Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion
featuring Ringdown

Artists

CAROLINE SHAW

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. Most recently, she has been nominated for her first Tony Award (Best Original Score) for the current Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. This year’s projects include the score to Fleishman is in Trouble (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible (dir. Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s Partita with NY City Ballet, a new stage work LIFE (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of Microfictions Vol. 3 for NY Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick co-composed with Andrew Yee, two albums on Nonesuch (Evergreen and The Blue Hour), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work Delicate Power, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with Sō Percussion featuring songs from Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society).

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SŌ PERCUSSION

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With innovative multi-genre original productions, sensational interpretations of modern classics, and an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker), Sō Percussion has redefined the scope and vital role of the modern percussion ensemble.

Sō’s repertoire ranges from “classics” of the 20th century, by John Cage, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis, et. al., to commissioning and advocating works by contemporary composers such as Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Steve Mackey, and Paul Lansky, to distinctively modern collaborations with artists who work outside the classical concert hall, including vocalist Shara Nova, electronic duo Matmos, the groundbreaking Dan Deacon, legendary drummer Bobby Previte, jam band kings Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Wilco’s Glenn Kotche, choreographer Shen Wei, and composer and leader of The National, Bryce Dessner, among many others.

Sō Percussion is the Edward T. Cone Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University, where they offer educational work and present an annual series of concerts. They are also Co-Directors of the percussion department at the Bard College-Conservatory of Music, and run the annual Sō Percussion Summer Institute (SōSI, now in its ninth year), providing college-age composers and percussionists an immersive exposure to collaboration and project development.

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RINGDOWN

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​Ringdown’s music is like calling your first love on a rotary telephone, percussively tearing out the hammers from a 1924 vintage upright, and flinging each of them into space while you wait for every heartache you’ve ever felt to quietly return. Collaborators Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan—who between the two of them have a Pulitzer Prize, a handful of Grammys, and a “Best Drum Major Award”—describe Ringdown as an electronic cinematic pop duo based in Portland, OR and New York, NY. Others have described Ringdown as the love child of Johannes Brahms and Brandi Carlile—if they were born in the same century and if Brahms was a queer woman. You decide.