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Making others’ dreams come true: Remembering John T. Montague

The stalwart patron of Portland contemporary classical music leaves a lasting — and surprising — legacy, including a video exhibition this month at Nine Gallery.

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John T. Montague.
John T. Montague.

Every arts obsession has an origin story. For John Montague, it was seeing and hearing Koyaanisqatsi. Godfrey Reggio’s trippy 1982 film about how modern capitalism and technology have driven “Life Out of Balance,” and particularly its mesmerizing Philip Glass score, which was for many of us a gateway drug (sometimes literally) to so-called minimalism and more.

That experience set Montague, who died last February at age 74, on a lifetime trip devoted to contemporary classical music. With his wife, prominent Portland artist Linda Hutchins, the Puget Sound native became one of Portland’s most quietly reliable supporters of new music, one of those exceptionally devoted arts patrons whose passion helps sustain so many of Oregon’s smaller arts institutions. 

But those of us who knew him, even Hutchins, never realized that along with supporting creative artists, Montague harbored his own secret artistic inclination. This month, Nine Gallery exhibits a 45-minute video compiled from images he shot from 2017-23, all viewed from the same urban vantage point overlooking the Willamette River. (Read Brian Libby’s companion ArtsWatch story John Montague’s ‘Willamette Greenway’ at Nine Gallery: the spirit of place, about that exhibit, which closes Nov. 2.) 

Serendipitously, the next few weeks feature live Portland performances of Glass’s music that meant so much to Montague — and, soon, Third Angle New Music’s release of a recording of a rare Glass score made in Montague and Hutchins’s home shortly before his death. 

Shared Passion

Montague and Hutchins met at Intel, where they both worked. He and an Intel coworker both had season tickets to the Oregon Symphony, and bought a third subscription that they’d alternate using for various guests to join them. The guest, Hutchins noted, “always seemed to be female.” It didn’t take long for her to become his regular symphony date.

They soon discovered a shared passion for new music. Hutchins had grown up across the street from Leslie Bassett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer in Michigan, and played the flute herself. Contemporary music, she recalls, “was really a shared passion.”  

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In turn, “as my interest in art developed, he came right along,” she says. “Whatever I was interested in, he’d read up about it — he was a voracious reader and storehouse of information — and pretty soon, he knew way more than I did about whatever it was.” Within a year of that Koyaanisqatsi epiphany, they were married. 

Hutchins & Montague. Photo: Ann Hutchins.
Hutchins & Montague. Photo: Ann Hutchins.

Eventually, both left Intel: she to attend art school, he to other tech companies, including co-founding Model Technology. When that startup was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1997, Montague became “gainfully unemployed” and able to devote his time to family, volunteering, studying piano, and of course, contemporary music. 

Much of the couple’s spare time, including traveling, involved art and music. “We’d spend the day looking at art, and find music in the evening,” Hutchins recalls. They pursued their musical muse at storied festivals such as New York’s Bang on a Can Festival and Tennessee’s Big Ears. Some of the most memorable trips included Glass’s music, including his magnificent early operas Satyagraha (Seattle, 1988) and Einstein on the Beach (LA, 2013). It’s no surprise that the repetitive structures that characterize much of Glass’s music and that of his fellow so-called “minimalists” such as Steve Reich resonated with Montague. Hutchins says he most enjoyed doing the “repetitive tasks around the house that require patience and discipline,” like laundry and dishwashing.

And of course, they enjoyed many, many concerts in Portland, except for a few years when their son Eric was too young to join them. Hutchins says that it didn’t take long for him to embrace the family obsession. “New music often has interesting percussion,” Hutchins explains. “There’s a lot there to engage a kid.”

Hutchins, Montague, and their son Eric.
Hutchins, Montague, and their son Eric.

Along with the symphony and others, Montague also followed Portland State’s piano series, which became Portland Piano International. But, frustrated by its near-exclusive focus on music by long-dead composers, “he wrote them a letter out of the blue, offering to sponsor a concert if it included only music composed in his lifetime,” Hutchins remembers. “That was his initial dip of the toe into becoming a patron” of new music. Montague served as president of the piano series board of directors in the 1980s. 

Still, the tendency of most Oregon classical music organizations of the time to shun or at best tokenize contemporary music left Montague craving more. “He didn’t think you had to attract people with some warhorse in order to get them to hear new music,” Hutchins says. “He wanted a whole performance of contemporary music.” 

He found them when they began attending new music concerts by an upstart ensemble initially called Virtuosi della Rosa, which morphed into Third Angle New Music, and has performed almost exclusively contemporary classical music for four decades.

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That’s where I first noticed the shyly smiling Montague and the ebullient Hutchins, who seemed to be at almost every new music concert I frequented, and we’d sometimes chat about the music. He joined the organization’s board of directors, where he helped “guide us through leadership transitions, a recession, and so much else,” says 3A Artistic Director Sarah Tiedemann. Montague chaired the committee that hired her, and she says he brought a distinctive perspective to the organization.

