Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion, featuring Ringdown: “Who Turns Out the Light”

This evening-length performance is a band-generated theatrical experience, featuring music from Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion’s Grammy-winning album Rectangles and Circumstance, as well as their first album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with an interlude from Shaw’s pop duo Ringdown. Beginning with a lone spotlight on Shaw singing “I’ll Fly Away,” the performance builds as musicians gradually introduce lights and inventive instruments, culminating in an ecstatic full-ensemble experience featuring up-tempo songs like “Sing On” and “To the Sky”—a dazzling blend of DIY design and original music.

In celebration of the Tang Museum’s 25th anniversary, this presentation of Who Turns Out the Light continues a long-standing artistic partnership between Sō Percussion and the Tang. The performance is co-presented with Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), which joins as a community partner during renovations of the Spa Little Theater—helping maintain strong connections to the region through collaborative programming.

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion, featuring Ringdown

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammys, and an honorary doctorate from Yale. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

For 25 years, Grammy-winning percussion quartet Sō Percussion has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker). They are celebrated by audiences and presenters for a dazzling range of work: for live performances in which “telepathic powers of communication” (The New York Times) bring to life the vibrant percussion repertoire; for an extravagant array of collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater; and for their work in education and community, creating opportunities and platforms for music and artists that explore the immense possibility of art in our time. Their commitment to the creation and amplification of new work, and their extraordinary powers of perception and communication have made them a trusted partner for composers, allowing the writing of music that expands the style and capacity of brilliant voices of our time. Sō’s collaborative composition partners include David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Nathalie Joachim, Dan Trueman, Kendall K. Williams, Angélica Negrón, Shodekeh Talifero, claire rousay, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bora Yoon, Olivier Tarpaga, Bobby Previte, Matmos, and many others.

The 24/25 season hears Sō and Caroline Shaw (as well as Ringdown, Shaw’s duo) perform a program highlighting their newest Grammy winning album, Rectangles and Circumstance, at the Barbican in London, the BOZAR in Brussels, Saffron Hall in Essex, and at 92NY in New York City. The season also includes collaborations with composer Viet Cuong; solo shows at the Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires; performances with at PASIC, and much more!

Ringdown – featuring composer-musicians Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan – is an “ecstatically blissful” (Night After Night) and “irresistible” (Feast of Music) cinematic electro-pop duo creating music that floats up from the dusty record bin between Brahms and Brandi Carlile, and centers around joy, human connection, and trying to inspire people to feel more love (and maybe even reach out to a crush). The duo was drawn to each other through mutual admiration of each other’s work; Shaw has won a Pulitzer Prize and several Grammy Awards for her boundary-breaking compositions and contributed music to films including Beyoncé’s Homecoming and the upcoming Ken Burns documentary Leonardo da Vinci, and Parpan is a dynamic vocalist and folk-pop singer-songwriter who writes emotionally stirring lyrics and relishes in challenging how instruments are “supposed” to be played. Together as Ringdown, they forge a new realm that unlocks ways to write, sing, and perform that they can only access with each other, encouraging each to loosen their grip on the music they have created before and fully revel in the intricate pop music they have both always loved. Their songs are built on late nights of countless back-and-forths on tables covered in instruments and wires, sonically merging Shaw’s pull toward the abstract with Parpan’s directness, perhaps with a playlist of Sylvan Esso, Glasser, Robyn, James Blake, and The Blow in the background. The result is music that invites deep listening but also welcomes you to sing along, and – they hope – helps people feel everything they have been too afraid to feel. As for the band’s name: A ringdown is the theorized sound two black holes make in the final microseconds when they merge, a sub-bass whoosh and glide that suggest the world’s biggest synthesizer, sighing in contentment. This might also describe how Ringdown’s music sounds. Or at least how it feels to the band. Ringdown is working on a debut album for Nonesuch Records and has performed across the U.S. and abroad at Big Ears, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Public Records, SXSW, Thuringia Bach Festival, and more. The duo, who are partners on and off the stage, split their time between Portland, OR and New York, NY. Learn more at ringdownmusic.com and follow them on what they are proud to share is “their friend Virginia’s favorite Instagram account” at @ringdownmusic.