For most music festivals, the setting is incidental—a field, a stage, a convenient place to gather a crowd. At Groundtone, the landscape is part of the score.
Returning to PS21 in Chatham June 18-21, Groundtone transforms the organization’s 100-acre campus into a site for musical exploration, where performances unfold not only in the Pavilion Theater but across meadows, pathways, barns, and open fields. The four-day festival is less a sequence of concerts than a roaming encounter with sound itself, inviting audiences to listen differently—to music, to place, and to one another.
Now in its second year, Groundtone serves as PS21’s annual deep dive into adventurous music, bringing together artists who move easily between genres and traditions. This year’s lineup ranges from contemporary classical and experimental music to jazz, rock, and collaborative works that resist easy categorization.
The festival opens June 18 with Grammy-winning percussion quartet Sō Percussion joined by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Becca Stevens, whose work draws equally from folk, jazz, and chamber music. The collaboration exemplifies Groundtone’s larger ethos: artists meeting in unexpected combinations and finding new possibilities in the overlap. Earlier that evening, Dutch percussionist Clara Warnaar launches the festival with a solo performance.
On June 19, Sō Percussion returns to the grounds to perform the music of minimalist pioneer Steve Reich before the evening shifts toward the jazz-punk energy of The Messthetics and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. The pairing brings together one of contemporary jazz’s most acclaimed improvisers with the instrumental trio formed by members of Washington, D.C.’s post-hardcore legends Fugazi.
Saturday’s programming highlights Groundtone’s eclecticism. Harpist Parker Ramsay, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and cellist Jay Campbell perform works by contemporary composers, while the evening features Order of the Illusive, a collective that blends spiritual jazz, hip-hop, and experimental sound. Throughout the weekend, audiences can also experience Annea Lockwood’s Home Ground, a new site-specific work that acoustically maps the PS21 landscape itself.
The festival concludes at sunrise on the summer solstice with perhaps its most emblematic event. Composer Phil Kline’s “Force of Nature (June),” a participatory musical procession commissioned by PS21, invites audience members to carry portable speakers, phones, boomboxes, and other devices playing fragments of the composition as they move through the grounds. The result is music that seems to emerge from everywhere at once—from the meadow, the trees, the morning air. The performance also inaugurates Chatham’s first participation in the global Make Music Day celebration.
That emphasis on participation may be what most distinguishes Groundtone from a traditional festival. Yes, there are virtuoso performers and ambitious programs. But there is also a sense that music is something shared rather than simply consumed. Across four days, Groundtone invites audiences to wander, listen, and discover how sound can reshape a familiar landscape—and how a landscape, in turn, can shape the way we hear.