“We attract a lot of designers and architects and musicians to our shows,” she explains. “And then John was blessed with a highly intelligent, creative engineer/ artist’s brain.” 

That allowed him to offer specific and valuable feedback. “One of my favorite things was talking to him after shows,” Tiedemann remembers. “He always had such thoughtful things to say when he liked something or didn’t like something. He was never judgmental, but he would be honest. You could tell when he really loved a piece. We were all so happy when John was happy.”

Montague with Sarah Tiedemann at a 2019 Third Angle event honoring his service on its board.
Montague with Sarah Tiedemann at a 2019 Third Angle event honoring his service on its board.

Montague’s analytical mindset manifested in practical ways, such as Third Angle’s Listening Labs that Hutchins and Montague sometimes hosted at their home. “John, with his mix of music appreciation and tech savviness, had just the most beautiful sound system installed,” Tiedemann says. “He always ran the mixing board during our listening labs. He got everything set up. He was like part of our tech crew — part of the show.”

Tiedemann, a veteran flutist and arts administrator, says that for relatively niche arts groups like Third Angle, super-supporters like Montague provide more than feedback and fundraising. “When you’re doing something that unique, you can end up feeling like an island,” she muses. “When you have these really generous folks who will go with you whichever directions you take, it keeps you grounded. It keeps you motivated. To have people who are with you on the journey keeps you tethered. It connects you to the community.” The organization dedicated this year’s Decibel Series to his memory. 

Montague and Hutchins’s love of music “was a pretty big driver of the design” of their Northwest Portland home, she says. They intended the Bowstring Truss House from the start to be configurable for musical performances. The former industrial warehouse, and the namesake bowstring trusses in the roof, create the wide-open space needed for rehearsals, performances and gatherings. ArtsWatch’s Brian Libby detailed the house’s design and music-friendliness in a splendid story in Dwell magazine.

Montague (in striped shirt) listening listening to Third Angle rehearse Philip Glass’s "1000 Airplanes on the Roof” at the Bowstring Truss House.
Montague (in striped shirt) listening listening to Third Angle rehearse Philip Glass’s “1000 Airplanes on the Roof” at the Bowstring Truss House.

Lasting Legacy

Fittingly, Montague’s last project with Third Angle took place at that house — and, in a neat symmetry, it involved Philip Glass’s music. After the group performed the composer’s singular 1988 science fiction music drama 1000 Airplanes on the Roof in May 2023 at Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, “one of the most exciting events Third Angle’s ever had,” Tiedemann says, “no one wanted the experience to end.” (Read David Bates’s ArtsWatch story.) The group approached Montague and Hutchins about sponsoring a recording of the score at their house. Glass’s music for 1000 Airplanes has sort of gotten lost in the flood of subsequent Glass compositions and reissues. (He’s probably the most prolific composer since Telemann.)

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Howard Hughes' massive Spruce Goose provided an untraditional setting for Third Angle New Music's performance of "1000 Airplanes on the Roof," an opera about alien abduction. Photo by: David Bates
Howard Hughes’ massive Spruce Goose provided an untraditional setting for Third Angle New Music’s performance of “1000 Airplanes on the Roof,” a music drama about alien abduction. Photo: David Bates

Montague and Hutchins were excited to nurture a historic premiere recording of the full version, including the actor’s monologue — but weren’t sure whether their urban home would work, what with the Portland Streetcar periodically clanging by, construction, and other street noise. They invited an audio engineer to assess the possibilities.

“They go around snapping their fingers and listening to the echoes and talking about hanging drapes over there,” Hutchins remembers. 

Fortunately, much of the music is generated by electronic keyboards and is therefore piped directly into the recording equipment, bypassing ambient noise. And almost exactly a year ago, they were able to arrange the sessions after hours, when construction and other regular urban sounds were at a minimum. Then they crossed their fingers in hopes that the autumn rains — which produce their own significant percussive effects on the roof but unfortunately don’t sound like a multitude of airplanes — wouldn’t arrive and intrude. 

The recording sessions were “a peak experience, really,” Hutchins recalls. “I feel so grateful he got to witness that. He was a total geek and just loved all the setup [for the recording].” The high point: hearing the great Portland singer Arwen Myers nail a stratospheric solo on a Sunday morning.

The sessions were a joy for the musicians, too. “I’ve had many recording experiences,” Tiedemann says. “This one was so warm and cozy. Linda cooked all our meals. We all dined together the whole time. John and Linda were there with headphones on, listening along, and they bonded with the musicians, the conductor and audio crew just like they were in the ensemble. To have them at the center of that felt so intimate and personal and special to us.”

