Portato Portato: Rites + Rituals, Chaos + Nature

Fri., Mar. 1, 2019
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm
Wind River
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$10 - $20
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Portato Portato’s 2018-19 program explores the expansion of granular experiential impressions and phenomena through texture and orchestration. Working with local and active composers drawing inspiration from the natural world, ceremony, and algorithm, the ensemble presents premieres of new works featuring delicate and playful performative media. Special guest: Stephanie Neumann, conductor

Directions to Wind River

About the Performers

Jacob Lane is a composer, pianist, and teacher who lives in Oakland, California. He works with Sleight Ensemble and Portato Portato. Jacob is a member of the Music Teachers Association of California, and teaches piano performance and music theory at The Alameda School of Music and New World Music Academy. 

In 2011, Jacob received his BA in Music Performance from Johnson State College, in Johnson, Vermont where he studied composition with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, and piano performance with Diane Huling. In 2015, he received his MFA in Chamber Music Performance from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied composition with Zeena Parkins and Roscoe Mitchell, and piano performance with Robert Schwartz. Jacob was a composer in the 2017 Atlantic Music Festival. 

Jon Myers (b. 1988 in Boston, MA) is a composer and percussionist based in Santa Cruz, CA. He creates music for a variety of settings, from fully notated acoustic pieces to live electronic feedback music. Much of his output has been rigorously process-based and statistically controlled, often involving repetition and cycles to shape the flow of time via mnemonic markers and temporal shifting. Lately, he has been working on quarter-tone Disklavier studies and just-intoned fanfares for arbitrarily tuned choirs of bamboo flutes. Myers’ compositions have been performed by Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), S.E.M. Ensemble (New York), Wild Rumpus (San Francisco), Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), and the Lightbulb Ensemble (Santa Cruz). 

Myers is a doctoral student in Algorithmic Music Composition at UCSC, working primarily with Larry Polanksy. In 2014, Myers completed a Master of Arts in Music Composition from Mills College in Oakland, CA, where he studied with James Fei, Zeena Parkins, and Chris Brown. Previously, he studied with Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he was awarded the Gwen Livingston Pokora Prize for music composition. 

Bay Area flautist Michelle Lee is a classically trained performer, new music enthusiast, improviser, and composer of electronic and electro-acoustic music currently living in Oakland, CA. Lee has attended the Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific, and holds a degree in flute performance from Mills College. Her teachers and mentors include Michelle Caimotto, Matt Krejci, Bonnie Lockett, Maggi Payne, and James Fei. Her works and practice draw from extended techniques, natural and scientific worlds, and mysticism, as well as explore the ambiguity of reconciling the disparate: her artistic and cultural influences, the seen and unseen, texture and feeling. Current works investigate the body, ritual, intuition, and text through both traditional and experimental notation, multimedia, and performance art.

John Ivers is a bay area composer, clarinetist, sound artist, and improviser known for his dynamic compositions and aural explorations. Traversing both acoustic and electronic mediums, his work explores intimate musical textures, symmetrical constructions, structured improvisation, and multiple temporal spaces. Ivers’ work has been featured at the soundSCAPE, highSCORE, Walden CMR, Cluster, and Atlantic music festivals. He has written for ensembles such as Quartetto Indaco, Amaranth Quartet, Brooklyn College’s ConTempo Ensemble, for the Leftcoast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection workshop, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

His recent work on Distant Radio Transmission with Roscoe Mitchell has been featured by the Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble directed by Petr Kotik, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Tonino Battista, at Ostrava Days Festival, and at the de Young Museum, San Francisco conducted by Steed Cowart. He is the co-founder of H/I ensemble, develops free, accessible, and collaborative music software for BandLab, and has recently guest lectured at UC Irvine and for WAC at Queen Mary University of London. John is currently pursuing an MA in Music Composition at Mills College studying with Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins, and Fred Frith.

Indexical’s Santa Cruz concert series is made possible through generous support by Arts Council Santa Cruz.

Arts Council Santa Cruz

Players gather around the piano to enact what seems to be an ancient ritual of the future. Their sounds resonate in the instrument tickling its overtones and delighting in the sensation of the sounds that come out of this.

“The Grove of the Ancients (2018) stems from a prolonged period of listening to the forested mountains on the eastern edge of the Colorado Rockies. While there I felt the erstwhile sovereignty of the wind. The recordings I took then have been fashioned together to create the sounding of a fictitious place, which the instruments have since joined.” —Declan Siefkas

Declan is a composer and pianist interested in exploring the interface between sound and felt space. At Colorado College (after he renounced his Political Science major) he studied piano with Susan Grace and composition with Iddo Aharony and Jane Rigler. He is strongly committed to bringing the practices of contemporary music to new audiences and communities. In 2016, he founded the Tenebrae Ensemble at Colorado College, which served as a local platform for new music. In its first two years, Tenebrae has commissioned and premiered half a dozen new works, performed four standalone and several smaller concerts, and provided a community for people to create and discuss music freely. His music has been performed across the country and internationally.

