USC School of Music and the Southern Exposure New Music Series present The Palmetto Saxophone Quartet
October 28, 2026
“Dark, too, blooms and sings”
The Southern Exposure New Music Series’ second concert of the 2026-27 season features the acclaimed Palmetto Saxophone Quartet in a program of music by some of today’s most dynamic composers, including the South Carolina premiere of David Kirkland Garner’s “Dark, too, blooms and sings.”
This free concert – no tickets or reservations required, general admission seating – is on Friday, November 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the USC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly St., Columbia.
The Palmetto Saxophone Quartet, formed in 2019 and already featured in performances throughout the United States, includes USC saxophone professor Clifford Leaman, one of the nation’s leading pedagogues and performers, and three acclaimed graduates of his powerhouse sax studio: Sheldon Johnson (Radford University), Andrew Allen (Georgia College and State University), and Matthew Castner (Boise State University).
The quartet’s Southern Exposure program is a stylistically broad tour-de-force, including short works by some of today’s most exciting composers.
Highlights include Grammy- and Pulitzer-nominated USC grad Andy Akiho’s rhythmic, sometimes frenetic Amalgamation for digital playback and sax quartet; Carlos Simon’s thrilling evocation of a Pentecostal worship service, Catch on Fire; Julia Wolfe’s joyful, deconstructed Cuban dance, Cha; and USC professor John Fitz Rogers’ anguished and apocalyptic contemporary masterpiece, Prodigal Child. The program’s title references a new piece written for the Palmetto Saxophone Quartet by former USC composition professor David Kirkland Garner, which will debut in South Carolina that night in only its second performance. Garner’s work was inspired by Wendell Berry’s poem “To Know the Dark:”
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
This free concert – no tickets or reservations required, general admission seating – is on Friday, November 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the USC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly St., Columbia.
Paintings by the concert’s featured artist, Regina Langston, will be on display in the USC School of Music Administration office before the event.
For more information or to arrange direct interviews with musical and visual artists, contact Clay Mettens, interim director, Southern Exposure, at [email protected] or 859-912-2676. (Michael Harley, Southern Exposure New Music Series director, is currently on sabbatical.) For the Palmetto Saxophone Quartet, contact Andrew Allen at [email protected].
