SŌ PERCUSSION / CAROLINE SHAW
Rectangles and Circumstance
Rectangles and Circumstance represents the collective creative effort of Sō Percussion and Caroline Shaw. After collaborating on 2017’s Grammy-winning composition Narrow Sea, we started to co-compose music for Let the Soil Play its Simple Part, which was released on Nonesuch Records in 2021. After a few years of touring Let the Soil Play its Simple Part together, with a pandemic in between, we came to record Rectangles and Circumstance for Nonesuch as a road-tested band who knew each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately.
Most of the songs started with instrumental pieces or fragments of pieces from Sō’s Jason Treuting or Eric Cha-Beach. Sometimes, those sketches came fleshed out with verse and chorus structure, other times they started as exercises or variations for us to jam on. We built these first layers at Guilford Sound, a state-of-the-art recording studio in a bucolic hilltop setting in Southern Vermont.
After the Vermont sessions, we had nearly completed the instrumental tracks. Caroline returned to them in the fall in New York in smaller sessions with Eric (who produced the album for Sō Percussion) and Jon Low. It was in the New York sessions that she started to fit poetry to new melodies, grabbing bits of the recordings we’d made. Sometimes she composed a melody to sing over the completed track; at other times, such as with Rectangles and Circumstance, she pulled the track apart and reassembled it with new material.
As both a songwriter and a classical composer, Caroline is accustomed to writing lyrics and also setting them. For this album, she, Eric, and I sourced a group of 19th-century poems that shaped the expressive mode for this album. Most of them are by women. We used verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake. In some songs, particularly “Sing On,” Caroline freely mixes the poet’s words with her own.
The title track “Rectangles and Circumstance” proposes a reflection on technology-saturated modernity. In many ways, the 19th-century texts remind us that love, loss, and true connection will always be our human obsessions, no matter what comes along to mediate them. As is usual with our creative process, these connections emerged rather than being planned. For instance, “Rectangles and Circumstance” was one of the last tracks to come together.
The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain word play that explores the same profound feelings that Blake and Dickinson do. Eric Cha-Beach’s “Who Turns Out the Light” expresses the loving but exhausted thought patterns of a parent trying to coax and calm a young child (and themselves). Caroline’s lyrics on songs like “And So,” “Slow Motion,” and “Rectangles and Circumstance”— the latter two of which she wrote with her Ringdown bandmate Danni Lee — often employ a meta-layer of words that talk about structures of words.
For the last song “To Music,” Josh Quillen and Caroline concocted their own warped version of Franz Schubert’s An Die Musik. The result is a glacial, minimalist version that is almost three times longer than the original. At this pace, Schubert’s magnificent voice leading, his small passing notes in the bass voice, and his luscious harmonies all seem to be suspended in the air. This leaves the ghost of a structure, like a ruined building or an ancient underwater city.
— Adam Sliwinski, Sō Percussion
CAROLINE SHAW
Narrow Sea
Narrow Sea was written for Sō Percussion, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and pianist Gil Kalish in 2017. Working with the seeds of old American folk hymns, they created unique sound worlds using ceramic bowls, flowerpots, humming, and a piano played like a dulcimer. All of the lyrics are from songs found in The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape note hymns first published in the 19th century. These lyrics, set in entirely new melodies, sing about “going home.” Each hymn refers to water in some way, as an image of what lies between this world and the next, and each carries a sense of joy in looking beyond that river. The words reveal our essential human yearning for a home, a safe resting place.
— Caroline Shaw