MusicWatch Weekly: A song and a dance
November 21, 2019
As Lou Harrison said, music is basically a song and a dance. Welcome to a week of it.
As Lou Harrison said, music is basically a song and a dance. Welcome to a week of it.
There are a handful of things that make a city’s musical culture feel complete. You need several symphony orchestras and large choirs, and they all have to be pretty damn good. You also need several smaller choral and instrumental ensembles overlapping with
What’s up? Big bands, big choirs, chamber classical, and hybrid music from Indonesia and the British Isles.
Our most excellent wrap of November music classical, new, jazzy, and hybrids in between.
The world is already a haunted house. Killer clowns, mercenary robots, dystopian surveillance states, wildfires galore–what do you need a haunted house for? Instead, go lurk in the shadows with some dark music and costumed fun. There are dozens of tribute shows
The present author normally adheres to a strict “no promoting your own shows” policy, but since I spent a month telling you all about band camp in Bali, I feel it’s only fair to let you know that the results of that
Third Angle welcomes Oregonian composers home. Creative Music Guild improvises.
Composer Andy Akiho and percussionist Colin Currie chat about ceramic bowls and meaty marimba.
We stumble upon a Hall of Fame inductee, learn about joiking and konnakol, and hear from the audients.
Warm up your fall with saxophones, film and classical music, international virtuosi, and metallized Metroids.
Composer Oscar Bettison talks about making cool music and helping the Oregon Symphony kick off its season.
Matthew Neil Andrews tells all: Your guide to choosing a balanced musical diet.
“Classical”? “Popular”? The week’s music ducks and dodges around a blurry line.
A few questions and answers with Queer Opera singers and stage director Rebecca Herman.
Monster surf, homebrewed string quartets, double drumming, and the tyranny of evil men.
It’s a busy month of music in Oregon, from classical to hip-hop to experimental and more.
What’s up: Retro rock, math punk, psychedelic cumbia, shredded metals, and Jimmie Herrod.
Folksy chamber operas, locavore choral music, doom and psych and loops, pairs of pairs of pairs.
A conversation with Caroline Shaw, composer of string quartets at CMNW and Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival.
Happy Indonesian Independence Day! Seventy-four years ago today, Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands after three centuries of Dutch colonialism (I’ll bet you thought they were always just about tulips and weed). To celebrate, here’s a little video (if you can’t
Music editor in Bali, women in wine country, classical jamming in NoPo.
Out-of-town festivals, funk at the zoo, opera ‘bout Guthrie, we’re all Kulululu.
Allow me to get personal for a moment. You, my dear readers, know that I’m involved in this vibrant local music scene I’ve been writing about every week for the last three years. As a student at Portland State University, I walk
Portland summers have a little something for everyone. If you like your summers dry, hot, and aggressive, you can easily get your fill of blinding, baking, oppressively sweaty sunpocalypse. If you like your summers bitter, cloudy, soggy, and unseasonably cold—well, you’ll get
Chamber Music Northwest seems a lot quieter since the clarinet circus left town. After last week’s brouhaha—a wide swath of concerts featuring upwards of a hundred clarinets—the audiences at Thursday night’s Copland/Shaw concert and today’s New@Noon felt hushed, rapt, attentively relaxed in
“Good afternoon! I’m David Shifrin, and I play the clarinet!” A big roomful of laughing clarinetists goes “woooo!” and welcomes the Chamber Music Northwest Artistic Director to Portland State University’s Lincoln Performance Hall for the first of the festival’s five New@Noon concerts.
We here at Oregon Arts Watch tend to pay a lot of attention to Oregon composers. In a sense, our job is made easier by the problem outlined yesterday by Senior Editor Brett Campbell: we like local composers, living or recent, diverse
The first movement of Melissa Dunphy’s new choral composition LISTEN sets texts from Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, with lines like “I thought he respected my work” and “When I was asked, I had to tell the
by MATTHEW ANDREWS Portland Opera’s As One is, on one hand, about one type of transgender experience (there are many); on the other hand, it’s not really about being transgender, any more than the Barber of Seville is about being a barber.
Kenji Bunch is either an oenophile or he’s been reading Jeff VanderMeer. The Fear No Music artistic director introduced the ensemble’s fifth annual Locally Sourced Sounds concert post-concert Q&A with a discussion of the somewhat esoteric term terroir, used to describe the
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