Well, dear reader, the day is upon us.

A few weeks ago an acquaintance said, “ugh I can’t wait for this election cycle to be over!” And it took an effort to refrain from quipping, “this election cycle will never be over”–which is true (the last one isn’t even over) but it would have been unkind to say so. That said, Whatever Is Going To Happen really is about to Happen, and then we’ll be entering the next chapter of Whatever The Hell This Is.

Okay, enough with the Egregious Capitals–we’re here for music, godsdamnit! To quote Future Jesse (last one) from last week’s interview:

Hopefully I would say that things weren’t as scary as they might have seemed, that things were going to work out, and that the music and my approach would be an expression of joy and appreciation for the life that I’ve been living. And also a getaway when things have been tough, a warm blanket, something to make me feel at home. Because that’s how it is now, and I want it to continue that way.

You can still get in on Renegade Opera’s performance of Preis’ opera The Raven this weekend (Nov. 9 & 10) alongside a workshop reading of Rhiana Yazzie’s libretto for Little Ones. Check it all out on their website right here.

***

Here’s what the esteemed Oregon metal band Witch Mountain has had to say recently about their upcoming concert November 8 at Star Theater:

15 years ago, Uta Plotkin first joined Witch Mountain on stage at club Satyricon to perform “A Power Greater”. A few weeks later she was in the band. To celebrate 15 years of music and friendship, she’s stepping in for one very special night on Nov 8 at Star Theater when we headline our only local show of the year.

Support comes from our amazing friends in Early Moods and Castle Rat who are touring the west coast together.

This epic show is only one week away. It’s on track to sell out (thank you, Portland!) so please don’t assume you can score at the door.

Let’s suppose you are an Oregon metal fan, by which I mean not only an Oregon-dweller who is also a metalhead but specifically a fan of specifically Oregonian metal. There are three bands you cannot miss without losing your cred entirely: YOB, Witch Mountain, and Agalloch. None of them perform in the Pacific Northwest as often as we’d like, which means you have to grab those bulls by the horns every time they charge.

But be honest: you’re probably going to miss ‘em. Console yourself with the CD, available on Bandcamp (the vinyl and cassette editions are long since sold out):

Witch Mountain plays Star Theater November 8. Get those tix (while you still can) right here.

***

Star chambers

Well now this is strange. Not only is the next concert in Fear No Music’s all-Oregon season happening at exactly the same time as Caroline Shaw’s Hexagons concert at The Reser with Gabriel Kahane (7:30 pm, November 15)–this FNM concert is the one with Shaw’s music on it. What’s the deal with that?

You’ll just have to choose. The Shaw-Kahane thing is a duo gig featuring the two composers themselves, performing a new work inspired by the work of the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. The title comes from the blind prophet’s delightfully absurd and vertiginously holographic 1941 short story “The Library of Babel,” in which the library’s rooms are each hexagonal (four walls of books, two doors). That Borges’ library is both infinite and not infinite–it is vast and recursive–has made it the basis of numerous subsequent thought experiments, notably in the distinct-but-related realms of computation and biology; it is also a way of understanding the relationship between literature and music, always relevant with this particular pair of composers (compared to, say, the considerably more visual-kinesthetic Akiho).

The Fear No Music concert, Sounds Like Home, features works by Shaw (Gustave le Gray) and Akiho (Portal) alongside music by two composers more closely associated with the Oregon School of Composition: FNM artistic director Kenji Bunch (Industrial Strength) and Young Composers Project co-honcho Ryan Francis (Voynich Transcriptions). Let’s consider each of these in turn.

Gustave le Gray is a Chopinesque solo piano piece, one of Shaw’s earlier works and one that’s had a lot of staying power (that tends to happen with good, solid piano music by excellent composers). It’s also a sort of perfect microcosm of what she does, and how her music operates outside the context of the snazzier ensemble work she’s known for (vocal octet, voice with percussion quartet, and so on). It’s named for the infamous French painter and photographer Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray, whose work looks like this:

It’s easy enough hear the connection between Le Gray, Chopin, and Shaw’s piece. Here’s what Shaw has to say about it:

Chopin’s opus 17 A minor Mazurka is exquisite. The opening alone contains a potent poetic balance between the viscosity and density of the descending harmonic progression and the floating onion skin of the loose, chromatic melody above. Or, in fewer words – it’s very prosciutto and mint. When someone asks me, “So what is your music like?” – I’ll sometimes answer (depending on who’s asking), “Kind of like sashimi?” That is, it’s often made of chords and sequences presented in their raw, naked, preciously unadorned state – vividly fresh and new, yet utterly familiar. Chopin is a different type of chef. He covers much more harmonic real estate than I do, and his sequences are more varied and inventive. He weaves a textured narrative through his harmony that takes you through different characters and landscapes, whereas I’d sometimes be happy listening to a single well-framed, perfectly voiced triad. But the frame is the hard part – designing the perfectly attuned and legible internal system of logic and memory that is strong but subtle enough to support an authentic emotional experience of return. (Not to get all Proustian or anything.) In some way that I can’t really understand or articulate yet, photographs can do this with a remarkable economy of means. Translating that elusive syntax into music is an interesting challenge. Then again, sometimes music is just music. Gustave Le Gray is a multi-layered portrait of Op. 17 #4 using some of Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged together with my own. It was written expressly for pianist Amy Yang, who is one of the truest artists I’ve ever met.

We could almost stop right here. You need to hear FNM executive director Monica Ohuchi play this one.

FNM’s press release describes Bunch’s Industrial Strength for piano and bass clarinet a bit modestly: “This work is made up of three short vignettes inspired by the abandoned factories of the American Rust Belt and imagines a renewed vitality for those massive structures.” This one’s classic Bunch, serious and playful at the same time, rollicking machine rhythms bouncing off the sorrows of the dispossessed. Ohuchi and Oregon Symphony principal James Shields–the best clarinetist in Oregon, well-known for his superb bass clarinet playing–give the work its West Coast Premiere at this concert; you can hear Andrew DeBoer performing it in Arkansas a few years ago right here:

Akiho’s Portal was inspired by and composed for New Mexico (for last year’s Music from Angel Fire festival near Taos) and is scored for “flexible instrumentation.” Most of Akiho’s music is very adaptable, scoring-wise, another thing he has in common in Bach and a feature you can hear in the various settings of Akiho classics like “21.” It’s unusual, however, for him to write something deliberately open like this. Here’s how the composer describes it:

Portal may be performed by any combination or number of instruments and performers. It is encouraged that the musicians make it their own by exploring individualized timbres, articulations, dynamics, and orchestrations, while possibly incorporating moments of subtle improvisations.

Ah, yes, that makes sense. Kind of an In C vibe, then. On this concert the ensemble will be Shields and the FNM string quartet, who will also perform the Francis piece. You’ll hear more about Francis’ clarinet quintet in Charles Rose’s upcoming profile, so for now let’s consider the mysterious manuscript which inspired it.

You could spend rather more time than you have to spare contemplating this rabbit hole; entire careers have been spent on it. One hypothesis is that it was composed by the great 13th-century Franciscan polymath Roger Bacon; another is that it was a fake Bacon forged centuries later by the Elizabethan mages John Dee and Edward Kelley; another possibility is that it was forged even later by the late 19th-century antique book specialist Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered (or “discovered”) the manuscript in 1912 and hence gave it his name. The language in which this bizarre codex is written–if it is indeed a language and not a cipher of some kind–has never been deciphered, despite the efforts of professional linguists and cryptographers. The whole affair has become something of a Rorschach test for modern medievalists and occultists and other enthusiasts of the weird (yes, the present author confesses a deep and abiding affection for this slice of arcana).

Here’s a sample page:

All of which brings us back around to Borges, and Shaw and Kahane, and the decision you have to make. For what it’s worth, Hexagons will probably be available on Nonesuch or New Amsterdam or some other label well before FNM manages to get its own record label off the ground and release this season’s glories on vinyl, so if you’re of a mind to have your cake and eat it too you may want to consider heading to Reed College on the 15th.

November 15: Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane perform “Hexagons” at The Reser, and Fear No Music presents “Sounds Like Home.”

***

We just love how each of 45th Parallel Universe’s concerts get its own blog entry by one of its members. The latest–Time’s Absence, written by violist Charles Noble of the Oregon Symphony and Pyxis Quartet–forecasts the upcoming 45|| concert “To the Angel who Announces the End of Time” (November 19 at The Old Madeleine Church in Northwest Portland). Noble is as fine a writer as he is a violist, and his essay is worth quoting at length. Regarding Germaine Tailleferre, whose String Quartet mousai REMIX will perform:

Germaine Tailleferre, who lived from 1892 to 1983, was the lone female member of a group of composer friends from the Paris Conservatoire who became known as “Les Six.” She had a life full of difficulties, some of which were a result of living in Europe during the First World War, others of which resulted simply from being a woman in a male dominated world. For example, she discovered early that she had an acuity for music, but her father — who viewed female musicians as equivalent to prostitutes — made her go to a convent school instead of the Conservatory. She did later make her way to conservatory against her father’s wishes. In fact, she even changed her last name in repudiation of her father. Such grit and determination!

