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Lavinia Meijer Premieres Douglas J. Cuomo's Every Door and Sandbox Percussion Performs The Jump Up!

Apr. 23, 2025

Last month, Dutch harpist Lavinia Meijer premiered Douglas J. Cuomo's Every Door for solo harp at The Studio on the Stanford Live series. The piece was inspired by Itaru Sasaki's wind phone - a phone booth he built in his backyard in Otsuchi, Japan, to help him deal with his grief after the death of his cousin. The booth contains a phone that's not connected to anything, and through that phone he speaks with his lost relative. Cuomo was taken by the mysterious beauty of this idea, and asked Lavinia if she had the chance what she would say. She replied very simply: "I would have opened every door for you", and this text is spoken by Lavinia during the very last section of the piece."

Click here to read more about Every Door, wind phones, and their connection with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

On April 26, Sandbox Percussion performed the West Coast premiere of Douglas J. Cuomo’s The Jump Up!, a site-specific piece directed by Mark DeChiazza, shaped to accommodate the specific topography and features of its location. The performance is presented as part of La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival and in partnership with UC San Diego Professor Steven Schick and Red Fish Blue Fish.

The Jump Up!, premiered last season at Caramoor, is a celebration of the joy of communal music making, composed for Sandbox Percussion and volunteer percussionists from the local community. This free outdoor performance will have the musicians roaming through the Epstein Family Amphitheater, with the audience encouraged to freely move about the players, each listener navigating their own interaction with the music.

Click here to view scenes from Sandbox Percussion's premiere of The Jump Up! at Caramoor last season.

To learn more about Douglas J. Cuomo, visit schott-music.com.

Douglas J. Cuomo
Every Door
for solo harp
6'

The Jump Up!
for percussion quartet
with audience participation

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