Spring brings something brand new to CMT with Sandbox Percussion! The GRAMMY®-nominated group is the first percussion ensemble to receive the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. They captivate audiences around the world with visually and aurally stunning performances. See and hear them perform as we present a percussion ensemble for the first time in CMT history.
Sunday, April 11, 2027 | 3:00 pm | Lorton Performance Center, University of Tulsa
Program selections to be announced.
About the Artists
Described as “exhilarating” by the New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, the GRAMMY®-nominated Sandbox Percussion champions living composers through its unwavering dedication to contemporary chamber music. In 2011, Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney were brought together by their love of contemporary music and interest in expanding the percussion repertoire; they have since captivated audiences around the world through visually and aurally stunning performances. Today, the foursome are established leaders in contemporary music for percussion, engaging a wider audience for classical music through multidisciplinary collaborations with leading composers and artists.
Sandbox Percussion has toured the world—from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris to the Beijing Music Festival—and reached mass audiences through NPR’s immensely popular Tiny Desk series, TED Conferences, and film. The group’s 2025 Tiny Desk debut consisted of a genre-defying program of pieces by Andy Akiho and Viet Cuong, two of the most important voices in contemporary classical music. Sandbox Percussion also recorded percussion music for its first feature film, The Wild Robot (DreamWorks, 2024), an animated science fiction film directed by Chris Sanders, with music by Kris Bowers. It received three Academy Award nominations, and a GRAMMY® Award nomination for the score.
Sandbox Percussion is the first percussion ensemble to receive the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. At the 2024 ceremony, the group performed “Pillar V,” from Seven Pillars, a 2021 feature-length suite for percussion quartet composed by Akiho and commissioned by Sandbox Percussion, with stage direction and lighting design by Michael VQ. The New York Times praised Seven Pillars as “a lush, brooding celebration of noise” and “as pure as music gets.” It was nominated for two GRAMMY® awards—Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition—and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Since the world premiere, the group has taken Seven Pillars on tour around the globe.
A highlight of Sandbox Percussion’s 2026–27 season is the completion of Pentalateral and its premiere in full. The group’s ongoing collaboration with Andy Akiho—resulting from a 2024 Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission—builds on the success of the Seven Pillars, bringing to fruition the artistic potential that was cultivated throughout the collaborative process for the earlier piece, this time with Akiho joining on steel pan to form a powerful quintet. The five musicians, who share a distinctive synergy, will continue to develop, complete, and record the hour-long piece and take it on tour beginning in the spring. The live performance will again incorporate visual elements by Michael VQ. The movement “Pentalateral I” is available now on all streaming platforms.
Throughout the season, Sandbox Percussion presents wide-ranging programs that highlight some of the most important composers of our time at major venues for contemporary music, including Steve Reich at Trinity Church, Christopher Cerrone at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Andy Akiho at 92nd Street Y. The group also appears at Yale University, the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Chamber Music Northwest (Portland), and Schubert Club at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and UCSD, San Diego, among other prestigious venues and festivals.
Sandbox Percussion’s upcoming album, available this fall on the Cold Blue Music label, features Prophecies of Fire, a work for percussion quartet by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams. “I’ve come to regard these four young men as the foremost interpreters of my percussion music,” writes Adams in his program note. “And I welcomed the invitation to compose Prophecies of Fire—a concert-length work—specifically for them.” The group gave the world premiere at Chamber Music Northwest in 2024.
Besides maintaining an international performance schedule, Sandbox Percussion holds positions at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, where they have created a curriculum with entrepreneurship and chamber music at its core, and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
Sandbox Percussion has led masterclasses and coachings across the United States, including at Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, the Yale School of Music, and the Peabody Institute. In 2016, the Sandbox Percussion Summer Seminar was founded, which invites percussion students to rehearse and perform today’s leading repertoire for percussion. The 12th Seminar takes place at The New School this season. Sandbox Percussion launched the Creator Mentorship Program in 2022, a commissioning program for early-career creators who are selected to compose a new work and receive funding for workshops and development.
Sandbox Percussion endorses Pearl/Adams musical instruments, Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Remo drumheads, and Black Swamp accessories.
