Sandbox Percussion Premieres New Music by Leading Composers at 92nd Street Y, featuring Conor Hanick

Sandbox Percussion Premieres New Music by Leading Composers at 92nd Street Y, featuring Conor Hanick

Wednesday, Jan. 31, at 7:30 p.m. — Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center

New York City — Jan. 9, 2024 — On Jan. 31, the GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion, which the New York Times calls “exhilarating” and The Guardian “utterly mesmerizing,” will present world premieres and New York premieres of music by some of today’s leading composers: Andy Akiho, Tyshawn Sorey, Christopher Cerrone, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and Vivian Fung. The quartet of established leaders in the worlds of contemporary music and percussion will be joined by new-music champion Conor Hanick for this unique program, centered on two works composed for them: Cerrone’s Don’t Look Down and Sorey’s For Arthur Jafa.

Don’t Look Down, a 17-minute concerto for prepared piano and percussion quartet, was written during the pandemic. It is Cerrone’s reflection on its effects. “The title takes its name from an article by the economist Paul Krugman,” writes Cerrone in his program note, “referring to the moment when the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote would look down and suddenly realize he’d fallen off a cliff, at which point he would actually drop.” The movements — “Hammerspace,” “The Great Empty,” and “Caton Flats” — reflect on the world before the pandemic, the uncertainty during its unfolding, and the welcome noise of the now, employing sonic oddities, from wine bottles to a bicycle pump. Don’t Look Down received its world premiere at Caramoor in 2020, a performance that the New York Times singled out among the “Best Classical Music of 2020.” This will be the New York City premiere.

The kinetic nature of Cerrone’s work is in stark contrast to the elegance of the new work by Tyshawn Sorey, a MacArthur fellow and United States Artists fellow. For Arthur Jafa belongs to a series of Sorey’s personal dedications that include For George Lewis, composed for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and For Fred Lerdahl, after the composer who served as Sorey’s principal advisor at Columbia. Composed for Sandbox Percussion and Hanick, For Arthur Jafa is named after the pioneering Black cinematographer and video artist, whose work ponders the universal and specific articulations of Black being. The performance will be the New York premiere.

Though Andy Akiho came to composition by way of the steel pan, his Portal is for any group of instruments and any number of performers — a “a template for further arranging and creativity,” says Ian Rosenbaum, a founding member of Sandbox Percussion who attended college with the composer. At its heart, Portal consists of an ostinato that is 19 sixteenth-notes long, and a series of melodies that grow in harmonic and rhythmic complexity. The structure is set, but the instrumentation, dynamics, pacing, and interpretation are left up to the performer. The piece was premiered at the 2023 Music from Angel Fire Festival, in New Mexico, in celebration of its 40th anniversary. This will be the New York premiere.

The music of Ellis Ludwig-Leone combines lush, naturalistic textures with moments of thorny complexity, influenced by storytelling and myth. “In talking with the members of Sandbox Percussion, I became interested in writing a work that would showcase a different side of their musicianship, with an emphasis on polyphony and harmonic development,” writes Ludwig-Leone in his program note for Lifeline, which will receive its world premiere. “It would have the kind of extended melodic lines — so often a feature of string quartets, but less so in percussion repertoire — that lend themselves to interpretive phrasing in performance.”

Featuring glockenspiel, bowed vibraphones, marimba, wood blocks, toms, bass drum, and other assorted instruments, Lifeline begins with fast notes on mallet instruments, with expansions and contractions that give out bursts of energy and propel the quartet through quick harmonic changes. The process spins itself out, exhausting its energy as it gives way to a quiet, sustained harmony primarily played on bowed instruments. The journey from explosive, energetic music to a more serene, internal landscape brings a feeling of ritual, explains Ludwig-Leone — a shared understanding that growth and life eventually gives way to decay.

(Un)Wandering Souls was originally a three-minute response by Canadian composer Vivian Fung to Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (2017), the first major symphonic work to commemorate the atrocities of the Cambodian genocide. The Requiem was composed by Him Sophy, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. In her program note, Fung, who visited Cambodia for the first time in 2019, explains that her extended family lived in Phnom Penh in the 1970s, until the Khmer Rouge stormed the city in 1975 and drove everyone out. “Those events changed the course of my family forever,” she writes. “I have been increasingly trying to piece together my family history and how it affected my family members’ subsequent lives.” This expanded version of (Un)Wandering Souls will receive its world premiere by Sandbox Percussion.

