
Kimberly R. Osberg is one of those restless composers. You know the story, the “there’s two types of composers” story. One is the brooding type, the Beethovens and Brahmses who spend ages perfecting some Grand Statement. The other is the fleet-footed type, the Haydns and Mozarts who compose for a living and crank stuff out all day every day. You can compose good music either way (not for nothing does the divine J.S. Bach embody both archetypes), but there’s certainly a difference in the approach and the feel.
So. Osberg is one of the Haydn types. Her homepage reads “Original music for anyone, anywhere.” She composes for specific people and specific circumstances, she earns a living taking commissions as a freelance composer, she cranks stuff out using a vivid imagination and a well-used sketchbook, she gets her music performed and recorded and puts it in her catalog and keeps going. She’s the sort of working class composer most of you probably didn’t know existed.
Osberg’s operetta THUMP receives its third staging this month with New Wave Opera, a newish Oregon opera company she co-founded with composer-singer Lisa Neher and soprano Lindsey Rae Johnson. That’s happening October 21 and 23 at Raven’s Manor, where NWO has staged a couple of recent productions (read about their show there last month in Charles Rose’s review here). As the name suggests, THUMP is based on one of Edgar Allen Poe’s more gruesome stories, ”The Tell-Tale Heart.” Also on the evening’s program: Serial Killers in the City, The Oval Portrait (another Poe piece), and Neher’s she conjures. And if you go on Wednesday you’ll get a preview of still more Poe with Renegade Opera’s The Raven, composed by RO creative team member Jesse Preis (you’ll hear more about them before The Raven premieres in November).
Anyways, this particular NWO show has a lovely title, one that almost graced the company as a whole: Night of the Living Opera, which is funny in more ways than one. There’s the overt reference to the classic George Romero film Night of the Living Dead, a movie made with almost no budget which nevertheless spawned innumerable sequels and changed the face of horror cinema forever. There are few better examples of the kind of good, solid entertainment which is relatively cheap to produce (if you’re willing to be scrappy and rely on your performers’ and audience’s goodwill and imagination) without sacrificing deeper artistic qualities. This is something that Romero’s work has in common with Poe’s–and Osberg’s.
There’s also the double meaning of “Living Opera.” The so-called “warhorses” keep coming back, year after year, like the relentless hordes of the undead, haunting the world’s opera houses long after their composers have shed their mortal coils. Meanwhile, contemporary opera has little room for anything other than the most socially relevant stuff from the biggest names. It’s not that we resent recent operas like Blue, The Central Park Five, Shizue, The Handmaid’s Tale, and so on. We love those too, and we hope operas like these keep getting commissioned, performed, and recorded.
The issue is that opera companies seem to have room for that sort of thing, and they have room for the warhorses, and nothing else. There’s no room for–dare we call it this?–normal, everyday opera. There’s certainly little room for opera by local composers (“local” in this case meaning “not Los Angeles or New York”).
This is where people like Neher and Osberg come in. NWO exists, like Renegade Opera and a variety of other Oregon music groups, primarily for the sake of performing music by living–not undead–composers. Not a little bit, every now and then, when you can get free press for performing established Pulitzer-winners and/or for doing the woke thing (again, nothing against Pulitzer-winners or the woke thing), but all the time, across every part of the social and artistic spectrum from Serious to Cheesy.
And you really could call Osberg’s music both of those things–it’s Serious and it’s Cheesy. Her piece on last month’s NWO concert was literally called If You Cheese, and it prompted Rose to say this about it:
The trio of Neher, Knotts and Johnson performed Osberg’s If You Cheese, a humorous micro-opera about the stresses and vagaries of preparing charcuterie. The libretto (also by Osberg) is littered with the cheesiest puns you’ve ever heard, helpfully capitalized LIKE THIS to make sure you got the joke. In the performance the puns were delivered with the dad-jokey “I know this joke is corny but I’m gonna sell it so it becomes funny” cadence.
You can watch that performance yourself right here:
You already know all this if you’ve heard Osberg’s music on other Oregon concerts: James Bash compared her Suite-Ass Cycle, performed at Fear No Music’s Locally Sourced Sounds concert earlier this year, to P.D.Q. Bach; last month, FNM performed her Extracted Wisdom, based on a horrendous visit to the dentist.
