SALT LAKE CITY, UT— Sō Percussion has long been described as an ensemble that “redefines” chamber music, but that verb feels far too small for what unfolded at Libby Gardner Hall on Tuesday night, January 13, 2026. What the quartet offered was not merely redefinition but expansion: an opening outward of what counts as sound, instrument, structure, or even shared musical memory.
Presented by UtahPresents in partnership with the University of Utah School of Music, the concert previewed two major premieres—Kendall K. Williams’s Panorama for Mallet Quartet and Caroline Shaw’s Strange and Artificial Echoes—before the works head to Carnegie Hall later this month. The evening doubled as a kind of communal debut, bringing more than twenty student percussionists into the fold for the program’s final selections.
Kendall K. Williams’s Panorama (World Premiere)
I invited Professor Sam Bryson—Director of Percussion at Weber State University and leader of Utah’s steel band Pantastica—to join me for the performance, knowing his deep relationship with Panorama tradition. Listening beside him sharpened every contour of the piece. Having played in Pantastica with Bryson, we recognized the authenticity of the textures together: the melodic clarity, the harmonic interior, the guitar-like comping patterns, the grounded bass logic, and the careful construction of the engine-room layer emerging from foot-operated percussion.
Witnessing the premiere with someone so fluent in Pan tradition clarified for me just how deeply the piece honors Panorama. What Sō Percussion achieved was not just stylistic reference—it was structural fidelity translated with care, intelligence, and respect. Before the piece began, Jason Treuting described their learning process: learning the music entirely by rote, just as pan players in Trinidad and Tobago have done for generations.
According to Treuting, Panorama took shape over 3.5 years and roughly 300 hours, passed from Williams to the quartet slowly, intentionally, body to body rather than page to page. For Sō Percussion, this was not simply learning a piece; it was stepping into a lineage.
For Bryson, the very first signal—the clicking of mallets, much like a bandleader tapping the skirt of a pan to start the ensemble—transported him straight to Woodford Square in Port of Spain. The driving tempo, the intricate interlocking lines, and the moment Sō Percussion began playing the irons while maintaining melody, countermelody, harmony, and bass felt astonishingly true to the musical world he loves.
The stacked sixteenth notes on two sets of hi-hats evoked both a drum set and a güira; the mounted bass drum and kick drum grounded the groove; the cowbell and brake drum added the unmistakable color of the engine room. Highly impressive on all levels—composing and execution!
Composer Insight: How the Steelband Became a Mallet Quartet
After the performance, I messaged Williams to ask how the parts were split, and he shared how he mapped a full steel band onto four players. Jason Treuting carries the melody, sometimes adding chords; Eric Cha-Beach shapes the harmony, moving between harmonic lines and countermelodies; Adam Sliwinski becomes the guitar section, comping steelband strumming patterns nearly 80% of the time; and Josh Quillen grounds the bass, mirroring the depth and drive of the big pans.
This mapping—melody, harmony, comping, bass—carries the structural DNA of Panorama into a contemporary chamber context, making the piece both culturally grounded and sonically new.
Caroline Shaw’s Strange and Artificial Echoes
Receiving its U.S. premiere, Shaw’s new 25-minute work is less a linear composition and more a constellation—an assemblage of memories, citations, and sonic artifacts suspended in orbit around one another. Inspired partly by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis—with its fantastical “Sound Houses”—Shaw threads together historical and personal echoes: Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet, John Cage and Morton Feldman’s 1960s radio conversations, Celeste Oram’s tape experiments, and even rocks collected from Shaw’s own backyard.
The work drifts between acoustic and electronic textures—voices, hums, cassettes, taped rehearsals—creating an atmosphere where recognition and estrangement coexist. Shaw encourages listeners to “feel free to daydream,” and the piece seems written for exactly that mode of perception. It functions as an archive—not of documents but of resonances, timbres, and moments across time, continually folding back on themselves.
What emerges is a piece that rewards openness and curiosity. It is strange, yes, and artificial by design—but also intimate, tender, and unexpectedly human.
Eric Cha-Beach — 4+9
Cha-Beach’s 4+9 is a study in rhythmic possibility—a kind of mathematical meditation masquerading as a groove. Scored around a single 9/4 bar, the piece tests every way its 36 sixteenth-notes can be divided: by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 18. What emerges is a constantly shifting grid where the underlying pulse feels both steady and unsettled, like watching a pattern reorganize itself in real time.
Originally written for the Sō Percussion Summer Institute in 2017, 4+9 expands on Cha-Beach’s earlier rhythmic experiments in A Gun Show, stripping the idea down to “the pure process” of hearing each permutation unfold. The result is propulsive, architectural, and quietly astonishing—a reminder that rhythm is its own landscape.
Jason Treuting — Go Placidly with Haste
Growing from Treuting’s modular project Amid the Noise, Go Placidly with Haste turns simple musical ideas—drones, pulses, textures—into a flexible, communal performance environment. Like Terry Riley’s In C, the work maintains its identity across wildly different sonorities. The piece is designed to expand, contract, and shift depending on who joins the ensemble, making each performance genuinely unique.
A highlight of the evening was the collaboration with the University of Utah Percussion Studio, whose students joined Sō Percussion onstage for Amid the Noise and Go Placidly with Haste. Their precision, presence, and musical maturity expanded the finale into a true community performance—an ensemble of emerging and established artists sharing a single musical language.
Student performers included:
Davis Fowers, Nathan Montoya, Ella Prawitt, Peter Hill, Jake Harker, Rebekah Hall, Zach Anderson, Conner Johnson, Kaitlynn Steff, Alex Kent, Jordan McMillan, Tim Petersen, Ellie Foote, Jaxon Howes, Eillot Mohlman, Evelyn Williams, Sawyner Nutall, Ian Miller, and Drew Fallon.
Conclusion
Sō Percussion’s evening at Libby Gardner Hall was a reminder of what chamber music can become when curiosity leads the way. From steelband lineage to experimental sound houses, from mathematical precision to communal joy, the quartet expanded the possibilities of what we can hear, remember, and make together. It was not only a preview of Carnegie Hall programs to come, but an offering uniquely alive in Utah and a rare moment where global traditions, local artists, and deep listening met in the same room.
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Next concert: Friday, January 23, 2026, 9 PM —Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall
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