And so we sneak up on the end of Sounds Like Portland – a series of eleven concerts spearheaded by Oregon Symphony and their Creative Chair Gabriel Kahane, spotlighting Portland’s famously rich musical ecosystem. The best news about the festival came in the form of a slightly disappointing answer to a question we put to their press folks.

Because, well, listen. Having noted the inclusion of some fine Stumptown bands, and a solid chunk of chamber music concerts featuring music by Oregon composers – not to mention Portland’s greatest musical success story, esperanza spalding – we still had to ask: “Why aren’t there more orchestral concerts featuring Portland classical composers?” The piano concerto they commissioned from Portland composer David Schiff for legendary Portland jazz pianist Darrell Grant notwithstanding (read about that here) – and also notwithstanding their recent collaborations with Oregon composers Andy Akiho, Nancy Ives, and Giancarlo Castro D’Addona – it seems a fair question for a symphony orchestra with “Oregon” in its name. Here’s what they said:

“Our approach to Sounds Like Portland embraces a wide range of musical styles and local artists. The goal is to showcase Portland’s diverse musical talents across genres, creating a series that truly reflects the city’s vibrant music scene. This is the first year of the festival, and we’re excited to expand and deepen our collaborations in the season ahead.”

Which is kinda mundane and press-releasey, to be painfully frank, though we do appreciate that they’re doing their best. Orchestras famously have the maneuvering capability of a cargo ship, and work under the weight of immense financial pressures and a tradition with a four-hundred-year moment of inertia. (You can read all about OSO music director David Danzmayr’s take on the challenges of balancing old music and new music in Charles Rose’s recent interview right here.)

But note the good news in that answer: “This is the first year of the festival.” Meaning they’ll keep doing this, which is perhaps the most important thing. “Progress, not perfection,” as the AA folks like to say.

We’ll return to this at the end. For now, let’s consider this year’s “diverse musical talents across genres.”

The Etceterists

First up, on November 6 & 7, is another band-and-orchestra pairing, this time featuring perhaps the most Portlandia of Portland bands: The Decemberists. It’s not just that frontman Colin Meloy and accordionist/glockenspielist/etceterist Jenny Conlee both appeared on the famous (and much-maligned, at least by older Portlanders) television show; it’s also the way the band embodies that whole quirky Pet Sounds-obsessed ethos the show so consistently lampooned.

That is, of course, not a bad thing. Pet Sounds is an awesome album that founded a whole genre of its own and has consequently influenced roughly ten million good albums and a handful of great ones – one of which is last year’s Decemberists album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again. Both the band themselves and the album’s producer, longtime collaborator Tucker Martine (a staple of the PNW scene who’s been blurring the distinction between “Seattle musician” and “Portland musician” for thirty-some-odd years now), were honored by the Oregon Music Hall of Fame this month, and it’s easy to hear why. Here, have a listen for yourself:

Or consider their lovely and weird 2005 album Picaresque, recorded in an old church in Portland (but not The Old Church in Portland):

In other words, their music is perfect for a band-and-orchestra setting, with its diverse, intimately epic songwriting and a rich timbral palette consisting of not only the band’s own expansive array but also various colorful guest musicians.

The Decemberists and the Oregon Symphony perform together on November 6 & 7 at The Schnitz in Portland. Tickets and more information available right here.

And so

Of the three really big-name composers who’ve chosen to call Oregon home over the last few years (welcome!), our favorite has to be Caroline Shaw. Nothing against the other two (Andy Akiho and Gabriel Kahane are both awesome), but Shaw is the bee’s knees. Partly it’s because while Andy and Gabe have their own strong connections with the musical traditions of the past, Shaw is the most “classical.” It’s as if the entire history of strings-and-voices music from Hildegard to Dowland to Tallis to Bach to Haydn to Schubert to Ravel to Bartók to Glass to Pärt to Lang all flowed together into one brilliantly modern creative imagination.