Yet there’s nothing at all cheesy about her Portland protest-themed Seek What You Want To Find, commissioned and premiered by Resonance Ensemble last year. Read about that here, and listen to it (with opening poem by lyricist and Resonance poet-in-residence S. Renee Mitchell) right here:
So, like Haydn’s music, Osberg’s is the good kind of “all over the place.” It fits the mood, the performers, the occasion. It insists only on being itself–but “itself” is an embodied thing, something defined by its context in a time and a place, in a community. In other words (to gratuitously quote Dr. Frankenstein): it’s alive!
We spoke with Kimberly Osberg in early October; our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and flow.
Oregon ArtsWatch: Could you tell us about your “a-ha” moment?
Kimberly Osberg: I was surrounded by music a lot growing up. My mom was always playing classic rock radio while cleaning the house, or she’d turn on Pink if she was rage cleaning. She was also the children’s choir director at our church, so I was at the church a lot, sight-reading the tenor part because we didn’t have enough people. And I started getting involved with music at school. I had taken some piano lessons, and I played harp for a little bit, and I really fell in love with percussion. You’re never playing the same thing every day, you get to do a lot of different things. And my band director there was starting to do a couple of different things, teaching the band and conducting the youth orchestra. They hosted a composition competition when I was in the orchestra, and I felt really motivated to just try it. I had been playing jazz piano, so I already knew I liked making stuff up, but not anything serious. And I was like, “oh, my mom has Cakewalk, I can totally write an orchestra piece”–and this is my first notated piece of music!
And I’d been sitting in the percussion section, and we were doing “Mars” and Night on Bald Mountain, and even though there’s some fun percussion stuff there’s a lot of rests. So a lot of times we’d be sitting in the back and just doing our math homework. But then because this competition was coming up, and I wanted to write something, I was like, “well, they’re going to sight read all the music that’s submitted, so if I write something that the students think is really fun they’ll pick it, because the students are having fun.” And I started paying attention in rehearsal for the first time. Just, ”the violins seem to really like this part, or the trumpets really like to do this big blaring thing.” And “why does the conductor end up doing this motion with that music? What’s motivating him to do that?” And so I started writing something, going through that process of learning.
When we had the reading, they ended up picking the piece–so the first thing I ever had played was for a 60 piece youth orchestra, which was really intense. But it was so fun. And you get to learn things like, “No, just because your best friend plays second clarinet doesn’t mean you can make that part more interesting.” Or “you can’t trust the trumpets when they say that they can play high C’s over and over again.”
And that director, after we got done with that concert, he said, “you know I know that you’re not thinking that you’re gonna go into music. But I think you are. And I think that you should really think about it. And I’d like you to try going to more music camps for this kind of thing, and you should go for it.” I hadn’t really thought of it before. And I went to the Tanglewood music program for the high school level. And that was the first time it really hit me that there are living people writing music, there’s people out there doing this. It’s not just film music, and it’s not just people arranging transcriptions of Bach chorales. There was a whole world out there that I was just dipping my toes in, and that summer at Tanglewood really solidified for me that I really can’t do anything else. I just can’t imagine getting involved with anything else.
OAW: What brought you to Oregon, and how do you like it so far?
KO: I was living in Texas, and I was doing all right. I had some things going on, I was starting to make some connections with other musicians, and I was working as the event operations manager for the Dallas Chamber Symphony, and I really loved meeting musicians there, and I was getting really excited about things happening. But my partner was really not enjoying his job, and he was like, “I’m kind of thinking about looking in other places for my job, and I’m not sure what you think about that.” And I was like, “well, I really love the food in Texas, and I love the people. But I’m not such a big fan of the weather and the endless urban sprawl.” I really missed trees, and I missed being able to drive ten minutes and be in the middle of nowhere, which is what I got growing up in Wisconsin. And so I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I had picked up and moved to Dallas, sight unseen, with no plan. So why not Portland?
