Sandbox Percussion Wins a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant

Brooklyn-based quartet becomes the first-ever percussion ensemble to receive award

New York (March 21, 2024) — The GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion, a quartet of established leaders in contemporary art music and percussion, received a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant last night. The awards ceremony took place in the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WQXR studios, where Sandbox Percussion and four other artists were announced as this year’s recipients of the career-advancing grant, which the Avery Fisher Artist Program awards every year to no more than five artists. The $25,000 grant provides professional assistance and recognizes instrumental artists who the program believes have great potential for major careers in classical music.

“We are deeply honored by this award from the distinguished Avery Fisher Artist Program,” said percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, who co-founded Sandbox Percussion in 2011 with fellow members Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, and Terry Sweeney through a mutual love of chamber music and contemporary composition. They are now an internationally renowned new-music quartet and have become the first percussion ensemble to receive the prestigious award. “We have looked up to many of the previous recipients and been inspired by them for years,” added Rosenbaum. “It’s exciting to become part of the celebrated history of this program.”

Deborah Borda, the Avery Fisher Artist Program Chair, and Nancy Fisher, daughter of the late Avery and Janet Fisher, presented the awards at the ceremony, which coincided with the program’s 50th anniversary. The annual ceremony includes a short performance by each selected artist and a professional recording. This year’s performances, which included music by the Balourdet Quartet, violinists Njioma Chinyere Grevious and Julian Rhee, and pianist Clayton Stephenson, besides Sandbox Percussion, will be broadcast on April 11 at 8 p.m. and April 13 at 7 p.m. on WQXR 105.9 FM.

Sandbox Percussion performed “Pillar V” from the riotous Seven Pillars, a 2021 feature-length suite for percussion quartet composed by Andy Akiho and commissioned by Sandbox Percussion, which the New York Times called “a lush, brooding celebration of noise.” “Pillar V” is built around a hexatonic scale and an interminable ostinato; with each repetition, the music swells and presses forward relentlessly, ending with an obsessive acceleration of the six pitches of the scale. Seven Pillars earned Sandbox Percussion and Akiho a GRAMMY® nomination for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance,” and the composer a “finalist” placement for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Since the world premiere in 2021, Sandbox Percussion has taken Seven Pillars on tour throughout the United States and Europe, with stage direction and lighting design by Michael Joseph McQuilken.

The Avery Fisher Career Grant will allow the recording and touring ensemble to jumpstart a follow-up commission from Akiho, a steelpan virtuoso with whom the quartet has a mutual synergy that resulted in the creation of Seven Pillars. The success of that work and its ongoing performance history has inspired Sandbox Percussion and Akiho to collaborate on a new piece, this time with Akiho joining the group on the steelpan. The planned quintet, about an hour long, will bring to fruition the potential that was discovered and cultivated throughout the collaborative process for Seven Pillars. It will add Akiho’s virtuosic talents as a performer. A recording and a tour as a live quintet are also in the works.

This season, Sandbox Percussion performed at the Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room, featuring premieres by Chris Cerrone and Viet Cuong, and at the 92nd Street Y with new-music specialist Conor Hanick on piano. In May, the quartet performs at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with acclaimed new-music performers Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, and Alisa Weilerstein. Sandbox Percussion will also continue to champion Viet Cuong’s ingenious concerto for percussion quartet Re(new)al, which they have performed every season since the premiere in 2017.

In the summer, the ensemble will give the world premieres of Prophecies of Fire, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams; and To Sing or Dance, for violin and percussion quartet, by GRAMMY® winner Joan Tower, also featuring violinist Soovin Kim. Later this year and in upcoming seasons, Sandbox Percussion will also perform new music by Douglas J. Cuomo, Tyshawn Sorey, Paola Prestini, and Gabriel Kahane. Future album releases include music by Michael Torke and by Chris Cerrone.

More about Sandbox Percussion
Described as “exhilarating” by The New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion brings out the best in composers through their unwavering dedication to artistry in contemporary chamber music, engaging a wider audience for classical music through multidisciplinary collaborations with leading composers and artists.

This season, Sandbox Percussion released the album Wilderness, featuring the piece of the same name by experimental composer Jerome Begin. The hour-long work seamlessly fuses the raw impact of live percussion instruments with electronic manipulations in real time. Last season, Sandbox Percussion released Bathymetry, featuring music for percussion and analog synthesizer by Matt McBane. The album draws from various strains of minimalism and modern electronic music production, and from ASMR and ambient modular synth videos. In 2020, the ensemble released their debut album, And That One Too, featuring music by Andy Akiho, David Crowell, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Thomas Kotcheff. 

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, where they have created a curriculum with entrepreneurship and chamber music at its core. In 2016, Sandbox Percussion founded the Sandbox Percussion Seminar, a weeklong seminar for today’s leading repertoire for percussion chamber music.

In 2022, Sandbox Percussion launched their Creator Mentorship Program, a commissioning program that solicits proposals from early-career creators around the world. The selected creators are commissioned to create a new work for the ensemble, and they receive time, space, and funding for a yearlong workshop and development period.

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

About the Avery Fisher Career Grants
Established by the late Avery Fisher in 1974, the Avery Fisher Career Grants give professional assistance and recognition to emerging instrumental artists who the Executive Committee of the Avery Fisher Artist Program believes have great potential for major careers in classical music. The Program, which supports instrumentalists and chamber ensembles, provides recognition in two categories: the Career Grants, given annually, and the Prize, given less frequently as the highest form of recognition for outstanding achievement and leadership in classical music.

Including this year’s awards, a total of 176 Career Grants have been awarded since 1976. All recipients are currently active musicians. The recipients are nominated by the Program’s Recommendation Board of nationally recognized instrumentalists, conductors, composers, music educators, managers, and presenters. Each laureate receives a $25,000 award, to be used for specific needs in advancing a career. Former Career Grant recipients include clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianists Haochen Zhang and Anne-Marie McDermott, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, and the Dover Quartet. The Avery Fisher Artist Program is committed to all forms of diversity, with recipients chosen based on outstanding artistic merit. Up to five Career Grants may be given each year. Final selections are made by the Program’s Executive Committee. Recipients must be U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents. For more information, please visit www.averyfisherartistprogram.org.