DUO Stephanie and Saar’s annual one-day mini-festival — with help from regular collaborators Portland Percussion Group, students from PSU’s Portland Summer Percussion Academy, and pianists from Portland’s new music scene — presented Terry Riley’s “In C” and music by Juri Seo, Michael Johansen, Martin Bejerano, Alejandro Viñao, and Alfonso Penuto.
By Charles Rose | August 13, 2026
On June 26, The Makrokosmos Project returned to BodyVox in Northwest Portland for the twelfth installment of their annual series of one-day mini-festivals. Helmed by DUO Stephanie and Saar — and aided by Portland Percussion Group, students from Portland State University’s Portland Summer Percussion Academy, and many of Portland’s great pianists — Makrokosmos guides their audience through a multi-set, evening-long performance of contemporary classical music.
The Makrokosmos Project centers percussion and piano music by post-war American composers who are difficult to fit into any singular aesthetic. They have given special attention at past shows to Meredith Monk, John Cage and George Crumb, composers who are part of a distinctly American avant-garde, taking as much influence from East Asian and African music as from the European avant-garde. This year Makrokosmos chose to highlight Terry Riley by playing his most famous work, In C, honoring the composer turning ninety years old last year.
One undercurrent connecting the music of Makrokosmos XII is minimalism. Riley is usually considered a “minimalist” composer, alongside his Downtown New York contemporaries Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But there’s little minimalist about In C on its surface. (The title is very minimalist; that crew liked to give their music no-nonsense titles like Music in Twelve Parts or Music for Eighteen Musicians.) The music is dense, and remains so through its whole duration. It seems that “minimalism” doesn’t refer to music that has few notes, but music with transparent form and repetition.
The score presents performers with a sequence of melodic fragments that can be repeated at will before moving onto the next one. It can be oppressively loud, leaving a faint ringing inside your skull after it’s over. In C’s aesthetic kin are thus Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, John Coltrane’s Ascension – or The Ascension by Glenn Branca – or even White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground. It is music borne from rock and roll, LSD and the urban muck of lower Manhattan in the 1960s.
Moreover, it is music borne from de-industrialization. By the late 1960s cracks began to appear in the post-war economic order. The end of Bretton-Woods, the Volker Shock, and Reaganomics were on the horizon. Many of the buildings that housed the engines of our economy and employed millions of Americans began to close their doors. Factories, mills, warehouses, foundries and mines became brick and concrete monuments to austerity. Artists, a creative and resourceful bunch, were drawn to the creative possibilities of these spaces–and to the cheaper rents. Call it gentrification, call it urban renewal, but many industrial sites became venues for contemporary and avant-garde music – as well as punk, hip-hop and techno, to varying degrees of legality. Terry Riley and his fellow New Yorkers were able to capitalize upon this new reality in the late 1960s.
Pulsations
The stage at BodyVox was crammed with sound-making-machines for the performance of In C. Portland Percussion Group, pianist Yoko Greeney and students from Portland State University’s Summer Percussion Academy made up the bulk of the ensemble for In C. But the audience was encouraged to bring their own instruments and join the group. I stepped up to join on an upright piano. After a few glasses of wine and without a proper warm-up I was not playing my best, but a wrong note faded away as quickly as any other.
While playing In C you are stuck inside this glorious thicket of C Major, and you can hear your fellow musicians trudging through each motif at their own pace. The motifs are for the most part short and simple. The sheet music fits it all on one landscape page. The piece also destroys the line between amateur and professional musicians: anyone can play In C on whatever instruments they’ve got. The oppressive volume drowns out the noise of urban life for a while.