And so when he got his job up here in Portland, the first time I visited Portland was looking for apartments. I fell in love with the city when we were here. There’s so much stuff going on, but there’s still tons of nature everywhere, and it seemed like it was a really great mix of exciting things happening in town while you still have the ability to disconnect and get away from things. We moved here in January of 2020, downtown, in the middle of everything, and we were carless. So we were like, “this will be awesome!” And then we were in the middle of everything–the protests happening, and all of the lockdown stuff, and the smoke coming into town. It was a really different experience moving here. But through that experience I really started learning a lot more about Portland and its history and why things were happening the way that they were here. And it deepened my desire to stay here and find ways to reinvest in the community, and be more a part of it than I have been.
When I first moved here, I was freelancing because I didn’t have a job set up, and so I just sustained myself only on commissions for the first year and a half. And during the pandemic it wasn’t easy, but it was something that worked out fortunately for me. But then, because I wanted to be more involved with the community, I started looking to get back into working with a nonprofit. This opportunity with Resonance Ensemble just happened to open up, and they seemed so aligned with the things that were really important to me as an artist, and that I had been thinking a lot more about during that time, and so I got the job with them. And now I’m still working with them part time. And I’ve learned so much from Liz Bacon Brownson and Katherine FitzGibbon. I hadn’t really been in a vocal music setting before, outside of my mom’s church choir, so it’s really been an education working with the opera and choral people here in town. It’s been really good, especially in the last year or so as I’ve been around more, and been able to get out to things and actually meet and talk with people. I’ve been really impressed and surprised and really grateful for the sense of community that the music community has here. We just had the Fear No Music kickoff concert for locally sourced composers. On Friday, when I was there, it felt like a big family gathering. Here’s all these amazing people who are also making music, and also live here, and we all just want to hear each other’s music and support each other, and we’re all winning. Everybody feeling that big glow of “we are not in competition with one another.” We’re a big community of people who’ve all been drawn here, and there’s something really beautiful about the community here that I’ve come to appreciate a lot.
OAW: Tell me about your “commissions from quarantine,” and about being a freelance composer.
KO: When lockdown happened, back when Twitter was nicer, there was this really active new music community, and we all were congregating there and talking about how people were dealing with the isolation, especially as it became more clear that it was not gonna be just a couple of weeks. And I started seeing so many of these musicians that I had started to connect with virtually just getting really despondent and despairing–understandably. And because I didn’t have a job, and I was still looking for work, I was like, “what is a way that I can give something to the people who are isolated at home?” And I was looking at my own catalog, and at the time I really didn’t have a lot of solo or duo repertoire, and I was like, “I could put out something that’s super cheap, super low commitment, and then I can get a couple of pieces written for solo stuff, and it’ll be at a price that is not gonna break the bank, but give them something new, a little project that they could just chew on, at least, for a couple of weeks.” And so I put out this call, just, “Hey, I’m doing these super cheap commissions and I’m gonna keep it open for the next three days.” And I was thinking I might get three or four projects or something, but by the time I closed that window there was forty.
And they were from all over the place. Part of that commission was just to help me get through things faster without having to do too much back and forth. They needed to give me the amount of time they wanted, their instrumentation, and then a word that they wanted that piece to encompass. And it was really interesting seeing what different people felt they wanted during that time. Some people were like, “I really want something that’s completely calm, and really nice, and really beautiful.” And some people were like, “I want something about Covid mania.” And they were really into it. I got to connect with so many different musicians that way, and some of those small projects ended up turning into larger commissions, and I ended up meeting so many people through that project that when I launched a bigger project during the pandemic, which was the Project 12 Series, a piece a week for twelve weeks–that filled up in a day. I was expecting that to take at least a month to fill up. I think the hunger for doing a project that was low stakes and big impact was there, and I just happened to tap into that at that time.
But a lot of those projects also grew into really wonderful and beautiful things. One of the groups who did something through that was The Merian Ensemble. They’re based in Atlanta, they’re all Atlanta Symphony musicians. And it’s an all women group, and they wanted something that was going to be part of their all women focus.
I was looking out my window, and I can see Mount Hood from here. And so I was like, “I wonder what have women done in climbing? What’s some of that history there?” And we found out that there was a manless ascent of the Grand Tetons, and a bunch of them play at the Grand Tetons Music Festival, so I thought, “if I write something about the Tetons, maybe they’ll also play it there.” And so I ended up writing about that, and now that’s on a brand new album that also features music by some of my idols, like Jennifer Higdon.