Declan’s music is rooted in the interaction between people and their environment. His music poses questions about our understanding of space via sound through tender acts of amplification and through invoking the inner beauty of sounds both forgotten and scorned. His recent music has incorporated field recordings in synthesis with acoustic performers, often through the use of live electronics.

Experience and Memory (2018) is a study in variation. It is inspired by the discrepancies between memories and the events from which they are derived.

Jacob Lane is a composer, pianist, and educator who lives in Oakland, California. He is the pianist for the chamber groups Sl(e)ight Ensemble and Portato Portato. A member of The Music Teachers’ Association of California, Jacob teaches piano performance and music theory at The Alameda School of Music and New World Music Academy. Jacob holds degrees in music performance from Mills College in Oakland, CA (MFA), and Northern Vermont State University in Johnson, VT (BA). He has studied piano with Diane Huling and Robert Schwartz, and composition with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Zeena Parkins, and James Fei. In addition to his own ensembles, Jacob's works have been performed by Colorado College's Tenebrae Ensemble (2018), and were featured in the 2017 Atlantic Music Festival.

Rhythmic, durational, and textural development are the base of Jacob’s compositions. His music often features a limited number of themes which are continuously developed throughout a work to create a diverse yet cohesive piece. His upcoming project, Scordatura Piano (2019), explores an alternate tuning he derived from the superimposition of two scales in just intonation. jacoblanemusic.com

should might will (2017) explores quiet threads of resistance that speak loudly against a seemingly comfortable surface.

text: the voice should/might/will be quiet.

John Ivers is a Bay Area composer and improviser exploring hybrid creative practices. Traversing both acoustic and electronic mediums, Ivers engages intimate sonic textures, unique improvisational voices, and dynamic musical structures to unravel traditional composer-performer relationships. Ivers work has been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Quartetto Indaco, Amaranth Quartet, Aperture Duo, Brooklyn College’s ConTempo Ensemble, and by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection workshop. His work has been featured at the soundSCAPE, highSCORE, Walden CMR, Cluster, and Atlantic music festivals, and his recent collaboration with Roscoe Mitchell on Distant Radio Transmission has been featured by the Orchestra of the SEM, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, at Ostrava Days Festival, and at the de Young Museum. Ivers is an also an active clarinetist and improviser, performing with Dirt and Copper, hi duo, and Portato Portato.

“Whittling I (2018) is the latest in a series of works—collectively titled Heuristic Automata—that utilize computer code to transcribe complex electronically generated sonic phenomena into traditional musical notation. This sonic material can be characterized as behaviors of a dynamical system consisting of a network of eight nonlinear chaotic oscillators. The dynamical behaviors of the analog network are simply passed through an equal-tempered mesh, parsing them with some preset constraints that conform to instrumental ranges. The system merely senses changes in frequency, velocity of events, and basic amplitude changes. Since the chaotic oscillator network is autonomous, the resultant behaviors are impossible to control other than the setting of initial conditions and some external perturbation from extrinsic sources or environmental conditions.

The use of the term “deterministic chaos” and the subsequent use of the word “chaos” is not a colloquial usage. This is a mathematical term that refers to a precise category of natural phenomena that is not simply random, stochastic or probabilistic. Since these “chaotic oscillators” are not conventional periodic oscillators but rather a network of circuits based upon a specific Ordinary Differential Equation, the result produces complex non-periodic (or aperiodic) acoustic waveforms. These sounds can be more appropriately described as evidence of a complex behavior in that a change in any parameter of one chaotic circuit in the network can cause a change in every other parameter of the other members of the network.

The implications for how (or why?) something that is perceptually analogous to traditional musical structures can be generated from these systems is also one of my foreground interests. While experimenting with the transcription process, I not only became impressed with the huge diversity of the resultant musical data but how reminiscent it could be of a divergent range of atonal musical “styles” associated with a number of familiar and celebrated 20th century composers. Most of these composers were either adherents of preexistent generative procedures (12-tone method) or invented their own generative processes, whether formal or intuitive. Since the Heuristic Automata compositions were all generated through the same organizational method and only differ by changes in the initial conditions of circuit settings, the similarity to the aural gestalts of other atonal composers has caused me to question whether such evocations are more than merely superficial. In other words: are the various aural characteristics and generative methods that we consistently associate with various atonal composers actually subsets of a larger organizational logic that might be formally identified?

