Portland Percussion Group: Patterns & Form

The second movement, “Bells Keep Tolling (Las Campanas siguen Doblando),” is organized around a tolling motif that is consistently present while being rhythmically irregular. Taut gestures are heard in prismatic imitation before fusing into brief, powerful unison statements. Arrivals are embellished by anticipatory ascending flourishes in the mallet instruments; at the 4:30 mark, Viñao downshifts the tempo dramatically for a ritualistic dance based around a sighing descending gesture. Nearly one and half minutes before the end of the movement, Viñao deftly reinterprets a syncopated piano rhythm in triple meter as the new, slower pulse in duple divisions, drawing the texture gradually down to a faint echo.

“The Fabric of Form (La Trama de la Forma)” is inspired by a process pioneered by György Ligeti termed “micro-polyphony.” Indeed, Ligeti’s presence is felt from the sound mass of the opening bars, like heavy droplets of rain falling on a pond. Viñao focuses on the transformation of these amorphous textures, extracting salient rhythmic cells from them as they coalesce into infectious grooves. This process repeats itself several times in the movement, mirroring a trajectory from disorder to order and back again in a cycle. Viñao writes, “the interest here lies more in the process of transformation than in the departures or arrivals.” He treats the pitch language in a parallel fashion, mining the clusters for intervallic content that then populates modal patterns. The overall impression, as with the other movements, is of vital organic forms interacting with each other in a irregular, but nonetheless inherently logical, manner.

Like in Viñao’s final movement, in The Spaces Between Mendel Lee is captivated not with departures or arrivals, but with the sonic journey along the way. But the similarities between the works mostly end there, as Lee’s work stands in textural, energetic, and expressive contrast to the pointillistic persistence of Patterns & Form. The Spaces Between is contemplative and inward facing, using the percussion ensemble as one hybrid instrument and exploring resonating timbres and the ringing textures that connect them. Occasional polyrhythmic punctuations animate tolling sustains, and delicate trills percolate beneath an ethereal chorale of bowed vibraphones.

The album closes with Daniel Webbon’s Whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, a work inspired by a powerfully disturbing short story by David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Webbon focuses largely on non-pitched percussion in the work, with the exception of a middle section which is anchored by interlocking patterns played by chimes. The piece opens with a dramatic splash of percussive sound before a vigorous rhythm emerges, and a jagged five note gesture presents itself as the motivic seed from which the piece develops. Throughout the textural shifts in the piece, that explosive opening gesture continues to assert its will on the proceedings. In this way, Webbon mirrors Foster Wallace’s integration of a catalyzing event into the formal fabric of his story.

– Dan Lippel