March Music Moderne preview: celebrating Debussy

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While everyone is checking their brackets for one kind of March Madness (go Ducks!), some of us are equally excited by the return of another crazy rite of spring. March Music Moderne has been on hiatus for while, so it’s even more thrilling to welcome back one of Oregon’s most fascinating music melanges, because it spotlights music you can’t hear at other Oregon classical music concerts, primarily composers who write or wrote music in the modernist tradition. And unlike most overpriced classical music concerts, March Modness is always free, subsidized by Priest (whose wealth lies in his musical generosity rather than negotiable currency) himself.

Actually, though, this edition of MMM superficially resembles Ye Olde Classical Music in at least one way: what I call necromusicophilia, the worship of dead composers. Classical music institutions, desperately needing a news hook to provide an excuse to pay more than usual attention to composers who aren’t going to be releasing any albums of new material or embarking on tours, tend to focus on round number birthdays or, more macabrely, death days.

Claude Debussy, 1908.

For Claude Debussy, that day came exactly 100 years ago Sunday, when the French composer died of cancer during World War I as German shells exploded near his Paris home. But why would the generally mid-20th century March Music Moderne’s three concerts this weekend at Portland’s Community Music Center, and associated other activities this month, commemorate Debussy’s demise?

One answer may be that it was one of his groundbreaking works, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, that turned MMMpresario Bob Priest onto classical music, rescuing him from rock music’s gutters and vaulting him into the palace of — nah, not really. Priest still cherishes Jimi Hendrix, Prince and other rock and pop deities. And as we’ll see, this festival includes far more new music — and by Oregon composers — than old.

But Priest is far from alone in his Debussy devotion. This isn’t the only centennial commemoration of his death happening around the world this year. There are days when he’s my favorite composer too. And it’s a sign of Debussy’s artistic significance and variety that he’s legitimately claimed as a major inspiration by many if not most composers who followed — modernist, post-mod, and otherwise, including one of Priest’s prime mentors, Olivier Messiaen. That’s how rich was his palette — from La Mer’s turbulent seascapes to Children’s Corner’s playful naivete to Pelleas and Melisande’s shadowy moods and so much more. And that’s why Debussy makes an appropriate centerpiece of a modern music festival: not just for his past accomplishments, but also for his future impact, which continues here and now.

That variety and influence are on display at Friday’s Music at the Speed of Sound concert featuring music by Debussy’s younger contemporaries Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, much of whose music is unimaginable without the older composer’s influence, plus Witold Lutoslawski, and Debussy-inspired sounds by contemporary composers Thomas Daniel Schlee, R. Murray Schafer, and Portland’s Robert McBride and Priest himself.

Music by two more Portland composers highlights Saturday’s Music in the time of Absinthe show. Linda Woody based her Absinthe Minded on a tribute to Debussy by yet another great composer he influenced, Manuel de Falla, and scored it for the beguiling combination of flute, viola and harp that Debussy pioneered in one of his last works, the ravishing Sonata that’s also on Friday’s program.

Sponsor

Jennifer Wright. Photo: Matias Brecher.

That piece and many others were strongly tinged by the influence of Javanese gamelan music, which Debussy first encountered at a famous 1889 exhibition in Paris. The shimmering textures of the Indonesian percussion orchestra so enchanted Debussy that he called Western classical music “child’s play” in comparison. Accordingly, Saturday’s concert features some actual Javanese gamelan music, a ravishing traditional work called Sri Karongran, setting the stage for another new Portland composition: Jennifer Wright’s Flora, Fauna, Humans, Gods. To learn the basics of gamelan music, Wright did something Debussy couldn’t: she actually signed up for an intro to gamelan course at Portland State taught by Mindy Johnston, who also directs the ensemble performing here, Portland’s Venerable Showers of Beauty. (Disclosure: I’m a member and will be performing in those two pieces.) And Wright painstakingly tuned one of her own toy pianos to the gamelan’s just intonation (much lovelier than the the compromised equal temperament that became standardized in Western music in the years after Debussy’s death), enabling her to blend it in with the ensemble.

Venerable Showers of Beauty plays gamelan music from Java and Portland Saturday at March Music Moderne.

Wright also composed Relatively Minor Infractions for baritone sax (played by terrific saxophonist and ArtsWatch contributor Patrick McCulley) and amplified harpsichords, which neatly incorporates two more of his characteristics: interest in newly invented instruments like the saxophone and a concert harp, and ancient musical modes and instruments. (One of that series of last sonatas he didn’t live to compose would have included harpsichord.)