At the conservatory in Paris she was a student of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Charles-Marie Widor. During her time at the conservatory she became friends with five other composition students: Francis Poulenc, Louis Durey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger. A reviewer called them “The Six” after a concert they gave in 1920, and the name stuck. During the time between the wars, she had to give music lessons to help support her family — enduring a miscarriage, a husband who hated that she composed music, and her first husband’s eventual suicide. In the Second World War her home was commandeered by the Nazis, and her manuscript scores were burned to heat the house. In spite of it all, she continued to write music that is almost unfailingly positive and full of beauty. She came to America during the war, returning to Paris after its close.

Her lone String Quartet (1917-1919) is tightly constructed and in its brief 10 minute running time it presents a sunny face to the world. Instantly recognizable as “French,” it features polytonality, non-traditional scales, and all of the elán one could want.

And then there’s the main attraction, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, for which mousai’s violinist and cellist (Emily Cole and Marilyn de Oliveira) will be joined by a pair of musicians we just heard from: Monica Ohuchi and James Shields. Here’s what Noble has to say about the timelessly legendary Quartet:

In eight movements that span around 50 minutes, Messiaen presents visions of a world outside of time — is it an escape from the interminable time of captivity, or of an exploration of the profundity of Christian faith — or both?

In this music, Messiaen combines his deep personal Catholic faith with his love of birdsong, both of which symbolize an escape of the mind from the captive body. Even the title of the work reflects on different aspects of what he was going through at the time.

In the realm of the ecstatic religious visions of the Book of Revelation, the end of days is literally the end of Time.

In the realm of musical expression, the boundaries of how slow music can be — especially in the central solo cello movement — become almost a literal representation of Eternity.

In the physical realm, the fact is that the composer is being held captive: days lose meaning, blur together… Time seems to stand still.

Like his Turangalila Symphony, which the Oregon Symphony performed several years ago, the Quartet for the End of Time is a work of enormous breadth, vibrant colors, sheer instrumental virtuosity, and deep symbolism. It’s an honor and a joy to bring this work to you!

It really is a dreadfully wonderful and important piece of music, almost without equal in the 20th-century classical tradition. It’s somehow challenging and dissonant and “avant-garde” while also being profoundly beautiful, transcendent, and–dare we say it?–comforting. These are qualities that 20th-century classical music very, very rarely managed to combine. We’re thinking here of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich, perhaps Satyagraha. It’s on that level.

And, as with Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray, this is music you need to hear performed by Monica Ohuchi.

45th Parallel Universe presents “To the Angel who Announces the End of Time” (November 19 at The Old Madeleine Church in Northwest Portland). Tickets and more information available here.

***

Chamber Music Northwest hosts two visiting groups this month, Akropolis Reed Quintet (a free concert in Tualatin on November 9 & a house show on the 10th) and Dover Quartet (at The Old Church on November 23).

Akropolis is a weird quintet, in the sense that at first glance they almost look like a wind quintet, with oboe (Tim Gocklin) and bassoon (Ryan “Not Deadpool” Reynolds) and–but wait, there’s no flute, and they have a regular clarinetist (Kari Landry) as well as a bass clarinetist (Andrew Koeppe), and a saxophonist (Matt Landry) instead of a horn player. So maybe it’s not that close to a wind quintet?

Anyways, we’ve heard them perform several times as one of CMNW’s Protégé Ensembles, and we’re excited to hear them strutting back into Oregon again. They’re also playing in Eugene tonight (if you’re reading this on Remember Remember the Fifth of November) and in Corvallis this Friday. The Corvallis show–at OSU’s new arts center PRAx–also features pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf, with whom Akropolis just recorded an album. You can listen to Are We Dreaming The Same Dream? right here:

The Dovers are also alumni of CMNW’s Protégé Project–among other things, they premiered Akiho’s completed LIgNEouS at CMNW 2018, for which they’ll always have our ear and our gratitude. At this month’s concerts in Oregon (they’re also at UO’s Beall Hall on the 24th) they’re giving the Pacific Northwest premiere of Abokkoli’ Taloowa’ (Woodland Songs) by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, composed for Dover and co-commissioned by CMNW and several others (we love these multi-org commissions, which get new music composed and performed, and get composers paid).

You can get a pretty good sense of this composer’s vibe with another of his song sets, Taloowa’ Chipota (Children’s Songs), performed by Resonance Ensemble at their Abya Yala concert in 2022:

Akropolis Reed Quintet performs in Eugene on November 5, in Corvallis on November 8, in Tualatin on November 9, and in Portland on November 10. More information and tickets at the links, or at the Akropolis events page.