To round out the concert, Hanick will present the New York premiere of Samuel Carl Adams’s Études, Vol. 1, which had its premiere at Music Academy of the West with six pianists playing each movement. The challenge was “to create a set of short pieces that could work both as strung together in a seamless performance with multiple pianists, as well as with one pianist doing the whole thing,” writes the composer. Rather than compiling seven unrelated technical studies, Adams writes each movement in sets of corresponding pairs. The movements are performed without pause, with the overarching form of the set taking the form of a large mirror image; this creates, in essence, one large étude that “goes beyond the material and individual technical challenges and becomes, in addition, a kind of study in long-form structure.”

Sandbox Percussion: Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney
Conor Hanick: piano

• Wednesday, Jan. 31, at 7:30 p.m.
• Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center, 92NY
• Tickets start at $40 and are available at www.92ny.org/event/sandbox-percussion-with-conor-hanick
• The concert is 90 minutes, without intermission.
• Online streaming is also available for 72 hours following the performance. 

Program

• Vivian Fung, (Un)Wandering Souls (world premiere) [Sandbox Percussion]
• Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Lifeline (world premiere) [Sandbox Percussion]
• Christopher Cerrone, Don’t Look Down (NYC premiere) [Sandbox Percussion & Conor Hanick]
• Samuel Carl Adams, Études, Vol. 1 (NY premiere) [Conor Hanick]
• Tyshawn Sorey, For Arthur Jafa (NY premiere) [Sandbox Percussion & Conor Hanick]
• Andy Akiho, Portal (NY premiere) [Sandbox Percussion]

About Sandbox Percussion
Described as “exhilarating” by the New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, the GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion brings out the best in composers through their unwavering dedication to artistry in contemporary chamber music. The members were brought together in 2011 by a love of chamber music and the simple joy of playing together; today, Sandbox Percussion captivates worldwide audiences with visually and aurally stunning performances.

Sandbox Percussion’s 2021 album Seven Pillars was nominated for two GRAMMY® awards — Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The ensemble performed the piece more than 15 times throughout the United States and Europe last season, including at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris.

This season, Sandbox Percussion also releases their fourth album, Wilderness, featuring the piece of the same name by experimental composer Jerome Begin. Other season highlights include two performances at the Park Avenue Armory (New York), featuring premieres by Chris Cerrone and Viet Cuong; and an appearance at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Sandbox Percussion will also continue to champion Viet Cuong’s acclaimed concerto for percussion quartet Re(new)al, with performances with the Des Moines Symphony (IA), and with the Albany Symphony (NY), which commissioned the piece.

Besides maintaining an international performance schedule, Sandbox Percussion holds the position of ensemble-in-residence and percussion faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and The New School’s College of Performing Arts. In 2016, Sandbox Percussion founded the Sandbox Percussion Seminar, introducing percussion students to the leading percussion chamber music of the day.

Sandbox Percussion endorses Pearl/Adams musical instruments, Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Remo drumheads, and Black Swamp accessories.

About Conor Hanick
Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music, new and old, whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master,” according to the New York Times. Hanick has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie, De Singel, Caramoor, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Park Avenue Armory, presented at the Gilmore Festival, and has worked with acclaimed conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ludovic Morlot, Alan Gilbert, and David Robertson.

A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with veteran composers like Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, as well as some of the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Samuel Carl Adams, and Anthony Cheung. This season, Hanick will be performing recitals across the U.S. and Europe, including performances with Julia Bullock, Jay Campbell, Joshua Roman, Seth Parker Woods, American Modern Opera Company, and the Takt Trio. Some of these performances include Hanick’s San Francisco Performances debut at Herbst Theater, and the Aix-en-Provence Festival. As part of the California Festival in Ojai, he will perform a new set of piano etudes by Samuel Carl Adams, whose piano concerto No Such Spring Hanick premiered last year to wide acclaim with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen. 

Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.

About The 92nd Street Y
The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a world-class center for the arts and innovation, a convener of ideas, and an incubator for creativity. 92NY offers extensive classes, courses and events online including live concerts, talks and master classes; fitness classes for all ages; 250 art classes, and parenting workshops for new moms and dads. The 92nd Street Y, New York is transforming the way people share ideas and translate them into action all over the world. All of 92NY's programming is built on a foundation of Jewish values, including the capacity of civil dialogue to change minds; the potential of education and the arts to change lives; and a commitment to welcoming and serving people of all ages, races, religions, and ethnicities. For more information, visit www.92NY.org.

Media Contact:
Matthew Herman, Managing Director
8VA Music Consultancy
matt@8vamusicconsultancy.com