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Percussion Quartet
2024
Pitched Percussion
Unpitched Percussion
Fixed Media Audio
- Program Notes
- "Breaking News" is inspired by the amusingly petty historic squabble between American newspaper companies and their rival radio news broadcasting organizations at the beginning of the 20th century. Known officially as The Press-Radio War, the discord between print and radio news sources reached a head in 1938, when representatives of the printed press organized a summit at a hotel in New York in an attempt to illegalize radio news broadcasts. Not having any substantial argument to justify banning radio stations from reporting the news, the newspaper companies intentionally exaggerated the extent of the panic caused by Mercury Theatre's 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds." By falsely claiming the hoax-news radio special had incited mass national panic, newspaper companies untimely built a case that radio was dangerous for public morale, arguing that radio's power to disseminate news so far and so fast posed a threat to public safety. In this piece, I recreate the printed press's depiction of radio as an omnipotent national threat to an absurd degree, constructing a warped reality in which the radio not only has the power to influence emotions, but can also mind control humans, puppeteer thier bodies, and distort the laws of time. The piece unfolds in six phases, each depicting the same scene of four workers in a newspaper press room tuning in to the radio as they work to monitor their competitors' news bulletins. Each phase begins identically, suggesting the workers are caught in a time loop. However, once a radio announcer cuts in with emergency news briefs (which progress in absurdity from weather reports to martians taking over the Earth) the phases diverge into increasingly wild breaks from reality. By the time we reach the sixth phase, it is apparent that what at first appeared to be nothing more than the sound of a singer's voice in a cheerful oldies tune is in fact a supernatural malicious entity that lives inside the radio. The stronger it becomes, the more it controls the workers' minds and bodies, forcing their natural motions into a rigid rhythmic pace.
- Recording Notes
Sō Percussion is a leading percussion quartet and nonprofit organization that fosters, creates, and presents adventurous new work with a unique focus on collaboration. Fueled by a belief in the unifying power of music, Sō Percussion brings the joy, curiosity, and inherent connectivity of percussion in all its forms to an ever broader audience. Sō Percussion is comprised of Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting.
- Performer Credits
- Sō Percussion