Montague at recording session for Third Angle’s ‘1000 Airplanes on the Roof.’ Time-lapse video: Third Angle New Music.

Sadly, it was one of their final gatherings. While post-production work continued (Tiedemann expects the recording to come out early next year), Montague was struck down by a blitzkrieg assault of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a fast-advancing, terminal condition. To ease his last days, Tiedemann prepared a playlist of favorite Philip Glass and Steve Reich music for Montague to hear from his hospital bed at home. As he slipped away, his journey’s end would be accompanied by the music that began it. 

At Hutchins’s request, Third Angle prepared one final gift for the stalwart supporter who’d given the organization so much. The recording engineer prepared a rough cut of part of the album-in-progress and Tiedemann and other Third Anglers took it over to the house to play it for Montague. Although he was pretty far gone by then, he stirred. He remained silent, “but we could tell he was listening,” Tiedemann says. “Thank goodness he got to be part of it. It was like coming full circle for him. It was a beautiful last memory of John.”

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Over a musician’s career, “performances and experiences can get lost in the shuffle,” she says. “Then you have an experience like that, and you see how important what we’re doing is to someone. That’s why we do it.”

Unexpected Coda

Montague’s story doesn’t end here. His friends, admirers, even Hutchins thought of him not as a creative artist himself, but as an enabler of others. “He just wanted to support things that his friends and others were doing,” she says, “making other people’s dreams come true. Behind the scenes, he did that in so many ways.”

But it turns out that Montague had dreams of his own. After he died, Hutchins discovered on his computer a wealth of images he’d made over the preceding six years. “John was an avid walker,” she recalls. “He would take these five-mile walks along the Willamette River path. I knew he was taking snapshots of a few locations with his iPhone. He kept that up off and on till a couple of months before he died, through December 2023.”

As a member of Nine Gallery, Hutchins was able to program one month of the gallery each year. When her turn came up this month, she remembered Montague’s photos and decided to see whether they might comprise a photo exhibition for this month. 

But when she went to his computer to find them, “I discovered these videos on his computer, over 130 of them, all about 20 seconds long,” she says. 

The first one is dated January 1, 2019, which suggested to her that he intended to create some kind of project from the videos. But he never talked to her about them, she never saw him reviewing them, nor does she know what, if anything, he’d have done with them.

Montague's exhibition "Willamette Greenway" at Nine Gallery.
Montague’s exhibition “Willamette Greenway” at Nine Gallery.

With the help of Portland filmmaker and visual artist Stephen Slappe, Hutchins compiled more than 250 still and moving images into a video installation, which their son Eric helped install at Nine Gallery. Although the setting remains constant in each shot, beauty and interest emerge from the gradual changes of light and the water’s motion and other details over time. Variation or evolution within repetition: that’s exactly what happens in much of the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich that so inspired Montague. In his own final artistic expression, John Montague reveals just how deeply art can resonate in those who fully embrace it.

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* * *

John Montague’s video installation Willamette Greenway continues at Nine Gallery through Nov. 2. On the final day of the show, Hutchins and Slappe will lead a 20-minute walk from Nine Gallery to the site of John’s videos, leaving the gallery at 1 pm and returning by 2:00-2:30. 

Several opportunities to experience music in John Montague’s spirit are also coming up in the Portland area.

• On Oct. 30, Third Angle New Music and longtime Philip Glass amanuensis and keyboard master Michael Riesman perform Philip Glass’s 1998 score to Tod Browning’s classic 1931 film Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, at Beaverton’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 S.W. Crescent St.

• On Nov. 14 at downtown Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 S.W. Broadway, Riesman leads the Philip Glass Ensemble, PSU Chamber Choir, and Oregon Symphony in a live performance of the work that inspired Montague’s devotion to new music, Koyaanisqatsi, accompanied by a screening of the film.

• On Nov. 17, Sarah Tiedemann and percussionist Chris Whyte perform in the next installment of Third Angle’s John T. Montague Memorial Decibel Series at Decibel Sound & Drink, 11380 S.E. 21st Ave, Milwaukie. 

***

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You can make a donation to Third Angle in John Montague’s memory here.

Brett Campbell is a frequent contributor to The Oregonian, San Francisco Classical Voice, Oregon Quarterly, and Oregon Humanities. He has been classical music editor at Willamette Week, music columnist for Eugene Weekly, and West Coast performing arts contributing writer for the Wall Street Journal, and has also written for Portland Monthly, West: The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Salon, Musical America and many other publications. He is a former editor of Oregon Quarterly and The Texas Observer, a recipient of arts journalism fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (Columbia University), the Getty/Annenberg Foundation (University of Southern California) and the Eugene O’Neill Center (Connecticut). He is co-author of the biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana University Press, 2017) and several plays, and has taught news and feature writing, editing and magazine publishing at the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication and Portland State University.

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