Dear friends,

We hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season and that the new year is treating you well. After some much needed rest and relaxation with family and friends, we’re jumping into 2023 feeling energized and excited for the coming months.

 

Goldbeater’s Skin, by Chris Cerrone
Performed by Sandbox Percussion and Elspeth Davis, mezzo-soprano

We’re starting off the year with two recording sessions. The first is an audio session for Chris Cerrone’s Goldbeater’s Skin featuring mezzo-soprano, Elspeth Davis. That piece will eventually be part of a full album of Chris Cerrone’s music—including Don’t Look Down for percussion quartet and piano, A Natural History of Vacant Lots for percussion quartet and electronics, and a new quartet that Chris is writing for us this year. The second recording is an audio-video session in partnership with Metropolis Ensemble and Continuous Motion Productions for Molly Joyce’s Loud and Soft. To make this even more exciting, Molly’s performance video will also feature sound descriptions to assist folks who are hard of hearing.

 

Snippets of our process working on Wilderness, by Jerome Begin

This year, we’ll also start the process of recording Jerome Begin’s Wilderness, for percussion quartet with live electronic manipulation for release later this year. We first premiered this piece in 2016 as part of an evening-length dance show with the Brian Brooks Moving Company, and we fell in love with the music instantly. In this piece, Begin creates a lush tapestry of colors using a relatively simple set-up of drums, crotales, triangles, wood blocks, and glass bottles. We are so excited to share the final product with you later this year!

This month, we’re thrilled to begin our role as ensemble in residence at the College of Performing Arts, part of The New School in NYC. Starting in late January, we’ll be working with students across many artistic disciplines on techniques for collaboration, and foundational rhythmic concepts. This will be our first step into our role as mentors, teachers, and members of the New School community, and we are overjoyed to begin this journey.

2023 will also be chock-full of—drum roll, please 🥁—more Seven Pillars performances! If you weren’t able to see us perform this monster of a piece in 2022, take a look at the events page on our website. We’d love to see you the next time we’re in your area!

Your friends,

Ian, Jonny, Terry, and Victor