Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival last month held three New@Night concerts at The Old Church. At these three shows the festival’s immensely talented musicians performed music by seven living composers of all ages along with the recently-deceased Krysztof Penderecki. Those who arrived early also got a chance to hear interviews with three of the composers: Caroline Shaw, Kyle Rivera, and Jörg Widmann.

These concerts have always been a favorite of mine. In fact, my introduction to Portland’s contemporary classical concert music scene was at a New@Night concert back in 2017. I could even say that this series is partially responsible for me writing about live music today. Having attended these concerts for over half a decade, I can say that the shows have been extremely consistent in terms of quality of programming and performances.

There have been a few changes over the years. Recently they have kept the whole series to a single venue, proving some consistency in atmosphere between shows. As cool as it is to hear live music in the atrium of The Armory in the Pearl, the switch to The Old Church opens up the show for larger audiences and a better seating arrangement. 

One noticeable difference from previous years was the length of the New@Night concerts. Some of the older shows were a bit short–sometimes less than an hour long. The music was dense enough to make up for it, but the series did feel a bit thin compared to the other concerts of the festival. This year’s New@Night shows were two thirty to forty-five minute sets plus an intermission, which is perfect for me.  

This year the series has a new addition that I hope continues into future New@Night series: conversations beforehand with one of the featured composers. I want to commend Artistic Director Soovin Kim’s skills as an interviewer. He said that he is new to hosting live interviews, but he seemed to know intuitively what to do. He asked pointed and interesting questions and allowed the interviewees to speak without interruption. Kim added some colorful anecdotes too, and also asked the composers to explain their inspirations and procedures to an audience. Composers can have a hard time describing what’s going on in their heads to someone who isn’t also a composer. I should know: I am also a composer. But I thought the more esoteric thought processes were explained reasonably well, and when things were obtuse it was accepted with good fun by the audience. 

The three showcased composers form an interesting trifecta. We have an established Pulitzer-winning composer, a young composer fresh out of college, and a top-tier international composer. There is much more to discuss at the New@Night series outside the three aforementioned composers, such as Ji Hye Jung’s amazing performance of Keiko Abe’s Variations on Japanese Children’s Songs, or Nina Bernat and Jennifer Frautschi’s equally amazing performances of Penderecki’s Duo Concertante and Stephen Hartke’s Netsuke. But I will focus on these three, their music and their interviews.

The Big Three

Shaw’s remarks introduced her 2015 string quartet Plan and Elevation, performed by the Opus13 string quartet (read Alice Hardesty’s profile on Opus13 here). The composer’s interview with Kim offered some insights into her creative process. She mentioned how her education is in violin performance, not composition. Thus she skipped out on the pages upon pages of species counterpoint exercises and similar assignments typical of composition students. This obviously hasn’t forestalled her compositional career at all, so how useful really are those exercises? She admits that they are useful but not essential, and that certain verboten techniques like parallel fifths sound quite nice and thus show up all over her music. 

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She said, “music is music, you can’t be too precious about it.” Maybe it is this intuition-first approach to composition that makes her music flow so well. At its best, Shaw’s music feels like you’re being led on a guided tour through a forest, stopping to admire the beauty along the way. This in contrast to a composer like Stravinsky, whose music can feel like staring at the many sides of a very precise geometric object. 

Plan and Elevation draws inspiration from architecture and gardening, particularly the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks in D.C. (yes, the very same that inspired Stravinsky’s piece of the same name). When I met Shaw years ago, she told a story about her receiving a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to study the aesthetics of English gardening–but no piece came directly from her ‘04/‘05 fellowship. So I’d like to think a decade of meditation on this unfinished project might’ve had an influence on this piece. 

The garden metaphor is apt for Plan and Elevation. The music grows organically, one idea smoothly flows into the next. In the opening moments, the music builds from a single descending three-note idea, unfurling with careful use of silence and dissonance. In my notes I described it with this alliterative phrase: “an amalgamation of magical musical moments.” Opus13 kept the music moving forward with their control of the loud and soft dynamic extremes. 

Rivera, meanwhile, recently graduated from Yale’s school of music. His conversation with Kim focused on the abstract qualities of music and his compositional technique. As a fellow composer, Rivera was speaking my language when he talked about his inspirations being “form and space,” and mentioning his interest in Just Intonation. He was also speaking my language with his movement titles evoking chaos theory, the butterfly effect, phase space and fractals. 