A variety of analytical methods derived from statistics or related formal measures have been the most consistent tools used to understand deeper structural aspects of complex atonal music. The results have been both enlightening and limited. I am much more interested in asking the above question but do not know how to answer it. This is also why I refer to this project as heuristic in nature and not analytical, nor theoretical per se. Intuitively it seems that a good place to start is with a different set of tools, more specifically, those proffered by Chaos Theory as already outlined. Rather than applying these methods analytically, my approach has been to use other deterministic hyper-chaotic systems to generate new musical data that can be compared and contrasted to familiar musical artifacts. One of my guiding goals in editing and organizing the material has been to act as quickly as possible in order to optimize—or get myself out of the way of—an aural reality reminiscent of the models that I have discussed but also something that resides between rigorously notated music composition and the tradition of free improvisation.” —David Dunn

“Byzantine has two definitions: “relating to Byzantium,” and “excessively complicated.” This collection of pieces sits between the two. The work emerges from a research project on Byzantine chant that was centered on medieval settings of the Cherubic Hymn. The Cherubic Hymn, beginning “we who mystically represent the cherubim,” is sung during a procession of clergy carrying ceremonial fans that represent the cherubim and the seraphim, two classes of angels. The cherubim have four wings and four heads: lion, bull, eagle and man. The seraphim have six wings and call back and forth to each other. It is said that the reverberant domes of the Byzantine churches made the music sound as though the choirs of angels were joining in the singing of the mortals.” —Laura Steenberge

Laura Steenberge is based in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. As a performer, she sings and plays viola da gamba, contrabass, piano, guitar and other things, in traditional and untraditional song styles. As a composer, she primarily writes vocal music. As a scholar she researches connections between music and language. Her current research is about the compositional practices of medieval composers of Byzantine chant, a study that has inspired a body of creative work about ritual and metaphors of the supernatural. She will be graduating from Stanford University in June 2016 with a DMA in music composition.

*Portato Portato* is an Oakland / Santa Cruz based performance trio, playing original works and select compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries. They are committed to presenting experimental and otherwise unheard music, as well as highlighting the processes of the composer-performer relationship in new music creation.

**Jacob Lane** is a composer, pianist, and teacher who lives in Oakland, California. He works with Sleight Ensemble and Portato Portato. Jacob is a member of the Music Teachers Association of California, and teaches piano performance and music theory at The Alameda School of Music and New World Music Academy. 

In 2011, Jacob received his BA in Music Performance from Johnson State College, in Johnson, Vermont where he studied composition with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, and piano performance with Diane Huling. In 2015, he received his MFA in Chamber Music Performance from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied composition with Zeena Parkins and Roscoe Mitchell, and piano performance with Robert Schwartz. Jacob was a composer in the 2017 Atlantic Music Festival. 

**Jon Myers** (b. 1988 in Boston, MA) is a composer and percussionist based in Santa Cruz, CA. He creates music for a variety of settings, from fully notated acoustic pieces to live electronic feedback music. Much of his output has been rigorously process-based and statistically controlled, often involving repetition and cycles to shape the flow of time via mnemonic markers and temporal shifting. Lately, he has been working on quarter-tone Disklavier studies and just-intoned fanfares for arbitrarily tuned choirs of bamboo flutes.
Myers’ compositions have been performed by Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), S.E.M. Ensemble (New York), Wild Rumpus (San Francisco), Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), and the Lightbulb Ensemble (Santa Cruz). 

Myers is a doctoral student in Algorithmic Music Composition at UCSC, working primarily with Larry Polanksy. In 2014, Myers completed a Master of Arts in Music Composition from Mills College in Oakland, CA, where he studied with James Fei, Zeena Parkins, and Chris Brown. Previously, he studied with Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he was awarded the Gwen Livingston Pokora Prize for music composition. 

Bay Area flautist **Michelle Lee** is a classically trained performer, new music enthusiast, improviser, and composer of electronic and electro-acoustic music currently living in Oakland, CA. Lee has attended the Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific, and holds a degree in flute performance from Mills College. Her teachers and mentors include Michelle Caimotto, Matt Krejci, Bonnie Lockett, Maggi Payne, and James Fei. Her works and practice draw from extended techniques, natural and scientific worlds, and mysticism, as well as explore the ambiguity of reconciling the disparate: her artistic and cultural influences, the seen and unseen, texture and feeling. Current works investigate the body, ritual, intuition, and text through both traditional and experimental notation, multimedia, and performance art.

Portato Portato: Rites + Rituals, Chaos + Nature

Fri., Mar. 1, 2019
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm
Wind River
Add to Calendar
$10 - $20
Buy Tickets

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Chamber Music
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