Mantra’s beat mavericks serve up rich “aural meal”

> BY ALEXANDER VARTY

New music doesn’t get much newer than what Mantra Percussion has planned for its return to Vancouver this weekend. The world premiere of Paul Dolden’s Mantra Groove. The second-ever performance of Aaron Siegel’s A Great Many, which will be unveiled a night earlier at Western Washington University’s annual Percussion Festival. Canadian premieres of Leslie Flanigan’s Hedera, with the composer singing, and Tristan Perich’s Moment of Inertia. Those wanting to discover current directions in percussion music will probably have already booked their tickets, especially if they caught the New York–based sextet’s local performance of Michael Gordon’s Timber in 2013.

You might remember hearing about that one, a symphony-long minimalist masterpiece played entirely on hardware-store-sourced two-by-fours.

The instruments, this time around, are more conventional. But, in compensation, the presentation will depart from what Mantra’s executive director Al Cerulo describes as the “piece, clap, piece, clap” format of most concerts.

“In general, we look to create evening-length works or evening-length experiences for the audience,” Cerulo explains, in a telephone interview from New York. “So even though none of the works on this program are eveninglength pieces like Timber, what we’re going to do with the night’s music is make it more stream-of-consciousness. We’re not going to pause at all throughout the entire night. With percussion, as you can imagine, there are a lot of set changes, but we’re going to have some incidental music played in between— almost like palate cleansers, in a sense.

“We hope it’s like an aural meal,” he adds. “As the audience comes in, they can sit down, relax, forget about their problems, forget about life and what’s going on, and just become engrossed by the music.”

Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi commissioned Dolden’s work for Mantra to perform, and it’s a wise choice. Although the former Vancouverite is known for the speed and density of his compositions—many of which, like Mantra Groove, mix live virtuosity with complex prerecorded structures—he balances those elements with other, more populist inclinations.

“The thing that really fascinates me is groove,” Dolden tells the Straight in a separate telephone conversation from his home in Montreal. “Of course, this is not James Brown or an Afro-cuban piece, but I have analyzed the push and pull of beats, of what most musicians would say is a great groove, and I’ve tried to emulate some of that in my writing of the last 15 years.”

With that in mind, Dolden has opted to use unpitched percussion— including djembés, talking drums, congas, cowbells, and cymbals—exclusively in Mantra Groove. “I feel that there’s a lot of works for four to six marimbas or vibraphones floating about,” he says. “I love that sound, but there’s a lack of unpitched-percussion scores in composed music. We’re all so concerned with notes in western music; this obsession with notes is endless. The nice thing about working with unpitched percussion is you have to think differently. You can’t just start up a harmonic formula that carries you through, like, three minutes of material with very little input: it’s all rhythm, and that’s a challenge.”