Welcome! Here is some additional info about tonight’s show!

PROGRAM

*WORLD PREMIERE for Percussion Quartet and ASL Poetry

PROGRAM NOTES (TAP TO READ MORE)

Inspired Joy Harjo’s poetry, this piece centers the nature of creation stories in relation to indigenous identity. Much of native belief and collective knowledge stem from oral traditions and the lens their provide is core to our understanding of the world and the spirits that live with us. ‘To give you form and breath’ seeks to channel portions of that understanding through ‘ground’ objects and manipulations of rhythm as manipulations of time. – note from the composer
The composer recounts:
“When I wrote this chorale for marimba at 13 years old, it expressed my spiritual feelings and displayed a pleasantly relaxed dimension of the instrument.”

By that age, Glennie was profoundly deaf– to best understand her experience as a prolific deaf musician please read her own words in Hearing Essay.
Note by the composer:
Aphasia, conceived originally for singer and two-channel tape, was commissioned by the GRM, Paris and composed for virtuoso singer Nicholas Isherwood. The tape, an idiosyncratic explosion of warped and mangled sounds, is made up exclusively of vocal samples—all sung by Isherwood and subsequently transformed digitally. Against the backdrop of this audio narrative, the singer performs an elaborate set of hand gestures, an assiduously choreographed sign language of sorts. Each gesture is fastidiously synchronized to the tape in tight rhythmic coordination.
The eccentricity of the hand gestures is perhaps upstaged only by the observation that the singer, however extraordinary, produces no sound in concert. (In fact, the role of the “singer” may be taken by any performer of suitably enthusiastic inclination and conviction.) In that regard Aphasia may be the first piece in the vocal canon that can be performed even when the singer has laryngitis.
Isherwood deemed the piece’s rigid synchronization impossible (except perhaps for a dancer) and instead championed a looser, more improvised version I call Aphasia—Dialect. (He also included an excerpt from the score in his seminal book The Techniques of Singing, Bärenreiter Verlag, 2013.)
Considering his pronouncement a challenge, I learned the piece (it took me four months of constant work to memorize it) and made a video of my performance. The video subsequently attracted dozens of performers—mostly intrepid percussionists—to learn the piece. Ironically it has become my most performed recent piece: I know of some 58 players who champion it and have played it in 17 countries in nearly 200 performances since 2011.
Some notable performances include:
- Steve Schick at his two-night Miller Theater concert in New York, a retrospective of his most important solo repertoire (for which the New York Times Arts Section identified the piece in its “Best of 2014” distinction for the year’s most humorous work);
- Parlour Tapes+ attempt to stage a performance in Chicago’s Grant Park with 100 synchronized players (they got six—which is five more than I usually get); and
- Morris Palter at Brazil’s Festival Internacional de Musica Erudita for which there were five stompy ovation curtain calls necessitating an extra scheduled performance at the end of the festival.
Aphasia was also the subject of Robin Eggers’ masters thesis at the Rotterdam Conservatory for which he also developed a continuum of three versions varying in its degree of performer persona: an intensely histrionic one with extravagant facial expressions; a conventional one, as composed; and a version performed in the dark with black light illuminating only his fluorescent painted hands.
Beginning first with theIsopangrammovement ofStraitjacketand then withAphasia, the hand gestures have since been used in several subsequent pieces. They now constitute what I think of as a nonsense sign language of more than 200 gestures. These are catalogued by various qualities such as height; one- versus two-handedness; and whether the gesture lends itself to a static pose, variable rhythmic articulation, or a continuous motion.
Stop Speaking by Andy Akiho is written for snare drum and digital playback, but the work might be more accurately described as a duo for percussionist and “Vicky,” one of the default voices in the Apple text-to-speech preferences. Akiho used a Microsoft Word document to generate the track for the piece, extracting increasingly complex rhythmic groves from repeated text-to-speech syllables. As the piece progresses, “Vicky” develops a grim self-awareness. – Note by Will Pyle
Potential Music is a piece that is performed without sound. It involves the setup of multi-instrument “tableaux” at which a solo performer poses in anticipation of articulations that are never made. Beholding each visual circumstance, the audience is invited to imagine the potential sound that might emerge. There are six movements played in the given order.
In a conventional piece, each movement takes the following form:
Logistical Preparation – Articulatory Preparation – MUSIC – Consequential Pause
But this piece is unconventional: it omits the MUSIC phase. So the actual form comprises just the two antecedent and single consequent phases:
Logistical Preparation – Articulatory Preparation – Consequential Pause
Read more about the piece from Mark Applebaum
This intricate work for four performers on two vibraphones requires exceptionally tight choreography from the quartet, often reaching over one another to pick notes from the extreme ends of the instruments.
Nerdy fans of more definitionally “classical” music will find it amusing that the work is written in sonata form. – Note by Will Pyle
Spheres, is a work for four percussionists and three deaf ASL poetry performers commissioned in 2025 by Third Angle New Music for People Into Trees.
The music for two vibraphones by Molly Joyce was inspired by the circular planetarium, using circular rhythmic figures that eventually morph into sustained tones.
Into Trees by Meg Day was written in response to Joyce’s musical work. The Poem is printed in the program booklet in English text and will performed in ASL by three deaf performers. Projected “Gloss”* and directions allow the performers to synchronize with the musical material as the poet intended.

