On Oct. 25, Middlebury welcomed Sō Percussion and Caroline Shaw for a mind-boggling night of acoustic poetry. With soulful chanting, processional tempo and impeccably layered percussion sounds from novel instruments, the group cast the audience in an enthralled trance.
The sounds featured a complex assembly of diverse elements. Percussive sounds stacked upon a base layer of melody, which accompanied or, at times, deliberately overpowered the vocalists’ singing. The diversity of percussion featured Fender Rhodes—a kind of electric piano— vibraphones, organs, steel drums and everyday items such as flower pots. Even sounds of ripping duct tape and pouring water innovatively found their way into the acoustic complex.
The show was as much an acoustic as a visual experience, with spotlights serving as theatrical props. Each musician on stage was illuminated by a spotlight, which was turned on and off in conjunction with the music. This interplay of light and sound elevated the show into a multisensory feat. Every musician on stage played with a visible sense of abandon as if music was a substance flowing through them. There were moments that bordered on delirium that were especially invigorating to watch — this musical intensity gave a visceral feeling to the performance.
What struck me as extraordinary about the music was how, despite its structural complexity, its emotive effect on the audience was immediate and potent. As the percussion sounds merged into a steady tempo, they gained a processional energy. Blended with Shaw’s resonant and piercing voice calling far into the distance, the multilayered music evoked feelings of poignancy, contemplation and infinitude. The dreamlike trance it cast over me as I sat transfixed was reminiscent of Cocteau Twins, and the processional undertone felt similar to certain tracks on Japanese Breakfast’s 2021 album “Jubilee”.
Apart from the innovative and versatile approach to sounds, Sō Percussion succeeded in completely blurring the line between speech and music. A seemingly spontaneous introductory speech about the upcoming song would segue seamlessly into the music, with the last word of the speech echoed on repeat, acquiring musicality as it bled into the next song. One of the songs was performed entirely in speech, where five artists uttered varied fragments of the sentence “This is not making sense”. From uttering single words to spelling out each letter, the waves of human voice climbed on a crescendo and reached a fervent breaking point before coming to a stop where they exclaimed in unison: “This makes sense!”
Midway through the performance, I wrote down in my journal: “This is poetry.” Indeed, the music was literally poetic; almost all of the song lyrics are sourced from famous literary texts. Excerpts from “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “The Sacred Harp” by the 18th-century poet and hymnist Anne Steele and verses from Anne Carson, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein,William Black and others found their way into the lyrics. The narrativity of the group’s musical composition is remarkable. It is music that possesses a rich interiority, wrestles with unanswerable questions and disturbs as much as it soothes the senses.
Christian A. Johnson Professor Emeritus of Music Peter Hamlin attended the show, and shared his thoughts with The Campus.
“It’s really interesting how she [Caroline Shaw] combines vocal techniques from all over the world, many of them ancient. So, in a way, it’s a combination of elemental and fresh. A metaphor I came up with while listening was how, at every moment, there is a door with a whole new sound in it, ” Hamlin said.
Stephen Abbot, professor of mathematics, also shared his experience of the show: “I couldn’t figure out how to listen to it at the beginning. It felt like trying to read Shakespeare—it’s English, but it’s not going in. Somewhere in the middle, I let go of my expectations and figured out what river I was in.” “The river is a great metaphor,” responded Peter Hamlin, “because when you’re in a river, you can’t fight where you’re going.”
This sentiment of being carried away is echoed in Caroline Shaw’s impulse to compose the music in the first place. “When I perform pieces by other composers, I often hear the music going somewhere else in my head,” said Shawl, quoted in the program for the show.
For the listeners, the music similarly represents a kind of journey. We were all born in the waves of sounds —“elemental and fresh,” ancient and modern, natural and instrumental — towards a final resting place of awe.