A secondary theme of the program seemed to be memory. In the program notes, Stephanie Ho (half of the DUO Stephanie and Saar) writes with fond reverence about growing up in Portland. The musicians brought back some of the works they have commissioned and premiered in the past few years: Lux, Lumen, Splendor by Juri Seo; Catalyst by Michael Johansen; Fantasia de Tres Mundos by Martin Bejerano and Patterns and Form by Alejandro Viñao. In this way they are giving further attention to some of the many living composers they have championed over the years. Johansen and Alfonso Peduto, composer of Reverie, Longing, Aftermath II and Fragments for the End of Time, were in the audience at Makrokosmos XII.
After a brief opening performance of Trekking by Meredith Monk, DUO Stephanie and Saar played Lux, Lumen, Splendor. The duo premiered Lux two years ago at Makrokosmos 10 (read my thoughts on the premiere performance here). My appreciation for the piece has deepened upon hearing a second performance.
Seo was inspired by Saint Bonaventure’s theory of light. Like his contemporary Dante Alighieri, Bonaventure links God with light. God created the universe with the proclamation “Let there be light!” The Sun’s light allows us to see the physical world, just as God’s light allows us to see into the divine. Both are around us at all times, but have no corporeality.
Seo depicts this dual perspective of light–its physical nature and its meta-physical significance–in Lux, Lumen, Splendor. This is one work on the program that strayed the furthest from minimalism: Messiaen-like sonorities and impressionistic scale runs abound. (Messiaen is an appropriate musical reference, since two of Messiaen’s major preoccupations were his Catholic faith and the many colors of light.) Seo shows us both sides of the prism: on one side light is a blinding multitude; on the other it is a rainbow.
This first set of the night ended with Johanson’s Catalyst, performed by Yoko Greeney and Susan Smith, who also performed the piece back at Makrokosmos IX. In a brief pre-performance comment the composer spoke of the piece’s “incessant pulsations.” These pulsations begin in the murky low register and grow into Herbie Hancock-like runs up the piano. Greeney and Smith played off each other well, and gave the piece a restrained energy, as if it was ready to explode at any moment before the exciting climax. The composer also dropped in a cheeky quotation from Rhapsody in Blue, to the delight of the audience.
To open the second set, Peduto’s Reverie, Longing, Aftermath II combined minimalist textures with a romantic lyricism, like a mixture of Glass and Mendelssohn. Ernesto Lecouna’s Ante el Escorial was a nostalgic minor-key work with many Rachmaninoff-like massive block chords. Fantasia de Tres Mundos was another work premiered by DUO Stephanie and Saar, back in 2014. Fantasia melds together classical, jazz and Afro-Cuban music: Montuno melodies and Bembé grooves are broken up with extended chords and aggressive tone clusters, with a loose, improvisational feel throughout.
Fragments for the End of Time, another piece by Peduto, took up the entire third set. Fragments was a collection of Eiunaldi-esque piano miniatures, unadorned and introspective. Ho comments in the program that the collection is “melancholic but honest, beautiful and touching.” Four pianists took turns on the Fragments, playing half-a-dozen each: Greeney, Smith, Julia Lee, and Jeff Payne. All gave beautiful performances. Lee was especially engrossing, her face scrunching up with every pensive chord and gesture, leaving the audience silent.
The fragments were brief explorations of a chord progression or melody. Some of the Fragments stretched phrases out a bit longer than you would expect from a typical 4/4 pulse, giving the music an increased sense of space between melodic moments. I enjoyed these Fragments, though I felt there was not enough contrast of tone, tempo and harmony throughout. At its best they reminded me of Johann Johannsson’s piano works, which were recorded wonderfully by Alice Sarah Ott earlier this year.
Viñao’s Patterns and Form opened the final set, before In C. It is a more maximalist take on Steve Reich’s percussive sort of minimalism. Portland Percussion Group led the consortium that commissioned the piece from Viñao and premiered the piece in early 2025. Their recording of the piece came out earlier this year on New Focus Recordings. Much of Patterns and Form lives inside a mid-tempo pulse and octatonic scales, building up the eponymous patterns into larger crests and valleys.
Portland Percussion Group at Makrokosmos XII. Photo by Andrew Wallner.