Sandbox Percussion opens ‘Classically Uncorked’ series in final … – Vail Daily

Parents, don’t casually dismiss your child’s plea to become a YouTuber. Instead, remind them videography — like any other craft — takes a little work to refine. Victor Caccese knows all about it.

The 34-year-old percussionist, one of four members of the New York City-based Sandbox Percussion, helped cultivate the ensemble’s culture into a “visually and aurally stunning” one as he taught himself filming and editing concepts during the pandemic.

“We really try to bring in a few different disciplines to a live performance that are more than just the actual music performance,” he said in advance of the group’s three-day ‘Classically Uncorked’ concert series Aug. 1-3, part of the final week of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival.

“I think we often see a video performance of a piece as sort of its own independent piece of art, even from the performance of the piece or the piece itself.”

Caccese sensed percussion quartet playing was his calling during his final few years of undergraduate coursework at Peabody Conservatory. As he transitioned to Yale for graduate school, he cold-called Peabody classmates Ian Rosenbaum and Terry Sweeney — and later Jonny Allen, who they met at Yale — and asked if they wanted to get together and rehearse on the weekends.

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“Without any real goal of any concerts or anything like that. Just doing it for fun because it was music we were really excited about,” Caccese said of the group’s forming in 2011. “And it sort of grew from there.”

Caccese described Rosenbaum as the determined one with “clear goals and a good headspace.” Allen is the “nice guy” in the group and Sweeney is well-read and thoughtful. Caccese, who, along with Sweeney, craves an early-morning daily run and is eager to explore Vail Mountain’s trails, described himself as ‘passionate.’

“When I decide I’m really into something, I really go full-force ahead.”

Together, each provides a plethora of skills, like the aforementioned videography — to help shape the brand. Caccese’s work, “Bell Patterns,” cuts against the stereotypically busy percussion stage by gathering all four friends around one vibraphone.

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“We each have a little bell that’s pitched and we each are assigned a number — 2,3,4,5 — and there are different little rhythmic cells that basically get composed based on these little number sequences,” Caccese described.

The five-minute long piece, on the Aug. 1 show, will treat listeners to an interdependent kaleidoscope of patterns that run Caccese’s course before a final resolution.

“It kind of sounds like one super-percussionist playing this crazy hard solo that one person could never do, but it’s split up between the four players,” the composer said.

Described as ‘exhilarating’ by the New York Times, Sandbox Percussion certainly fits Bravo! Vail’s description for the ‘Classically Uncorked’ series — “remarkable juxtapositions of music by cutting-edge composers, familiar favorites and brand new voices” — in a chamber setting with handcrafted wines, à la carte hors d’oeuvres and cabaret-style seating.

On the Aug. 2 program, Sandbox Percussion will perform Andy Akiho’s “Seven Pillars.” The group commissioned 11 filmmakers, including Caccese, to create 11 videos for each of the piece’s 11 movements. A complete film anthology can be seen on the group’s Youtube channel, but Sandbox Percussion also collaborated with a stage director, Michael Joseph McQuilken, to develop a unique live presentation. The group triggers seven Astera tube lights via Bluetooth through an iPad while playing the piece.

“(McQuilken) has designed all of these different cues and colored looks for each movement; it’s highly integrated into this piece as we play it,” Caccese described, adding there is also considerable movement on stage as well.

“That brings another level of the stunning visuals that we try to bring to the live concert.”

Even though COVID forced the group’s focus online with live stream concerts and new music posts, he was curiously deep-diving YouTube tutorials even before then.

“Really it came from curiosity and being excited about learning a new skill and learning how to show a piece of music in a new and interesting way,” he said.

“Realizing we actually live in a time with technology, where it’s fairly accessible to pick up a camera or even a cell phone and film things and think creatively about how you’re getting different shots and editing those shots together.”

Maybe there is something to all this new-fangled technology after all.

“I think I got into different ways to teach yourself to edit and software to film different things and create it into its own piece of art that is separate from the music,” Caccese summarized.

“Taking the visual elements and the aural elements and finding the touch points between those two things to develop into a video.”