It’s just absolutely wild, the life and the relationships that have come from those really tiny projects. Since then my catalog has exploded, and I think I’ve written something like a hundred pieces in the last three years, just because of those projects that have burst off, and people hearing about me secondhand due to some of these relationships.
OAW: What is your compositional technique like? What’s your process?
KO: It changes a lot, because the approach that I have really hasn’t changed that much since that first piece in high school. The first thing I always do is I meet with the people who are interested in commissioning something from me, and I ask them a bunch of questions. I say, “What is something you love to play on your instruments? And what is something that you would love to never do again? What are some of the pieces you really love to play? Or is there something you’re really good at?” I had a clarinetist who’s like, “I’m amazing at trills. Please give me all the trills.” And so I wrote him a piece that had a bunch of trills.
I also ask, “what are the things you like to do outside of music? What are things that are important to you? Is there something you feel like you’ve always wanted to have a piece about?” A lot of the interesting things that have come from that have really sparked those compositions. Sometimes they don’t know what they want, and they’re like, “please don’t make me do that, I don’t know!”
There’s this flutist named Elizabeth Robinson, and she was putting a whole album together of bird inspired pieces, and she had apparently pitched this project to several different people, who, for reasons unknown to me, just didn’t want to do it. There’s this coffee table book–I have it here because I was just giving a talk to a class about this–called Extraordinary Chickens. And it’s basically like Vogue magazine for chickens. And she’s like, “I’m gonna send you this book, and if it’s too weird I understand, but maybe you’ll like it. You’ve written some funny things so maybe this would be for you.” And I saw these chickens, and I was like “you could write so much music about these birds. They are so fascinating. There are so many different stories.” There’s one that was bred for samurai, as gifts for kings, so they would grow their tails out as long as possible. Some of them are recorded as being as long as thirty feet long. It really sparks the imagination. So I wrote a multi-movement flute quartet that was all inspired by different chickens, and we called it Fowl Play. I usually start with a title, or a very specific idea. And I spend a lot of time not writing music while I’m doing that–I’m reading stuff online, looking at videos of how the chickens move, getting a lot of visual cues. I spend a lot of time sketching little cartoons and drawings, and from that I draw gesture lines near them, and then that ends up translating into lines of music. For me it’s less important that an audience member needs to see exactly the movements that I was imagining when I was writing; I just want them to get the essence of chicken.


I love the process of getting to know these different things about musicians, because I think those things outside of actual performance practice are the things that we’re trying to express with music. I know that for some people the theory, or the way these chord relationships are, is exciting and interesting on its own. But, growing up in a small town, it was harder to get exposed to classical music–especially contemporary classical music. I think about people in my town who haven’t heard a lot of “out there” music in person–so in my own writing, I try to find ways to ground more unusual sounds and harmonies in something visual to make it more accessible (“Aha, this is about wisdom tooth removal – it’s supposed to sound kind of awful!”). In doing that, when they hear it again, it’s less alien – so maybe they’ll give that kind of piece more of a chance the next time they hear it; in that way, I like when my music can act as a gateway drug to other music.
In the piece that Fear No Music played last spring, the Sweet-Ass Cycle, there’s a movement that’s called “Big Ass Moth.” The whole point of that piece was that my friend was doing a flute recital that had Ferneyhough’s Cassandra’s Dream Song, so I took all of the same techniques that were in that piece and I put them in the context of these different animals. And it gave people, I think, a visual: “this kind of sounds like this, and this kind of sounds like that.” So when they hear it in a different piece, I think it gives them their own visual that they can relate to. They can bring something into it themselves. It’s not this totally distant thing to them. It’s like, “now I have this narrative context that I’ve heard the sound in before, and now I’m okay hearing it in a slightly more ambiguous context.” And so I think a lot of times I’m thinking about “I want to use this really cool sound,” or “I have this idea of how this motion should be or how the pacing should go.” But also I don’t want to do something just because I want to show off how many techniques I can do. So I tend to approach writing music a lot more narratively, and pacing and gesture, and how to evoke those kinds of imagery through sound. It’s a lot of visual stuff before I get into actual writing.
