Premiere : 16 juillet 2022, Taplin Auditorium, Université de Princeton, New Jersey, Etats-Unis
Commission and production : Sō Percussion
Musicians : 4 percussionnistes
Duration : 9’
Part of the “MINIMAL” program.
Born in Missouri in 1991 and now based in Brooklyn, Shelley Washington is an American saxophonist and composer whose broad palette borrows from jazz, rock and folk. Not surprising for an artist who has counted composers Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw among her mentors, and collaborates with contemporary music ensemble Eighth Blackbird as well as pop musician Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). Although Sunday was not commissioned by Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the performance recorded here is virtually a creation. Shelley Washington composed it as part of the 2022 edition of the Sō Percussion ensemble’s summer residency at Princeton University (New Jersey). Minh-Tâm Nguyen got in touch with the composer when she came across a video recording of this performance, and she embarked on a rigorous editing of a piece originally hand-written for Princeton students. Today, the Percussions de Strasbourg performers have taken the luxury of time to work on the nuances, the melancholy and luminous melody.
It is also the memory of an injury that guided Shelley Washington in writing Sunday, in the spring of 2021. Or rather of a time before the injury, that of the “last (im)perfect Sunday afternoon I’d spent before everything fell apart. (…) Just reading books at the café, wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood, taking a quiet break in a shady spot. That last easy and comely, bittersweet, normal, quiet and boring day spent by the park, doing nothing.”