Quadraphonnes play Debussy at March Music Moderne.

The saxophone also appears in the concert’s welcome profusion of Debussy’s own music: an arrangement of two movements of his sublime sole string quartet performed by the crack Portland sax foursome Quadraphonnes. And no tribute to Debussy would be complete without a dose of his magnificent piano music, played by one of the world’s most eminent authorities on it, frequent Portland visitor Paul Roberts, who’ll also introduce the concert.

Pianist Paul Roberts plays and talks at March Music Moderne.

The many new compositions Sunday’s closing Cascadia Composers concert, Tombeau de Claude Debussy à Travers la Mer, also belie the notion that MMM is merely another classical music tomb. Oregon composers Texu Kim (once composer in residence of his native South Korea’s national symphony), Christopher Wicks, David Bernstein and Stephen Lewis contribute new solo piano works inspired by Debussy and performed by two of Oregon’s finest pianists, Asya Gulua and Colleen Adent.

Theresa Koon and ArtsWatch contributor Matthew Andrews premiere new Debussyian music for singer and piano. Denis Floyd and Elizabeth Blachly-Dyson contribute original works for wind quintet. And Debussy himself is represented by his Chansons de Bilitis, a lovely setting of faux-ancient lesbian love poetry actually devised by a contemporary French dude.

Debussy’s life was as turbulent and colorful as his music, as you can see on Thursday at Portland’s Cinema 21 at MMM’s free screening of British avant garde filmmaker Ken Russell’s biopic, The Debussy Film.

MMM master Bob Priest

Priest deserves toutes nos félicitations for putting together such an amazingly diverse — and free — festival on a baguette budget. That range, richness and freshness are also a tribute to the vital Portland classical music scene and of course to Debussy himself. His creativity was far too capacious to be confined to narrow categories like Impressionist or Symbolist or whatever. Few if any other artists created such varied treasures of innovative beauty, which continues to shine in the music of his successors down through the decades and across La Mer.

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Portland Playhouse Passing Strange Portland Oregon

March Music Moderne‘s concerts happen Friday through Sunday at Portland’s Community Music Center, 3350 SE Francis St.

Want to read more about Oregon music? Support Oregon ArtsWatch!
Want to learn more about contemporary Oregon classical music? Check out Oregon ComposersWatch.

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Photo Joe Cantrell

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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3 Responses

  1. Thanx so mmmuch, Brett/OAW, for your wonderfully comprehensive preview of MMM’s 4-spot that begins with the Ken Russell film @ Cinema 21 a mmmere 21 hours from now!

    As for Debussy: yes, Debussy is dead, long live Debussy!

  2. This is such an unexpected morale lifter for those such as I plowed under by our ‘miraculous economic recovery and record-breaking low unemployment in the state of Ore…” Is Bob Priest like the Wall Street Oligarch and bluegrass inspired musical enthusiast Warren Hellman, that has for over a decade paid to turn Golden Gate Park in San Francisco into the
    HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardly_Strictly_Bluegrass

    I don’t find any Wiki dossier or ABOUT page explaining how Priest has pulled off these impressive impresario feats. This is where the banishment from listener-supported KBOO (90.7 FM and dot org streaming with audio archives)just prior to the community broadcaster’s celebration of its 50th Year of advertiser-free broadcasting and of long-time borderless music producer\host Daniel Flessas (The Outside World, A Different Nature, remote musical event broadcasts from Marylhurst to Reed to Pickathon to New Music at Old Instrument shops around town) for the crime of daring to practice satire without full disclosure reveals the breakdown in our Oral History of that which would otherwise be washed away or run-off that fertile cultural topsoil. What accounts for impresario Bob Priest’s deep roots?

    In reviewing past pieces here in Oregon Arts Watch and back when you were covering the vast range of musical styles to find sanctuary and fertile topsoil in PoTown, Ore for Willamette Week, before the 20 to 30 somethings and indie rock became that paper’s target for their advertiser-sponsors there doesn’t seem much explanation for how Priest and March Music Moderne can present so much FOR FREE.

    Thank you though for covering the material, and previewing that which, truth be told, too often gets short-shrift compared to the economics of show bid-net in other periodicals and publications. Also, for bringing such background to the arts that most often lack any PR budget or access to the advertiser-driven and corporate under-written programs.

    Keep on doing,
    Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Shifters
    Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
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