*Note - Glosses (the projected words in ALL CAPS) are not Translations—they’re labels for ASL signs. The instructions and gloss were provided by Meg Day.
"Karakurenai" (Japanese for "foreign crimson") was originally written for solo prepared steel pan in June 2007 as part of the Synesthesia Suite; however, this piece can be performed on any combination of instruments and can include elements of improvisation if the performer desires.

ARTISTS

Portland Percussion Group
Brian Gardiner | percussion
Sijia Huang | percussion
Terry Longshore | percussion
Chris Whyte | percussion

Romduol Ngov | ASL performer
Rian Gayle | ASL performer
Miki Smith | ASL performer

STAFF

Evan Lewis | Executive Director
Sarah Tiedemann | Artistic Director
Will Pyle | Executive Assistant & Communications Manager
Lori Trephibio | Production Manager

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Michael Reed | Interim chair
ALEX VAN RYSSELBERGHE | Interim vice chair & secretary
Ted Clifford
Valdine Ritchie Mishkin
Ross Seligman
Elaine Vote
Evan Lewis | Ex-officio
Sarah Tiedemann | Ex-officio

BEHIND THE SCENES

Madeline Sorenson | Graphic design
Terrellyn Faye Moffett | Concert photography
Gilly Platt | ASL interpretation
Jenessa Raabe | Lighting design
Jim Todd | Kendall Planetarium director
Shawn Trail, PhD | CymaSpace production coordinator - universal music design
Nate Hergert | CymaSpace program director - universal music design
Eric Buchner | CymaSpace design engineer - universal music design

CYMASPACE

We are partnered with CymaSpace to provide their audio responsive haptic technology for the show. CymaSpace is a non-profit organization that makes arts, cultural and media events accessible and inclusive to the deaf and hard of hearing through technology, education & outreach. Learn more at cymaspace.org.

INTO TREES BY MEG DAY

Still alive in the leaves, a dream

I nearly slept through: voiceless

first initial of your name skipped

across the stillness to rustle sweet

the green of sorrow’s waterline,

then woke me with want. A whistle

might well be a whisper by hands

too smooth to make a ripple sing

before it drops its stone beneath

the surface, even when the surface

is the sky. The hush of knowing

before knowing rolled through

branches, disturbed the verdure

like a sequined sigh. We stretched

our limbs & wrestled in the lace

shade below the room the future

owns—the darkness where it grows

your tiny bones—& freed the one-

eyed moon for other vowels

in need of howling. We made you,

as much as anyone can make

by fate’s suggestion what is inevitable,

absolute. Now I set loose your name

into the dark wood of that same soon

only to be certain of the breath

that means you’re sleeping. I watch

for the murmur of your quilted

weather & sense anew the knitted

roots of listening while dreaming.

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can't Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019), with co-editor Niki Herd. Day's poems appear or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, POETRY Magazine, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, and Vinyl, among other journals, and in recent anthologies, including Best New Poets, Wingbeats II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival edited by Andrea Gibson, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.

Day was raised in northern California's Bay Area. Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Amy Clampitt Fund, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, and the International Queer Arts Festival. A recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Research Grant and a North Carolina Humanities Grant, Day was recently named the Guggenheim Museum’s 2024 Poet-in-Residence. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

website

Composer and performer Molly Joyce has been deemed one of the “most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome” by The Washington Post. Her music has additionally been described as “serene power” (New York Times), and “unwavering…enveloping” (Vulture). Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source. She has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and seeks to explore disability through composition, performance, collaboration, community engagement, and further mediums. Her most recent album, Perspective, featuring forty-seven disabled interviewees responding to what access, care, interdependence, and more mean to them, was released in 2022 on New Amsterdam Records. The record has been praised by Pitchfork as “a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture” and The Wire as a “powerful ongoing project…charged by an intense composer/performer relationship.”

The primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument she bought on eBay that suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level. Her debut full-length album, Breaking and Entering, featuring toy organ, voice, and electronic sampling of both sources was released in 2020 on New Amsterdam Records, and has been praised by New Sounds as “a powerful response to something (namely, physical disability of any kind) that is still too often stigmatized, but that Joyce has used as a creative prompt.” Additionally, she performed original songs orchestrated by Christopher Theofanidis with the Albany Symphony and conducted by David Alan Miller, and praised as “ethereal, eerie, magical” by The Daily Gazette.

As a composer and creator, Molly’s artistic projects have been presented and commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Invictus Games (Düsseldorf), SXSW EDU, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, TEDxMidAtlantic, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Bang on a Can Marathon, Danspace Project, deSingel, Americans for the Arts, National Sawdust, Music Academy of the West, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, National Gallery of Art, Classical:NEXT, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, eBay, Red Bull Radio, WNYC’s New Sounds, and I Care If You Listen. Her compositional works have been commissioned and performed by ensembles including the Minnesota, Vermont, New World, New York Youth, Pittsburgh, Albany, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras, Chicago Sinfonietta, Gränslandet Symfonisk Fest (Sweden), as well as the New Juilliard, Decoda, Contemporaneous ensembles, and Harvard Glee Club. She has also written for publications 21CM, Disability Arts Online, Women in Foreign Policy, and is a member of the Americans for the Arts’ Artists Committee. As a DJ (“DJ MJ”), she has covered events ranging from house parties to car launches, most recently with GM Europe for the launch of Cadillac’s Lyriq EV in Zurich, Switzerland.

As a collaborator, Molly has worked across disciplines including with media artist Andy Slater, visual artists Lex Brown, Leo Castaneda, Alteronce Gumby, Maya Smira, Julianne Swartz, choreographers Melissa Barak, Kelsey Connolly, Carlye Eckert, Jerron Herman, director Austin Regan, and writers Marco Grosse, James Kennedy, Christopher Oscar Peña, and Jacqueline Suskin. She has also assisted Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond, including orchestral arrangements for American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and Glenn Kotche of Wilco.

Her debut EP, Lean Back and Release, was released in 2017 on New Amsterdam Records. Featuring violinists Monica Germino and Adrianna Mateo, the EP was praised as “energetic, heady and blisteringly emotive” by Paste Magazine and “arresting” by Textura. Additionally, Molly’s music has been released on thirteen commercial albums, including from pianist Vicky Chow, cellist Nick Photinos, and vocalist Bec Plexus (all on New Amsterdam Records), Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (on Innova Recordings), NakedEye Ensemble (on New Focus Recordings), cellist Alistair Sung (on 7 Mountain Records), percussionist Ralph Sorrentino (on Ravello Records), and on releases from VONK Ensemble, Party of One, clarinetist Lucy Abrams-Husso, saxophonist Don-Paul Kahl, percussionist Evan Chapman, pianist Brianna Matzke and violinist Hajnal Pivnick’s duo album On Behalf.

Molly is a recipient of ASCAP’s Leo Kaplan Award, as part of the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, grants from New Music USA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Fund / American Composers Forum, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and residencies at AIR Krems an Der Donau, ArtCenter/ South Florida, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, De Link Tilburg, Embassy of Foreign Artists, Grace Farms, Halcyon Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Villa Sträuli, Titanik, Surel’s Place, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, The Watermill Center, and Willapa Bay AiR.

Molly is a graduate of The Juilliard School (graduating with scholastic distinction), Royal Conservatory in The Hague (recipient of the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund Grant), and Yale School of Music. She holds an Advanced Certificate and Master of Arts in Disability Studies from CUNY School of Professional Studies, has done doctoral studies in artistic research as part of the Dr. Artium program between Graz and Zurich Universities of the Arts, and is an alumnus of the National YoungArts Foundation. She has studied with Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick, Guus Janssen, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, Martijn Padding, Christopher Theofanidis, and has served on the composition faculty of New York University, Wagner College, and Berklee Online, teaching subjects including Disability and the Arts, Music Technology, Music Theory, and Orchestration. She is currently a Dean’s Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia, focusing on Composition and Computer Technologies.

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A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO SEASON SPONSORS & DONORS

Ronni Lacroute, John Montague & Linda Hutchins,, Oregon Arts Commission, The Miller Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Brookby Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Aaron Copland Fund, Explore Tualatin Valley, The Rossotti Family Foundation and the Fred W. Fields Fund of Oregon Community Foundation, City of Portland Office of Arts & Culture, MJ Murdock Charitable Trust, Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, Jackson Foundation.