And it’s noteworthy that all three transplants are also composer-performers, just like their fellow Oregon composers Kenji Bunch and Nancy Ives (and Dowland and Glass and and and). Whether she’s doing the electro-pop thing with Danni Lee Parpan in Ringdown or singing with Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth or just playing viola in her Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, Shaw is almost always a part of her own story. This is a thing that composers sort of (though not completely) forgot about for a while. We can thank Leonard Bernstein, as always, for helping to keep that alive, but it was Joan Tower and Philip Glass and Lou Harrison and Terry Riley and John Cage and Steve Reich and Meredith Monk who really started bringing that back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It wasn’t too long before Bang On A Can came along, and here we are.

At the festival’s “Caroline Shaw Concert Crawl” on November 9, Shaw’s complete music for string quartet will be performed by two different string quartets and at least one singer across three different venues around Portland. The quartets are the two who operate under the 45th Parallel Universe umbrella: Pyxis Quartet and Mousai REMIX. The singer: Madeline Ross, who is steadily emerging as Portland’s greatest singer of contemporary music (she does a mean Queen of the Night too).

You could – and should – try to make all three concerts, since the program is different at each stop. But, in case you have a day job or something and have to pick and choose, here’s how they’re arranged (according to 45|| Executive Director Lisa Lipton):

Session 1: 12-1 pm / Polaris Hall, 635 N Killingsworth

Mousai REMIX & Madeline Ross, soprano

Punctum – 8′
Limestone & Felt  – 6′
And So (with Maddy) – 5
Cant Voi L’aube (with Maddy) – 4′
Evergreen – 20′
Valencia – 6′

TOTAL – 49′


Session 2: 2:30-3:30pm / Native Arts and Cultures Foundation 800 SE 10th Avenue

Pyxis Quartet

Schisma – 6′
Microfictions Vo. 1 – 20′ (with narrator tbd)
Ritornello 2.sq.2.j – 16′
Blueprint – 7′

Total: 49′


Session 3: 5-6 pm / Show Bar at Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark Strett

Pyxis Quartet & Mousai REMIX (and mystery guest)

Entracte – 11 (Pyxis)
Plan and Elevation – 15′ (Pyxis)
Three Essays – 20′ (Mousai)

Encore:

Other song  – 4′ (Pyxis and Mousai, with mystery guest)

Total: 50’

That’s, yeah, a lot of string quartet music for a contemporary composer. In many ways this stuff marks Shaw’s real arrival as a composer. Attacca Quartet recorded a lot of it on two colorful albums, Orange and Evergreen; “And So,” featured on the latter, marked Shaw’s coming out as a serious solo singer (separate from Roomful of Teeth, the vocal ensemble for whom she composed her career-founding, Pulitzer-winning Partita for Eight Voices). That happened when she sang it with Attacca in 2019 at Lincoln Center, and I never tiring of using that video to introduce people to Shaw and her music:

“And So” is part of the orchestral song cycle Is A Rose, composed for Anne Sofie von Otter and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, who recorded it in 2020 alongside Shaw’s oratorio The Listeners. But it was Shaw’s own performance with Attacca that marked the beginning of my devotion to Shaw’s music. I’d heard and been impressed by her excellent string quartets “Entr’acte” and “Three Essays” at a couple of Chamber Music Northwest summer festivals (2017 and 2019); that laid the groundwork, as had hearing Partita for the first time in a contemporary music appreciation class at Portland State University. But what really sealed it was that video of “And So” – and “Evergreen” itself, composed for and premiered by Third Angle New Music on a just-before-the-pandemic concert with Shaw. (I wrote about that here and here. Incidentally, it was this same concert that introduced Caroline to her partner Danni Lee, which you can read about right here).

Most of the music on this concert crawl is on those Attacca recordings (both available on Bandcamp). The two oddballs in that assortment are “Schisma” (recorded by Brooklyn Rider in 2019) and “Microfictions, Vol. 1,” premiered by Miró Quartet in 2022 and recorded on their album Home. You can listen to all of it, and watch that “Microfictions” premiere, right here:

45th Parallel Universe performs the complete string quartets of Caroline Shaw on November 9 at three venues around Portland. More information and tickets are available right here.

