The Living Earth Show

The Living Earth Show is an innovative and boundary-pushing percussion-and-guitar duo. In its own words, the duo “uses the tools of experimental classical music to foreground BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, facilitating the creation of their most ambitious musical visions and creating work that reflects and responds to our world.”
The Living Earth Show consists of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. The pair came together in San Francisco in 2011. From the beginning, the Living Earth Show has focused on commissioned multimedia productions; collaborators have included dance companies, visual artists, sculptors, poets, and other musicians, in productions that often contain material relating to California in some way while amplifying voices excluded by the general classical music tradition. The duo made its recording debut in 2013 with the album High Art, following that up three years later with Dance Music on the New Amsterdam label. Committed to shaping the next generation of creative thinkers, the Living Earth Show has held various residencies, including those at the University of South Carolina and the University of California at Davis in 2018, the University of Michigan Center for World Performance Studies and Stanford University’s music department in 2019, and the University of Maryland in 2021.
A look at the duo’s 2019-2020 season gives an idea of the range of its activities. The Living Earth Show appeared at the Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina, at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco (in a production called “Tremble Staves” that was co-produced with the National Parks Service), at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, with San Francisco’s ODC Theater dance company in a festival honoring the duo’s tenth anniversary, and at the Cloisters in New York (in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in Lordship & Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman. That work appeared on a Living Earth Show album in 2019. The duo returned in 2022 with an appearance on Lyra, an album of genre-crossing music by John Adams’ son Samuel Adams, and during that year, the Living Earth Show planned a diverse series of almost-monthly album releases. ~ James Manheim