anything like that. But there are these rough ideas of where you fit in a chord when you're voicing it or where your melody fits in the texture. And with a percussion quartet, the four of us become the first violinist and the cellist multiple times in a concert or even multiple times in a piece. So it's challenging in that we all have to learn how to fit those different roles very well. But it's also fun because you get the experience of leading and following and being in the middle and all of these things.
The other thing that's so different is that we have no set instrumentation. So when you see a Sandbox concert like the performance in San Antonio, every single piece has a completely different group of instruments. Not only would you be moving between different, let's say, keyboard instruments, maybe you play marimba on one piece and vibraphone on another piece, but you're also moving between drums and glass bottles and tin cans and anything that that you could imagine. We play a whole piece on four triangles! And so it's it's very interesting because every day when I go to my studio to practice, I'm picking up many different things throughout the course of that practice session or day by day. But it's also hard because you have to figure out a way to get as close to mastering so many different instrumental techniques as you as you possibly can.
Do you guys just have a particular ear for sound, where you might hear something banging against something else and then just realize, "Hey, you know what? We could do something with that. Maybe we could, you know, commission somebody to do something with that!"
We absolutely have this obsession! I'd be lying if I told you that every time I ride the subway, I'm not like tapping that rhythm and playing polyrhythms against it or something like that. I also think we seek out particular kinds of composers who do that like Andy Akiho, he's like what I just explained, but turned up to 11! He's such an active participant in the world around him. Like, we were hanging out with him backstage, literally 30 seconds before we go on stage the other day. And instead of talking to us, he's hitting things like the little pipes that are backstage, just finding new sounds. It's a really liberating and exciting thing to be a part of, if you accept the premise that anything around you from your body, your voice, to any object that you can touch, could be an expressive instrument in the hands of the right composer, in the hands of the right performers.
Well, the new album "Wilderness" that's out right now has not only acoustic sounds, but also electronic sounds that I guess are triggered by you guys. Tell me a little bit about the structure of this album, and the sounds that are on it, written by Jerome Begin.
It's an hour long piece in 13 parts. So each track is like a different movement of the piece. And each movement uses electronics in a slightly different way. The unifying principle of the electronics is, like you just said, they are triggered by what we're doing. So sometimes it's very obvious. Like for instance, at the center of all of our instrumental set ups are these set of four roto toms, these four drums, and they have little drum triggers on them which send an electronic signal to a computer every time you hit it, including information about the velocity, how hard you hit it, how loud all of that. And then Jerome can take that information and do any number of things with it. So for instance, by the end of the piece you're hearing similar material that you heard at the beginning. There are pitches assigned to every single one of the drums. So what was once a very rhythmic experience is melodic in a way. I mean, you can of course hear contour as drums are moving up and down, and it's now a completely melodic experience in that there is a synthesizer note for every single one of the drums, and there's all kinds of other like there's this beautiful movement near the end. One of my favorites on the album called Crotale Birds, which is scored for these crotales, which are little discs of metal that are tuned to a pitch. And we're bowing them in the piece. So taking a bass bow to make these beautiful, long, sustained sounds. It's a wonderful sound. But then Jerome takes those sounds and transforms them into these, like it sounds like birdsong. It sounds like birds flying around you. But it's all based on the performance that we gave in that moment. So Jerome is as much a performer on this album. And when we play it live as us, it's just his instrument is this computer with all of these other things around it.
I went to his website, and did I read it right that he's a pianist-composer as well?
Yes, he is a pianist and he's fascinating. So we met him through his association with the dance world. So he is the director of the of the music program at the Juilliard Dance Department. So he works with dancers and composers about how to write music and how to perform music for dance. And this piece actually was commissioned by the great choreographer, Brian Brooks, for his dance company. And we did a performance with his dancers and with us playing, and we just enjoyed that experience so much that we made an album of the score.
A pianist is technically a percussionist, I guess, in a way. But does it take a percussionist to write for percussion instruments? I mean, composers throughout the centuries have written for different instruments. You know, you'll have people writing for strings or brass, and maybe they're not string or brass players, but does it take a particular type of person to write for percussion?
I don't think it takes a particular type of person, but of course you get something very different with both extremes. So Jerome, as a pianist and as a performer, he comes to his music with a performer's sensibility. So he is excellent at at, at tracking problems with what he wrote, maybe, that are going to that are going to crop up in performance. But because he could sit down and tap through the rhythms, even though he's not a percussionist. That's really helpful. It can sometimes be challenging maybe if you're working with someone who doesn't perform as much as he does, you have to kind of explain like, you know, with percussion, it's like I actually have to walk from here to here to play that other instrument or put down this mallet and pick this up. There's all these logistics involved then, and then Andy Akiho maybe is the polar opposite. He is a composer, but he's he's a percussionist too. He can play all of these instruments. He can play any of the music that he's written for us, so that gives him kind of a special entry point. I feel like "Seven Pillars" (our previous album) really takes some of the instrumental techniques and sounds that we're making to a degree that we've never experienced before. And I think Andy's background as a percussionist gives him the capability to really think outside the box and imagine new ways to make sound on these instruments. So both of these things are possible. It's just a very different experience depending on which type of person we end up working with.
Let me ask about your audiences at shows too, because I wanted to know, do you feel that you guys get more, I don't know, rock and pop fans at your shows than a typical so-called classical performance because of the nature of what you do?
In some ways it depends on the type of venue. So, here in Brooklyn where we live, we've done over the years like a series of performances at dance clubs because we discovered this amazing intersection in interest between folks who go to dance clubs and what we do. Playing music by Steve Reich or Philip Glass or someone like that is just a stone's throw away from some of the other things that are happening at venues like this. And so rather than like just showing up at a classical music series and kind of expecting that a whole bunch of folks from outside of that world might show up, I think what we've tried to do is get ourselves involved as much as possible with as many different genres as we can. "Wilderness," when we first did it with the dance company, that's a wonderful experience because suddenly we get to play percussion quartet, brand new percussion music for a whole bunch of audience members who are used to hearing dance and might have no idea who we are or what we do. But through the virtue of a collaboration like that, we get to put ourselves in front of them. To answer your question more generally, I do think people who come to a Sandbox performance are maybe thinking a little bit more all-encompassing than just a very straight-ahead classical performance. But we do our best in our performances to give a little bit of everything. And that San Antonio performance, we played a transcription of a piece by J.S. Bach, and we also played music that we had just commissioned, and we had really everything in between to try to show prospective audience members. There is really a range of potential for what you can do with these instruments that we have really only scratched the surface of.
Well, Ian, thank you so much for your time today. This is really great. And I got to say that show in San Antonio was one of the best concerts that I attended this year. It was it was so much fun!
I really appreciate that! And you taking the time both to broadcast the concert and to talk to me about it.
