Portato Portato

Portato Portato (Jacob Lane, keyboard instruments, Michelle Lee, flutes, and Jon Myers, percussion) 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, boundary-expanding, and otherwise unheard music. This performance at Wind River is part of their first series of programs, encompassing work by the ensemble members as well as repertoire from the middle of the 20th century by Morton Feldman and Louis Andriessen. Selections explore perceptions of timbral and temporal spaciousness, permutation and pattern, and the long-form.

The detuned and ornamented unison flute and piano lines of Louis Andriessen’s Melodie (1972/1974), and the mystifying overlay of near-repetitions in Morton Feldman’s classic trio Why Patterns? (1978) speak to a rupture in the 1970s, when academic modernism and atonality gave way to new conceptions of musical space and time, accompanied by meditative modes of listening. This abstract kind of music isn’t “about” anything. Instead, it plunges audiences into states of inner contemplation, allowing them to construct their own meanings. Andriessen and Feldman were contemporaries, unpopular in both academic and mainstream classical music worlds in their earlier years, but their work has since inspired international scenes and stylistic innovations ongoing since the 1980s. These works are complemented by Lane’s Diaphane I and Myers’ Daniel in Chicago, both of which inspire pensive listening through their unique evolutions of minimal materials.

Note: Because of extremely limited parking and capacity at Wind River studios, we highly recommend purchasing tickets in advance, and carpooling whenever possible. Advance tickets are discounted to account for the online service charge.