I think if you keep trying things the same way, sometimes you can get stuck, and sometimes you just don’t know how to move past it. I love talking with painters and writers and dancers, and seeing what they do to come up with ideas, because that translates really well to music. It’s nice to break up the way that you’re approaching that sketching and writing process.
OAW: What’s the genesis of THUMP? What drew you to that particular Poe story?
KO: When I was an undergrad at Luther College there was just me and one or two other seniors that year, and our composition teacher Brooke Joyce sat us down and said, “I want you to write operas this year for your senior projects,” and we were like “aaaaah!” It was a little scary at first, but he said, “what we’re going to do is this fall is you’re just going to watch a bunch of videotaped operas, and then I’m going to get you together with a playwright in town that’s going to help you develop your own libretto, and then you’re going to write it and have it performed in the spring.” I was really scared of writing my own text, trying to figure out a story. And they weren’t showing us La bohème, they were showing us Bluebeard’s Castle and Wozzeck, and so I got into this headspace of watching really creepy, dark operas. And a lot of them had pretty simple stagings–I think that was part of the reason he was showing us those.
And I wanted to do something to honor my mom, because she was a really big part of why I ended up pursuing music. When we were younger, she used to read a bunch of scary stories to us–especially if there was a thunderstorm, she’d get out the kerosene oil lamp, and she’d sit there, and she’d make all these faces with her super expressive eyebrows. And so I was looking at what would fit nicely into a nice thirty-minute thing, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” just fell into my lap–because it’s a short story, but there’s so many interesting things there. And since it was a Liberal Arts College, I could take whatever classes I wanted by the time I was a senior. So I took a theater directing class and a creative writing class that fall semester, and it was so helpful being able to approach things from so many different ways and get so much training and input that fall.
When I was writing it I almost quit, probably four or five times because it was just so overwhelming. I hadn’t really written for voice before, and I hadn’t really written for solo piano, and now I’m writing a 35-minute piece for three voices and piano. And my teacher just said, “You’re not gonna quit. You’re gonna finish it.” We had very light staging, super simple, the only options we had for lights were “lights on and off.” But the students that I was working with were so dedicated, and were really willing to give it way more rehearsal time than they should have. And we got to try things out and frame things. Even though it was really simple, it was a great experience, and we found out later that that was the first time a student opera had ever been done at the school. So it was really exciting to be part of that.
So I get done with that, and I think that’s it. “Okay, I’ve done my opera.” I have it for applications, but it’s never gonna happen again. But then, the next year I was at Indiana University, and there’s a company there called New Voices Opera, and every year they produce a student opera. They do a fall exhibit where they let people submit a bunch of arias, and they perform them, and from that they pick one that they’re going to develop into an opera.
THUMP was done, and I was like, “I’ll just throw this thing in, and at least I’ll get another performance of it.” But they ended up coming back and saying, “we’d love for you to orchestrate this and have it turn into a fully orchestrated, staged, costumed, lit opera.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh! It’s so exciting! Can’t wait to spend the next year doing that!” And they were like, “oh, no, because yours is done we’d like yours to be orchestrated for this spring.” So on top of starting a Master’s degree and being in a brand new place, I started orchestrating a 35-minute opera in a month. We got through it somehow. I’m sending them drafts updated at 3 am, and they were sending messages back, “go to sleep.” It was so amazing to have this chamber orchestra playing that, and period costumes, and a real theater director and a real conductor. It was a dream.
And so then I thought, “it’s done. That’s never gonna happen again, it’s over, obviously no one will ever play these old pieces again.”
And it’s so funny, because both of the pieces Fear No Music has played from me now have been from my master’s program. And now THUMP is being done at New Wave Opera. When Lisa started the company, I think she almost called the company “Night of the Living Opera” because she just loved the title so much. She was really excited about this event, and she has some really cool music for it. Her she conjures piece is just so awesome. And when she was talking about other things to program, she’s like, “Well, your thing is done.” I’m finding out that that is a big bonus for opera companies–something that’s done. So it was really easy to stage. And I am getting to step back into a director role for this.
