Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated flutist, composer, and vocalist. The Brooklyn-born Haitian American artist is hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice” (The Nation). She is co-founder of the critically acclaimed urban art pop duo Flutronix, and comfortably navigates everything from classical to indie-rock, all while advocating for social change and cultural awareness. A 2020 United States Artist Fellow and a 2019–2020 Kaufman Music Center Artist-in-Residence, Joachim has performed and recorded with an impressive range of today’s most exciting artists and ensembles, including Bryce Dessner, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Richard Reed Parry, Miguel Zenón, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and is the former flutist of the contemporary chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. As a composer, Joachim is regularly commissioned to write for instrumental and vocal artists, dance, and interdisciplinary theater, each highlighting her unique electroacoustic style. Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti is an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet and electronics that celebrates some of Haiti’s most iconic yet under recognized female artists and explores Joachim’s personal Haitian heritage. The work, released in 2019 on New Amsterdam Records as Joachim’s first featured solo album, received a Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album.
Though I’ve spent much of my life trying to quiet my inner voice, for this work I chose to focus on and explore the thoughts that occupy my headspace as a result of my chronic anxiety.
Note to Self, for percussion quartet and recorded samples of my voice, takes the listener through different phases of cyclical thoughts and states of being that I experience regularly. Composed in three short movements, this work examines the notion of having my inner voice embodied elsewhere in an attempt to create new space for processing emotion. It also plays with repetition as an opportunity to bring new meaning, understanding, and perhaps some levity to the language itself. Each movement is a reimagining of vocal incantations that—driven by imaginative, virtuosic, and whimsical percussion scoring—re-center and re-purpose my voice as a tool for healing.
—Nathalie Joachim
Caroline Shaw is a New York–based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gilbert Kalish, Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Juilliard415, Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, Calidore String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry. Shaw’s film scores include Erica Fae’s To Keep the Light, Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, and Maureen Towey’s 8th Year of the Emergency. Shaw has produced for Kanye West and Nas, and contributed to records by The National and Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. At the Kennedy Center, she joined Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds in three-part harmony. Shaw has studied at Rice, Yale, and Princeton. She currently teaches at New York University and is a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School.
Narrow Sea places the seeds of old American folk hymns within the unlikely combination of Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gil Kalish. Together they create unique sound worlds with ceramic bowls, flowerpots, humming, and a piano played like a dulcimer. All of the lyrics are from songs found in The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape note hymns first published in the 19th century. These lyrics, set in entirely new melodies, sing about “going home.” Each hymn refers to water in some way, as an image of what lies between this world and the next, and each carries a sense of joy in looking beyond that river. The words reveal our essential human yearning for a home, a safe resting place.
—Caroline Shaw
Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero continues to make musical strides as a groundbreaking and highly adept beatboxer, vocal percussionist, and breath artist who pushes the boundaries of the human voice within and outside the context of hip-hop music and culture. He formally served as a dance technique musician and composer-in-residence for Towson University’s Department of Dance for 12 years and is the founding director of Embody, A Festival Series of the Vocal Arts, which strives for artistic and cultural convergence through a variety of vocal art traditions such as opera and throat singing to the many forms of vocal percussion. Talifero now serves as the university’s first innovator-in-residence. Over the years, Talifero has moved from beatboxing’s hip-hop roots to explore innovative and convergent collaborations with a wide range of traditional and classical artists. He serves as the beatboxer and vocal percussionist for the globally renowned Alash, one of the world’s leading Tuvan throat-singing ensembles.
Vodalities: Paradigms of Consciousness for the Human Voice seeks to illuminate the different modalities of the vocal arts utilized by not only me, but vocalists the world over. Through three movements composed specifically for Sō Percussion—with each focused on the vocal modalities, or “vodalities” of breath art, vocal percussion, and beatboxing—Sō’s challenge was to listen to, learn, and (of course) enjoy each vocal movement, transcribe the pieces from a hip-hop–based oral tradition construct to a system of Western notation, and finally through “technique transcription” to figure out which physical, percussion-based instruments and which members of the ensemble using those tools would be best suited to play each element of the overall compositional structure. In other words, welcome to the 21st century, where compositional paradigms and a synthesis of learning styles can take on a whole new reversal of impact, influence, and imagination.
—Dominic Shodekeh Talifero
A founding and current member of Sō Percussion, composer-percussionist Jason Treuting has appeared in performance around the world. His compositions have been performed by Sandbox Percussion, Ji Hye Jung, the JACK Quartet, Tigue, and others. Treuting’s unique voice as a drummer and percussionist has made him an in-demand recording artist; in recent years he has worked frequently with both Bryce Dessner and Aaron Dessner, contributing to Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore, and to recordings by Ben Howard and Big Red Machine, and the soundtracks to Cyrano and
The Two Popes. Other frequent collaborators include Cenk Ergün, Grey McMurray, Steve Mackey, Caroline Shaw, Susan Marshall and Company, and others. Treuting studied at the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, and also studied marimba with Keiko Abe in Japan and gamelan with Pac I Nyoman Suadin in Bali. He is co-director of the percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music and lecturer of music at Princeton University, where Sō Percussion is ensemble-in-residence.
Treuting’s Amid the Noise is performed as a suite of purely instrumental pieces, each of which was composed using the patterns of language to generate new and often dizzying musical patterns. Many of the pieces assign different rhythmic values to consonants and vowels so that the balance and symmetry manifest effortlessly and covertly in the music.
Sō Percussion has performed Amid the Noise dozens of times around the world, incorporating everything from huge steel bands to brass choirs to percussion ensembles and more. Tonight, the quartet is joined by many friends and colleagues to celebrate this time of reconnection after such a difficult couple of years.
—Sō Percussion
Amid the Noise began as a soundtrack, which morphed into Sō’s third album and then into a flexible set of live music. Now it is a communal music-making project that can occur with a flexible number of musicians in almost any combination.
The musical ideas in Amid the Noise are abstract: drones, melodies, rhythms, textures, and patterns. Originally, Sō orchestrated them on the instruments we had in our studio, but we’ve since discovered that accordion, organ, or tuba might play a satisfying drone as well as bowed vibraphone. This work maintains its identity and integrity even through wildly different realizations.
—Jason Treuting