Liminal fills its new space with a little show

Willamette Week, February 21, 2003
by David Stabler

Liminal, the Portland performance art ensemble that sold out Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” last year, recently found a home in Chinatown and is putting on a concert.

The performance, “minimal at liminal,” will inaugurate the new space with classic early minimalism by Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and La Monte Young.

Works include John Cage’s notorious “4′33″,” a piece that’s so minimal, the performer sits silently for four minutes and 33 seconds while the audience takes in the ambient noises. Young’s “Composition No. 7” consists of a two-note chord “to be held a very long time.” In a previous performance, stones were placed on the pedals of an organ and left there for a week.

Riley’s “In C” set San Francisco on its ear in 1965 with a slowly evolving pattern of 53 simple note patterns that the performers must play in exact order, but at their own speed. The fragments overlap, but the underlying harmony never moves away from C Major.

Reich’s “Pendulum Music” from 1968 offers electronic feedback as music. The performers swing microphones in front of amplifiers to produce a series of feedback pulses.

Glass is represented by “One + One,” also from 1968, which calls for a performer to tap repeated rhythmic cells on an amplified tabletop in an arithmetic progression.

Performers include Liminal’s sound director, John Berendzen, and a dozen Portland musicians, including composer/performer Michael Stirling, bassist Jonas Tauber, saxophonist John Gross, Boca Marimba’s mark Burdon and bass clarinetist Chad Hensel.

8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 403 N.W. Fifth Ave. (at Flanders), $15 general, $12 students; 503-890-2993 or www.liminalgroup.org.

Minimal at Liminal

In 2003, Minimal at Liminal was the first in a variety of genre-crossing performances by Liminal that surveyed the ensemble’s roots in avant-garde music, art and theater.

American Minimal Music, or “repetitive music,” frequently refers to the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who all began their careers in the early 1960s. Minimal music focuses on the audible transformation of small musical phrases through repetition and the execution of processes determined by the composer. All Minimal music lacks narrative structure. The music discards traditional harmonic schemes of tension and relaxation, and formal structures of cause and effect. Thus, the listener must discard regular listening habits if one is to experience the ecstatic effect of the music.

Minimal music is inherently performative. It is about the process of experiencing sounds as they transform in the moment. The task of the Minimal composer and the performers is not to lead the audience to a planned catharsis, but to arrange a system where catharsis may spontaneously occur. It is like listening to falling rain in a quiet house—you can hear the pulse of a million drops of water hitting the roof, or you can isolate the sound of a single drop hitting a window. Minimal music allows us to hear the parts and the whole, separately and together.

Minimal at Liminal was directed by John Berendzen.

Special thanks for this project went to:

Michael Stirling, Michael Walsh, Community Music Center, Creative Music Guild, Third Angle New Music Ensemble, Tim Duroche, Musik Centur, Michael Harberson, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Amanda Dahlquist, Metropolitan Group, Trent Moore, OPB, Laura Winter, Terry Riley

©2008 Liminal Performance Group / P.O. Box 40353, Portland, Oregon 97240-0353 / Founded in 1997 / info [at] liminalgroup [dot] org / Join our mailing list.