It’s been really exciting to go back. The very beginning of this notebook that I have is THUMP. I’m at the end of it now. It kind of feels like the last few things that are going to be in it is that. That’s really poetic, being able to come back to it with more experience. We ended up not changing the music–the biggest change is that the main baritone role is now being done by a soprano. That’s been really fun, to see how that has changed some of the ways we’re thinking about the show, and the way these different harmonies come together. But otherwise the musical material is exactly the same.
But I definitely am doing something really different with staging for it from both of the iterations we had before, in part just because Ravens Manor is such a cool venue. There’s so much to play with. The beginning of the opera has characters coming in from offstage, and since there’s no offstage area we’re gonna be scattering the performers on the second level of their bar, and near the stairwell, and by the bar itself. They’re going to be sitting there during the break, and when the opera starts they’re going to just start singing from the audience. I think that’ll freak some people out! But it’ll be fun.
Now this piece is officially ten years old. I really appreciate the opportunity to bring this back, and have it alongside two other Poe-inspired things.
OAW: How did you meet Lisa and get involved with co-founding New Wave Opera?
KO: Lisa and I had connected on new music Twitter, so we’ve been aware of one another, and had seen each other’s stuff. When I announced I was moving to Portland, Lisa got together Drew Swatosh, Arthur Breur, and I think another Portland composer, and they all took me out to dinner, and we went to a Fear No Music concert. So that was my first ever thing in Portland, going to a Fear No Music concert.
We realized that both of us had some similar interests, and she had done school in Iowa so there was that Midwest experience. And then, during the pandemic, I was doing my tiny commission projects, and she had started doing some virtual operas–and I saw that she was someone like me, who couldn’t sit still and couldn’t just do nothing. So over the course of the pandemic we really didn’t get to meet in person very much at all, but we were talking online. The more we talked, the more we were realizing our same frustrations with current opportunities for composers, and her frustrations with opportunities for singers, and what the modern opera landscape really looks like. We were aligned in what was missing and what we wanted to see.
There’s been this influx of singers who are looking for things to do. And so this past spring, she formally approached me and said, “I want to start an opera company, and I want you to be a part of it.” And I was like, “that sounds like a lot of work, and I’m totally in.” So we started planning what we knew for sure was gonna happen, like Night of the Living Opera. And I just happened to go to Ravens Manor a few months prior, and I was like, “I have the perfect venue for this.” Luckily they were really amenable to that. We’ve been talking a lot about being really committed to only doing work by living composers, and living librettists whenever possible. Making sure that while we’re supporting voices from around the world, that we are having that work performed by voices living here in Portland.
OAW: What do you listen to for fun?
KO: I was born and raised on Billy Joel. So he’s always in rotation. I also really like a lot of older film scores; I’ve been listening to Korngold and Herrmann. During the pandemic I got really into these collaborations between a filmmaker named Jacques Demy and the composer Michel Legrand, and I got to know Legrand’s music through that. And it’s really lush and semi-operatic. And also a lot of video game soundtracks. My partner and I were in the whole Elden Ring craze when that came out, so we were listening to that stuff. But then he started playing the other Souls games. And then I heard the music for Bloodborne, and I was like, “this stuff is amazing. I love this music so much!” So that’s been in heavy rotation recently.
OAW: What would you ask Kimberly Osberg?
KO: I think I’d probably ask me what I ask everyone else, which is, “what is something you would do if you weren’t afraid to do it?” Whether that’s a personal thing or a music thing. For me, there’s a music project that I got the itch to do this past spring, and I’m starting to realize it’s scaring me because it’s so big. But I’m thinking that it’s a good thing. I saw an artist on Instagram that was doing these really cool artistic renderings of trees, different tree-inspired things. I thought it would be so cool to write a piece a month for a year, each about a different tree, and then have those pieces performed near those trees. And Oregon has so many of the ones that I want to write about like redwoods, and the Japanese fire maple, and cherry blossom, and quaking aspen. Some of them, they just write themselves. If I decided to do that I would actually have to stop taking commissions for about a year in order to make sure I had the time to do what I wanted, and that’s scary. But I’m really considering doing it, and anytime I ask myself that question–because I try to ask it a lot–I always find that the only reason I’m not doing it is because of that fear. Then I’ve answered for myself that it’s something that needs to happen.
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