Urban Bohemia

And so we come to the close of the festival and Dandy Warhols, performing with the orchestra on November 13. These guys are the most pre-Portlandia of Portland bands. As a band they’re only five years older than The Decemberists (founded in 1995 and 2000, respectively), and sure, that’s a fine line, but it’s the same fine line that marks the generational shift from Gen X to Millennials. (That the fine line dividing pre- and post-Portlandia is precisely coterminous with the fine line dividing Gen X and Millennials is no accident.)

You probably know the Dandy Warhols story. They’re a wild crew, more odd than weird, with a long run of albums sprawling across an array of styles. They made a ton of money off their song “Bohemian Like You” when it was featured in, of all damn things, an ad for a phone nobody remembers. Another of their songs, “We Used To Be Friends,” was used as the theme song for Veronica Mars.

What they did with that money is what makes the story interesting: they bought a warehouse in the industrial part of Northwest Portland and turned it into a music studio, The Odditorium. They’ve been recording there for the last two decades.

Now, the greatest crime for Gen Xers is “selling out,” which is why none of us have stable careers or own our own houses. This Dandy Warhols play, though, marks the exact distinction between “selling out” and simply “selling.” It is a hacker move, dear reader. They took their payday and reinvested in their own freedom. It’s more or less the same thing that happened with Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club. Classic Gen X.

Anyways, you can get a good idea of what Dandy Warhols are all about with four albums: the first one, 1995’s Dandys Rule OK, a masterpiece of nineties alternative; their deliciously Bowiesque 2008 album …Earth to the Dandy Warhols…; their most recent album, last year’s ROCKMAKER; and the three-and-a-half-hour psychfest that is Tafelmuzik Means More When You’re Alone, recorded in 2010 at The Odditorium and released in early 2020, just as the pandemic was first unfolding.

Or you might get into one of several live albums they’ve recorded at iconic Portland venues: McMenamin’s Mission Theater, Wonder Ballroom, and Crystal Ballroom.

In true Dandys style, they’ll be hanging out after the concert. The next day, they’re back home at The Odditorium for a post-game gathering. Here’s how they describe all that:

Raise a glass with The Dandy Warhols after our epic symphony performance! Then, stick around for a champagne toast, photo opportunity, and limited-edition silk-screened poster as the band celebrates their symphonic collaboration.

Friday November 14th: An Enchanted Evening with The Dandy Warhols

A dreamy night of music, mischief, and glamour. Champagne, oysters, wine, and delicate bites provided.

Enjoy a one-of-a-kind, stripped-down, post-symphony set with The Dandy Warhols in their private studio, The Odditorium — joined for the first time by symphonic composers Tamil Roegan and Louise Woodward on strings.

Dress to impress. Be unusual. Be spectacular.

A rare chance to see the Dandys up close — surrounded by friends, fine wine, and stimulating conversation. Where sound, style, and atmosphere blur into something beautifully unreal.

Dandy Warhols plays with the Oregon Symphony on November 13 at The Schnitz. More information and tickets are available right here.

The Terroir

And now let us consider all of this. For starters, the artists chosen for this first iteration of a festival that purports to sound like Portland are unquestionably the absolute best introduction: if you’re familiar with 45th Parallel Universe, Kenji Bunch, ChatterPDX, Dandy Warhols, The Decemberists, Fear No Music, Darrell Grant, Resonance Ensemble, David Schiff, esperanza spalding, and M. Ward, you do in fact know what Portland sounds like.

Let’s return to that “orchestral music by Portland classical composers” question from earlier. There’s one Portland composer whose omission is glaring: Tomáš Svoboda. He lived, taught, and composed in Portland for decades (read Brett Campbell’s memorial here). Portland Youth Philharmonic premiered his Symphony No. 2 in 2016. Delgani String Quartet has performed and recorded his string quartets. Oregon Symphony themselves commissioned and recorded his Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra in 2000 under the stentorian gaze of James DePreist, with longtime OSO principal percussionist Neil DePonte at the marimba.