In that discussion he mentioned how the pianist plays both a piano and a keyboard, with the keyboard tuned a sixth-tone flat. (Composers such as Thomas Adés, Sofia Gubaidulina and György Ligeti have used similar techniques). But in the piece we heard, Grimoire I: Laplace’s Demon, the sixth-tone difference between the keyboard and piano didn’t register so much as the instruments being “out of tune,” and more like a wobbling chorus-like effect. I’m sure Rivera would also know that that difference between A440 and A432 would produce difference tones at approximately the Schumann Resonance (8 Hz), supposedly the resonant frequency of earth. 

Given the title and the invocations of grimoires and demons there is an esoteric element to his music: the spoken syllables in the third moments sound like an incantation to a spirit. There is an overall mysterious and unsettling vibe to Laplace’s Demon, whether that comes from a George Crumb-like spaciousness over augmented chords, or more furious and dramatic gestures. Like in some pieces by Crumb and Cage, the mixed ensemble (three strings, piano, and percussion) works together as a macro-instrument, with instruments reinforcing each other’s timbre. The ending also reminded me of Helmut Lachenmann, as the music fades away leaving behind the residues of bow noise, squeaks and all the various “unwanted” sounds that were nonetheless always there.

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I would love to hear Laplace’s Demon again, as the music left me with a sense that there was something deeper beneath the surface. Even still, the exoteric music was a delightful experience.

Widmann is the most immediately indebted to classical music, even if it may not sound like it. His composition reminds me of Ligeti in some ways: taking influence from a mid-century German modernism without holding too strongly to its austere and intellectual aesthetic. Widmann writes music that can be dramatic and fun, even while it’s chromatic, difficult and knotty. In one of Alex Ross’ fantastic articles on the legacy of German music he says in praise of some contemporary German composers, “[a] few composers have escaped the cul-de-sac of theory and have written works of immediate sensual appeal.” Among them he mentions Wilhelm Killmayer, Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm, and I would have to add Widmann to this list. 

His string quartet we heard (his ninth, performed by Ruysdael Quartet) was most directly inspired by Beethoven’s String Quartet in C# minor. “Directly inspired,” is an understatement, given the many, many quotations and re-writings all over the place. Widmann’s conversation with Kim focused on his dual life as a composer and performer. We had a chance to hear him that night and the following night at The Reser playing some of his own difficult music for clarinet. According to a recent survey by BachTrack, Widmann is the third most-performed living composer behind John Williams and Arvo Pärt. Then followed Thomas Adés, Philip Glass, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, a tie between Caroline Shaw and Unsuk Chin, and Anne Clyne.

Widmann’s String quartet No. 9 sounded as if Beethoven rose from the dead to hear two centuries of string quartets, from Debussy and Shotakovich and beyond. The rapper Aesop Rock once said, “truthfully I was never cutting-edge: my hand was on the hilt.” Our friend Ludwig had his hand on the hilt of music for a century to come. But in this hypothetical situation he would find himself in a tough position. His late works were radical for his day, so it seems like he would have a taste for music that was similarly daring. But would he think they took it too far? How far would he be willing to go with his music before it became incomprehensible even to himself? Would he make the leap into greater unknowns, or would he remain comfortable in the music he knew and loved? 

This conflict is alive in Widmann’s string quartet. In many moments, it sounds as if Beethoven’s C# minor string quartet is growing and expanding in new directions, often way more dense and chromatic than the original. Widmann also captured the rapid shifts in texture, emotional intensity and Bach-like contrapuntal magic that characterizes late Beethoven. Sometimes the quotations are unadorned and stoic, sometimes they are veiled behind layers of scratch tones, sul ponticello, and stratified textures, as if centuries of decay smeared the ink on the original manuscripts. 

I relayed to Widmann this elaborate metaphor after the concert and he seemed delighted by it. Most composers would be happy to hear their music compared to Beethoven! We spent the rest of our brief conversation talking about Beethoven’s late string quartets.

Beyond the Big Three

I’m very happy to see world premieres and commissions on other concerts at the festival beyond the New@Night series. For instance, the “Preeminent Piano” concert featured a world premiere of Stewart Goodyear’s The Torment of Marsyas alongside Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano and Beethoven’s massive “Hammerklavier” sonata (read Lorin Wilkerson’s review here). I like seeing three centuries of chamber music co-existing on one program.

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Under the direction of Soovin Kim and Gloria Chien, I think Chamber Music Northwest has found a near perfect balance between old and new. The classics are made vital again through fantastic performances, and new music is contextualized by the music of the old masters. I would love to see this balance and careful programming continue into the future of the CMNW summer festival, with the New@Night series doing its part to showcase some of the immense talent in our midst.