A scene from last year’s Makrokosmos Project classical music festival at the Vestas building in Portland. – photo: Masataka Suemitsu
When Stephanie Ho first heard “Makrokosmos,” the four-volume cycle of amplified piano and percussion music written in the 1970s by one of America’s greatest living composers, George Crumb, she thought, “I haven’t lived on this Earth until I heard this music.”
Years after that epiphany at Oberlin College’s prestigious music school, Ho and her piano duo partner, Saar Ahuvia, decided to play Crumb’s music to inaugurate their first Portland festival, which they named after “Makrokosmos.”
Makrokosmos Project turned out to be an apt name for their annual five-hour, come-and-go-as-you-please music marathon, which happens for the fifth time June 27 at Portland’s Vestas Building. A macrocosm is a social body made of smaller compounds — in this case, a series of 30- to 45-minute concerts with breaks for snacks, wine and conversation. The name, in its expansiveness, also alludes to how the Makrokosmos Project welcomes a broad audience for new and often unfamiliar music by creating a relaxed, communal experience.
The festival started because Ho and Ahuvia, a married couple who live in New York City, visited Ho’s native Portland each summer to see family and nature. Their friend Harold Gray, a Portland State University professor and pianist who founded Portland Piano International, suggested that “instead of only doing so much hiking, we should do something musical, too,” Ahuvia recalled.
After all, as DUO Stephanie & Saar, the two pianists had earned a national reputation for their performances of classical and contemporary music.
And they’d staged performances in “strange venues” like Los Angeles’ Bank of America building and such New York City sites as One Liberty Plaza, the door factory-turned-performance space Knockdown Center and the basement bar of the now-closed Cornelia Street Cafe. “If any place was up to that, it was Portland,” Ahuvia said.
With Chamber Music Northwest already covering traditional classical music in its annual Portland summer festival, the pair decided to focus on the late 20th- and 21st-century classical sounds they cherished — a niche within a niche. How to make it appealing to a wide audience? Rather than cater to today’s alleged short attention spans, they decided to go against the grain — and go big.
“We wanted to create a curated marathon — but also give the option for those who don’t want to run as long distances to pick and choose, take a break, come back,” he said. “Sets of 30 to 45 minutes do just that. You can see how little or how much you want to take.
“At Makrokosmos, you can walk around different parts of the space, listening closely to the music, or you can go a few floors up, contemplating life and having a glass of wine, and having that music be a soundtrack. It’s the experience you make of it.”
They staged the first two festivals in downtown’s Blue Sky Gallery. The Pearl District’s capacious Vestas Building offered more space to accommodate their increasingly expansive vision. The lobby could host intimate performances accompanied by wine and cheese, while the central atrium with stadium seating could hold as many listeners, musicians and instruments as needed — and room to move. Audience members could gaze down on instruments, walk around, even leave for a bit.
“We’re most surprised by the number of people who stay for all five hours — total immersion,” Ho said. “We’re told we’re approachable people and we make this music approachable. We’re trying to create a comfortable experience.”
This year’s festival, featuring DUO Stephanie & Saar and a half-dozen of Oregon’s most adventurous classical pianists, again starts with late 20th century sounds — this time, the sublimely spare, spacious piano music of the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, presented in two sets.
Inspired by trees, water and gardens, Takemitsu considered himself a “musical gardener.” That suggested the 2019 festival’s theme of nature and the human condition, beginning with the opening work, Pulitzer Prize winner John Luther Adams’s “Dark Waves,” inspired partly by human-caused changes in polar ice and sea levels.
For contrast to Takemitsu’s ruminative abstraction, Ho and Ahuvia programmed more expressive works — by Takemitsu’s major inspiration, 20th-century French mystic Olivier Messiaen; by another American Pulitzer winner, Julia Wolfe; and by California composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who draws on her Peruvian heritage.
The festival closes where the Makrokosmos Project began, with Crumb’s dark, shattering 1970 string quartet, “Black Angels,” whose chaotic fury emerged from the divisions that tore the country during the Vietnam War.
Coming after the natural beauty evoked by Takemitsu’s music, Crumb’s cathartic classic, performed by Portland’s Pyxis Quartet, suggests “it could all just go away unless we do something about it,” Ahuvia said. “This music is therapeutic — it goes through nature, hope, danger, war, destruction, then hope again, compassion, desire.”
Makrokosmos Project 5: Black Angels
When: 5-10 p.m. Thursday, June 27.
Where: Vestas Building, 1417 N.W. Everett St.
Tickets: $10-$20, include all events and food and wine; makrokosmosproject.org