Gabriel Kahane | Sandbox Percussion

Sandbox Percussion is the newest addition to my musical community. We’ve admired each other from afar for a while, and they have a particular—and, to me, appealing—interest in moving the percussion quartet beyond the spectacle of highly “gridded” music. I recently spent a day with them in Portland, Oregon, when they were in town to perform Andy Akiho’s brilliant Seven Pillars. (It was a spellbinding performance!) As we sat in my backyard brainstorming for this project, I was struck by the gentleness of their spirits, and how thoughtful they are when it comes to the possibilities of the percussion quartet as a vehicle for expression. It is no secret that much of the percussion repertoire emphasizes the “vertical”: music on a grid, highly and often virtuosically coordinated, yet sometimes reduced to something of a spectacle. (“Look how fast they’re playing!”) It’s precisely this paradigm that Sandbox hopes to escape. To that end, we’ve talked about leaning into a more flexible sense of pulse, as well as a rich, chromatic harmonic palette. As with Teeth, I hope that this collaboration will interrogate the traditional relationship between composer and performer(s), blurring the lines between text and interpretation.

—Gabriel Kahane, August 2022