On December 7, ChatterPDX paired Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8 with a premiere by local composer Kimberly Osberg, Conversations for Clarinet and String Quartet. 

ChatterPDX have been growing their audience and ambitions. Artistic Director and General Manager James Shields recently announced his departure from the Oregon Symphony. This was to give him time and energy to focus on other projects, such as expanding ChatterPDX and building up his budding career as a composer.

Kimberly Osberg is ChatterPDX’s first of three composers-in-residence. (She is also the group’s Communications Manager; you can read Matthew Andrews’ thoughts on the politics of this in December’s MusicWatch Monthly here.) Each composer will premiere three pieces over the next three years. The second composer-in-residence is Akshaya Avril Tucker, and the third is TBA.

Osberg’s music always pushes forward. Her music concerns sonic processes, not static images. It’s animated and lively, and like great animation, it creates evocative movement through clever timing and exaggerated gestures. Her scores also show a great eye for detail and craftspersonship.  

Osberg has made an extraordinary effort to spread knowledge of composing-as-a-career. Her website boasts an impressive list of resources and is never shy about sharing how she makes it work. She writes music that fits the needs of whomever is commissioning her. Maybe a soloist has always wanted a fast show-stopper. Or an ensemble needs something slow and relaxing to fit in between two difficult pieces. Osberg prioritizes making her musicians sound good while retaining her compositional voice. 

So it’s no surprise Osberg’s first piece for ChatterPDX, Conversations, fits their “thing” so nicely. For one, it’s about communication in its myriad forms. Conversations contains three movements, each named after the type of communication it depicts: “Chitter Chatter,” “Whispers and Murmurs,” and “Bitching and Moaning.” It’s also a clarinet quintet, and music for clarinet-plus-strings forms much of ChatterPDX’s repertoire. 

The first movement’s vivaciousness comes from its driving string rhythms that support the clarinet’s wide arpeggios that find their footing on long high notes. There were nice back-and-forth moments where ideas are quickly passed through the ensemble. These conversant sections contrasted with monologues and instruments talking over each other in counterpoint. Shields got a moment in the middle to solo in 7/8 time, and did so with some cool G blues scale runs. 

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“Chitter Chatter” seeped into the second movement, “Whispers and Murmurs,” as the final chord got broken apart with tremors, flutters and stutters. The twitchy textures bring to mind the titular whispers and murmurs that won’t so easily give up their secrets. Shields switched to a bass clarinet and played in the instrument’s growling low register. Spacious moments would build into restrained climaxes before landing on inquisitive suspended chords. The exciting closer “Bitching and Moaning” (inspired by Osberg’s grandma’s “Stitch n’ Bitch” knitting club) began after a brief pause. A furious 16th-note pulse persists throughout this final movement. At times this pulse grows into noisy scratch tones, wide glissandi and dissonant half-step chords. There were moments that felt like a near one-to-one recreation of the build-up and release of a frustrated outburst.

God in pine tree form

ChatterPDX welcomed poet Adam Falkner for the poetry reading and moment of silence. He spoke with an upbeat demeanor, endearing himself to the audience with crowdwork. He called Portland “that which is God in pine tree form,” for instance. His second poem was a humorous reflection on embarrassment–specifically, the embarrassment of a parent commenting on your social media posts. A few lines got some chuckles. A reminder that poetry need not always live in a high, self-serious register. 

There could be no greater contrast from Osberg’s Conversations than Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8. The former is lively, exciting and direct, while the latter is dreary, introspective and enigmatic. After Conversations and Falkner’s poetry, it felt as though ChatterPDX had been doing their best to inoculate us against the despair to come. Pairing Shosty’s string quartet with something equally dark, in the vein of Celan’s Todesfuge maybe, could have made the audience’s seasonal affective disorder far worse. 

The quartet was dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war,” but the composer made it clear that the music came from a place of immense despair within himself. The personal is political, the political is personal. Analyses of the piece identify the quotations and references to the composer’s own music, the Dies Irae and other notable themes.The string quartet has similarities to the sadness, contrapuntal intensity and formal richness of Beethoven’s late string quartets. The opening movement is a dreary fugue on the four-note D-S-C-H (in our parlance, D, Eb, C, B). Beethoven’s late quartets made use of a similar harmonic minor scale fragment for his fugal subjects, particularly the first movement of the heartbreaking C# minor string quartet. 

The string quartet was the same one as before, minus Shields of course: Yuqi Li, Ruby Chen, Haojian Wang, and Trevor Fitzpatrick. The quartet’s performance felt subdued and restrained. Some quartets like to take the second movement at a breakneck pace. Here the slower tempo kept things under control. The Stravinsky-like stabbing chords resonated wonderfully – and somehow, these minor triads sound monstrously dissonant. 

The third movement is a macabre scherzo that falls apart into greater depths of sadness for the final two movements. Pedal tones lasted for what felt like forever, disappearing into the din as members of the ensemble took lonely solos. The opening theme returns one last time and fades into nothing. 

How do we reconcile the wildly different sides of this concert? Conversations and the String Quartet no. 8 have a sense of humor in common, though they take that humor towards opposite ends.

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Cellist and ChatterPDX’s other Artistic Director Trevor Fitzpatrick delivered some remarks to introduce us to Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8. Fitzpatrick told an anecdote that, unsurprising for Shostakovich, combines immense sadness with dark humor. Shostakovich apparently told a friend that while writing the piece, the tears flowed like urine after a half-dozen beers. (This quote strikes me as one of those clever inventions or historical exaggerations; but it’s still a very Shostakovich thing to say.)

The humor of Osberg’s Conversations, on the other hand, was more kooky than sardonic. In his interview with the composer, Andrews compares Osberg to Haydn, and like Haydn, Osberg’s music can be witty and humorous. I like to think that Haydn had to invent new ways to keep himself amused on his way to composing one-hundred-and-four symphonies and sixty-eight string quartets. Osberg is similar, in that she is always finding inventive twists and turns to keep the music engaging.