A March Diversion-So Percussion concert

With all of London getting ready for the Jubilee and the Olympics, we saw a lot of "diversion" signs in the city this spring.  In the states we call them detours.  Tom and I took a  diversion from  London in late March  to see a concert by So Percussion (Adam's percussion quartet) at Carnegie Hall.  

The day of the concert, I walked from our hotel over to Carnegie Hall.  The first thing I saw was a huge Mayflower moving van.  I thought "Wow, So Percussion really has a lot of equipment for this concert."  I soon found out that the San Francisco Symphony was also playing at Carnegie Hall and they were unloading their equipment.
It was exciting to see the poster for the concert on the outside billboards of Carnegie Hall.  It was even more exciting to see that it was sold out.






The concert was called  "We Are All Going in Different Directions"- A John Cage Celebration. This was a tribute to Cage in honor of his centenary year.






Here's what the Carnegie Hall website said about the concert program.  No one did more to change how we think about music—how we listen to it, make it, perform it—than John Cage. As part ofAmerican Mavericks at Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn-based ensemble So Percussion fetes this challenging composer, who was born 100 years ago in Los Angeles, and whose influence is felt today almost everywhere in American music.

Someone once asked me if percussionists play more than drums. The entire stage was filled with all kinds of drums, computers, soda bottles (filled with water) conch shells and anything else that four percussionists could find to create music.  The number shown on the wall was a digital clock that showed the exact timing of the concert. This was also a tribute to Cage's music which as explained by the New York Times review said, "Even the show’s timing winked at Cage. A backward-counting chronometer projected on the stage wall showed that the program took precisely 91 minutes, the time it would take to perform Cage’s “4’33” ” 20 times: once for each year since his death in 1992.

So Percussion was joined by composers and artists honoring John Cage including Dan Deacon, Matmos, Cenk Ergun and Beth Myers. The concert ended with a standing ovation for the performers.

An after concert reception was hosted by Carnegie Hall to celebrate!

Adam, Cristina and I after the concert



Here is So Percussionn performing John Cage's Third Construction