Music Notes: gone virtual
August 6, 2020
With so many performances going online, our news roundup follows suit with video and audio from Oregon musicians for your home streaming enjoyment
With so many performances going online, our news roundup follows suit with video and audio from Oregon musicians for your home streaming enjoyment
Recent recordings by Cappella Romana, the Broken Consort, Portland State University Chamber Choir and The Industry showcase Oregon choral and vocal music
This month’s Virtual Supper Club supports pianist Michael Allen Harrison’s program to bring music lessons to Oregon students.
Cascadia Composers’ In Good Hands expands students’ horizons and brings music to the next generations.
Oregon festivals spread the music online and in other virus-resistant forms. Brett Campbell counts the ways.
The good, the bad, and the adaptable: Oregon musicians make the best of a socially isolated summer.
Chamber Music Northwest, Oregon Bach Fest lead parade of summer shows from onstage to online.
Let there be many: Brett Campbell’s radical resetting of Oregon arts policy for the post-Covid age.
The Metropolitan Youth Symphony gets savvy and shows that shutdown doesn’t have to mean shut up.
The Portland drummer and composer’s diverse projects embrace his expansive creative mentality.
Feeling down? Think local: Recent recordings by Oregon composers offer sonic solace in troubled times.
Oregon musical performances may be suspended, but Oregon music plays on. Oregon classical musicians aren’t letting a little thing like a deadly pandemic and total cancellation of live performances stop them from bringing the sounds. Tonight, Friday May 8, at 10 pm,
Brett Campbell gets down with the beat at home with a stack of recent Oregon jazz recordings.
After retiring from his last teaching job, at Eugene’s Spencer Butte Middle School, Paul Bodin “wanted to see what it was like to be a student again.” And he wanted to explore the music that had enchanted him since childhood but had
When Roger Saydack lived on a bare bones graduate student budget at the University of Oregon in the mid-1970s, the only way he could afford to hear classical music live was what’s now called the Oregon Bach Festival’s Discovery Series concerts. Following
Is it real, or is it covideo? Forced to shut down concerts, music groups turn to livestreaming.
A shipwreck brought musician Emily Lau to Portland. It didn’t happen in Oregon but off the Italian coast, where in 2012 the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground, capsized and killed 32 people. Lau was on her honeymoon, and though she and
The disability-arts champion’s death shocks the community. But the organization she built vows to keep on.
Fast break: PSU brings a choral music “rock star” and 500 singers to its campus basketball arena.
Pioneering contemporary classical composer Terry Riley brings his jazz chops to town.
Metropolitan Youth Symphony leader: In a troubled world, schools need to teach the empathy of the arts.
New leaders take the renamed Five Oaks Museum deeper into the arts and the diversity of culture around it.
Washington County Museum branches out under a new name, Five Oaks Museum, and a broader cultural umbrella.
Wobbly duo see a dangerous world: “Hate based crime directed against people with disabilities has gone up.”
• Portland Opera has named Sue Dixon the company’s sixth general director, replacing Christopher Mattaliano, who departed in June after 16 years. She’s served the company in other capacities since 2014. PO also temporarily assigned Mattaliano’s artistic direction responsibilities to Palm Beach
As Ilana Sol’s new film about war and reconciliation screens this week, a look back at the Portland filmmaker’s first documentary
FearNoMusic commemorates the Portland murder of immigrant Mulugeta Seraw by white supremacists.
A conference introduces a national organization to Portland. Tackling of pressing issues in Oregon arts ensues.
This is what we fear…Nothing to think withNothing to love or link with From “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, excerpted in Shadow & Light. When Eugene Concert Choir and Vocal Arts director Diane Retallack approached Joan Szymko in 2014 to write a new
A FearNoMusic concert features new music composed in response to a Supreme Court confirmation battle.
The Zombies and Brian Wilson, voices from the fraught days of 1968, bring their sounds to Portland 2019.
“I was really on fire”: PHAME Academy and Portland Opera collaborate on original rock opera.
China Forbes & Storm Large make a dream team of co-lead singers for Pink Martini.
Oregon festival of music and dance from many cultures addresses issues ranging from terminology to privilege.
A new play asks which parts of our past we should bring with us, and which we should leave behind.
Philip Glass never expected In the Penal Colony to be a success. “When I wrote it, I thought, it’ll get done once and then no one will ever do it again,” Glass said. “Why would you want to watch a suicide? Basically
Hunter Noack grew up in Sunriver cherishing both classical music and outdoor Oregon. His mother, Lori Noack, directed the Sunriver Music Festival, which each year included top American classical pianists. “Growing up in central Oregon, I spent all my time outside when
The 49th Oregon Bach Festival has lately been looking a bit like a Blah-ch Festival. If the venerable University of Oregon music institution is ever to regain the cultural primacy it once enjoyed in its glory days, I’m afraid we’ll need to
When Portland native Stephanie Ho first heard Makrokosmos, the massive, 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
A concert is never about only the music. Otherwise we’d just listen to a recording on headphones. At Pyxis Quartet’s Feb 15 concert at Portland’s Old Church, which on that rainy evening felt like the most consequential performance I’ve attended in Portland,
Oregon’s leading classical music public radio station All Classical Portland has launched a brand-new second radio network, for children. The International Children’s Arts Network (ICAN) is a 24-hour radio service and, the station announcement says, is the first of its kind in
At its best, theater makes magic happen onstage. Fairy tales do the same on the page. So I had high hopes for a pair of short-run May Portland theater productions that updated magical children’s tales. Unfortunately, while each provided sporadic moments of
Classical music programs largely consist of endlessly recycled old classics by composers who are (a) European, (b) male, and (c) white. Florence Price is (e) none of the above. The 20th century African American composer does, however, abide by that other common
“I am Mexican, and they killed my husband a year and a half ago, leaving me alone and pregnant with our second child. It has been so difficult to find a way to feed and clothe my children, and we had to
Music, like any other art form, must prove itself to each generation if it’s going to last. That’s why classical music and jazz organizations increasingly sponsor shows suited to kids and families, like Oregon Symphony’s Sci-Fi at the Pops shows Saturday and
Famed classical clarinetist David Shifrin recently commissioned Portland composer David Schiff to write a new piece for him to play at Chamber Music Northwest’s 2019 summer festival. After Schiff began working on it, he asked Shifrin if he had any suggestions. Shifrin
Classical music still lags a ways behind, say, the reggae community when it comes to appropriately celebrating 4/20. Admittedly, the some of the thrill has kind of, uh, gone up in smoke since Oregon finally ended the preposterous cannabis Prohibition, but it’s
Women’s History Month just passed, but fortunately, times are changing enough that Oregon performers and presenters are no longer confining half the human race’s creative accomplishments to only one-twelfth of the calendar year. Several concerts this week focus on women’s voices and
Oregonians today are lucky to be able to hear live performances of music from several centuries, not just the narrow 150 year swath of Central European music that once dominated classical concerts. This week’s concert schedule includes music from the Renaissance, Baroque,
These dark days, it does indeed take a lot of audacity to hope, much more than it did when those words first inspired the nation. Portland Gay Men’s Chorus’s concert of that title includes pop faves like Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me”
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