It would have been quite natural to program an entire concert of Svoboda’s music, which is what they ought to do next year. They might also have featured Bunch’s orchestral music, of which there is plenty (Supermaximum, commissioned and remiered by PYP; Aspects of an Elephant, also recorded by OSO; The Snow Queen, commissioned and recorded by Eugene Ballet). The recently departed co-founder of Cascadia Composers, David Bernstein, also composed some very compelling orchestral music: the orchestral suite from his Gloriana was performed just a few years ago by Orchestra Nova Northwest, still called Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra at the time, and everybody loved it (read about that here). PCSO/ONN performed Nicole Buetti’s Odyssey Overture around the same time, and it has appeared on several orchestral programs around Oregon (and Vancouver; read about Buetti here).

There’s even a great title for a concert that would feature those three. You could call it The Three B’s: Bernstein, Buetti, and Bunch.

Or how about the upcoming Metropolitan Youth Symphony premiere of Giancarlo Castro D’Addona’s flute concerto Spirits of Wildness, commissioned by and composed for Portland flutist Adam Eccleston? That’s on November 9 at The Schnitz, which is in Portland. (You can read more about that next week, when we publish our interview with Giancarlo). No reason that couldn’t have been an official part of this festival. Maybe next year!

Anyways we could go on, list every significant composer in Portland, the long-timers and the newcomers. Which brings us to an important point, which is that the map is not the territory. We usually say that as a way of expressing the limits of our understanding, but another aspect is that the map is useful as a map precisely because it is not the territory. It is a reduction, a curated representation. Curation represents, always, the biases of the curator. But a map is also a guide, and a way of limiting focus for the purpose of comprehensibility. Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.

Because, in a real sense, everything that happens in Portland sounds like Portland. That stack of Dead Moon records in your living room sounds like Portland, and so does the trio of Deena Grossman CDs recorded at Bill Oskay’s Big Red Studios in Corbett, and so does that Bandcamp Friday box of vinyl from Nadine Records, and so does the latest single from the electro-doom band that formed this morning in someone’s Alberta basement and will be broken up into splinter bands by the end of winter.

The latest Quasi album, last year’s Breaking the Balls of History? Sounds like Portland! Blind Pilot’s In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, inducted as this year’s Oregon Music Hall of Fame Album of the Year? Sounds like Portland! Dancing Dimensions, the 2022 album by legendary soul singer Ural Thomas with his group The Pain? Sounds like Portland! The umpteen albums released by Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble over the last decade or so? Sounds like Portland! Drummer-composer Christopher Brown’s never-ending run of shows at The 1905 Jazz Club? Sounds like Portland!

The latest from E. Ellison (aka Cardioid aka Lizzy Ellison from Radiation City), last year’s Pillars and the accompanying live album Pillars: Live at Dekum Street Theater? Sounds like Portland! The next installment of long-running monthly hip-hop showcase The Thesis, happening November 6, now at Lollipop Shoppe after a long run at Kelly’s Olympian across the river, featuring Portland-by-way-of-Jersey rapper Lambo Lawson, of whom Willamette Week writer Daniel Bromfield said, “Lawson moved to Portland in 2019 to more easily commute to L.A. for a modeling gig” – yeah, that sure as hell sounds like Portland.

The new album from Portland krautrock band Møtrik, EARTH (available on vinyl November 7), sounds like Portland; and so does their single “Hazel Hall,” based on the early 20th century Oregon poet; and so does their 2021 double album MØØN: The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK. When they play their album release show on November 1 at Portland venue Showdown Saloon on Powell, that will sound like Portland. The opening act, Plankton Wat – aka Dewey Mahood from Portland psych band Eternal Tapestry – sounds like Portland.

We could go on, and on, and on, and on. But you get the idea.