Princeton-Based Sō Percussion and Caroline Shaw *14 Won a Grammy

For four years, Jason Treuting had what he calls a “paper Grammy.” Now he also has a real one.

Treuting, a drumset specialist with the Princeton-based group Sō Percussion, was the drummer on the opening track of Taylor Swift’s album Folklore, which won the award for Best Pop Vocal Album and Album of the Year in 2021. Swift alone got to take home the hardware, but Treuting received a certificate from the Recording Academy in recognition of his contribution. Now Treuting and the other three members of Sō Percussion — Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, and Adam Sliwinski — will each receive their own Grammy statues. Their album, Rectangles and Circumstance, featuring composer Caroline Shaw *14, was honored for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. 

Cha-Beach represented the ensemble at the Grammy ceremonies on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. He thanked Shaw as well as his fellow Sō Percussion members saying, “You guys are my brothers, and I feel just lucky to do this with you.”

Watching back home, the others soon found their phones blowing up with the good news. Jokes Treuting, “We’re hearing from people we haven’t heard from since high school.”

Rectangles and Circumstance consists of 10 songs written and performed by Shaw and Sō Percussion, drawing on the works of several 19th and early 20th century poets, including Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake. “When Sō Percussion started working with Caroline, we noticed that her first creative step, before writing any music, was to suggest sounds. Then, she would step back and listen,” Sliwinski wrote on the album’s liner notes.

Sō Percussion, which was founded in 1999, is known for broadening the range of percussion to include almost any object that makes a resonant sound when struck, including tin cans, shards of pottery, and even a cactus. Since 2014, they have been the Princeton music department’s Edward T. Cone Performers in Residence.

Treuting says he found it especially significant that the group was recognized in the category of chamber music because, face it, theirs is not your grandparents’ chamber music. “We’re not necessarily what you’d think of in that category,” he admits. “For the recording academy to recognize our work could lead to other opportunities for us.”

Certainly, the group will remain busy. Sō Percussion is celebrating its 25th anniversary season with several new projects. On March 8 and 9, it will play a concerto with the Princeton University Orchestra at Richardson Hall featuring works by composer Viet Cuong *22. In May, the group will reunite with Shaw for a two-week residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And in September, they will release an eight-CD box set comprised of all new works. 

“We feel really confident about our output,” Treuting says, “but something like a Grammy just reads so much more broadly in the public mind.” 

Shaw, meanwhile, who was a student in the music department’s Ph.D. program for several years, also remains highly in demand. The Philadelphia-based group The Crossing won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance for Ochre, which features a libretto partly written by Shaw. Her contribution weaves lines from Tennyson and Goethe’s Faust with fragments from a 15th century French chansons, and even includes the formula for iron oxide, which produces the pigment ochre, for which the composition was named.

The shared award with Sō Percussion is the fifth Grammy win for Shaw, who has been nominated seven times. She also won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her composition, Partita for 8 Voices, becoming the youngest person ever to win a Pulitzer in music. She sings with the acclaimed choral group Roomful of Teeth.

Shaw is now one of the country’s hottest composers. Donald Nally, The Crossing’s founder and conductor, says that Shaw’s composition, To the Hands, written for the group in 2016 as a response to a cantata by Baroque composer Dieterich Buxtehude, has been performed more than 200 times since it was first commissioned.

“Caroline is no longer an ‘emerging artist;’” Nally says. “She has definitely landed.”