Dover Quartet performs in Portland on November 23 and in Eugene on November 24. More information and tickets at the links, or at the Dover events page.

Strength-drenched testing

Jesse Preis isn’t the only one playing with poetry this month. On November 23, Cascadia Composers–whose Lawson Fusao Inada concert in 2017 remains a favorite–partners with no less than five Oregon Poets Laureate for Fearless Lieder (Cascadians can’t resist puns) at The Old Madeleine Church. The music on the program sets poets by four former laureates: Inada (2006-2010), Paulann Petersen (2010-2014), Elizabeth Woody (2016-2018), and Kim Stafford (2018-2020). The concert will also feature a special appearance by Oregon’s current poet laureate, Ellen Waterston.

The composers on this one are a classic Cascadian array. You’ve got the long-timers, folks like Jeff Winslow and Greg Steinke and Ted Clifford and Dawn Sonntag; hell, even young buck Nicholas Yandell is a long-timer at this point. A couple of familiar names from the choral scene, Theresa Koon and Judy A. Rose. Lisa Neher is here too, of course, as she seems to be more or less everywhere–we last heard from her at New Wave Opera’s Night of the Living Opera. And then there’s the current Cascadia Composers president, Kevin Bryant Lay, whom we last saw with a lightsaber in his hand.

You can get a preview of the concert a week earlier, on November 14 at the WaterStone Gallery in Northwest Portland. No Waterston this time–Petersen is the special guest for this one.

Tickets and more information available at the Cascadia Composers website.

***

Ginette DePreist opens her recently-published memoir Reach Up: My Beautiful Journey with James DePreist with the story of telling her parents that she had fallen in love with the conductor, who had already worked with Leonard Bernstein and Antal Doráti and was then living in Quebec:

I invited my parents to spend a couple days with me at my summer home at the end of August.

“Mom, would you please come and sit with me in the garden? I have something important to tell you. I’m not going home this fall. I’ll be moving in with my boyfriend.”   

Big shock!

She wanted to interrupt, but I cut her off. “Mom, I’m not finished yet. While you are stunned, especially with our strained relationship, I’ll tell you all the negatives you might be inclined to find in this man so you won’t be surprised when you meet him. The obvious things you have to know are that he is not from here, he has been married, he is the father of two little girls. He’s twelve years my senior, he’s from another religious belief, he barely speaks French, he’s black, and he’s disabled. Last but not least, he is the music director of the Quebec Symphony Orchestra. I can assure you that you will fall in love with him the minute you meet him, but no matter what you think of him it won’t change one thing, because I love this man and will be his wife soon.”

After a long silence, she said, “I’m not totally surprised, because I could see sparkles in your eyes lately. Something I hadn’t seen before.”

On November 17, DePreist will be at the Oregon Historical Society for a conversation with OHS executive director Kerry Tymchuk. The book is terrific (stay tuned for our full-length review); DePreist herself is a wonderful storyteller; and we all remember “the Jimmy years” fondly, even if we weren’t actually around for them. Besides all that, Tymchuk is a fascinating figure himself: a former Dole speechwriter, four-time Jeopardy champion, and co-author of various Oregon business leader memoirs (Gert Boyle’s One Tough Mother, Al Reser’s No Small Potatoes). One can hardly imagine a better co-host.

Before we leave the DePreists, let’s consider one of Jimmy’s poems, the one that gave this month’s column its title (it appears in his first book of poetry, This Precipice Garden, and opens the first chapter of Ginette’s book):

I’ve been weakened by the walls I’ve built,
robbed
of strength-drenched testing,
protected into an unprepared defense
of self.
Failing in my futile fortress to see
contentment’s numbing trap
I
answerless
must battle the questions now breeching
my barricades.

DePreist’s book talk happens at 2 pm, Sunday afternoon, November 17 at Oregon Historical Society in Downtown Portland. More information on this free event can be found right here.

***

So Portland Opera’s new production of Elvis Costello and Brodsky Quartet’s The Juliet Letters is cool and all, but what really excites us about this show is its opening act: local superstar Hannah Penn singing Howard Blake’s Shakespeare Songs. It’s fully in character for Penn–a mezzo who sometimes sings like an alto and always sings like a god–to perform songs originally composed for a tenor.

Anyways, the opera itself will also be badass. The original album was turned into an opera in 2017 by Fenlon Lamb and Jefferson Ridenour (Papermoon Opera Productions), who also participated in this production (as director and scenic designer, respectively). You may remember Lamb’s last PO production, a refreshing Marriage of Figaro which everybody loved (read Angela Allen’s review here) and which looked like this:

In a recent email, Lamb had this to say about this version of The Juliet Letters:

Almost eight years ago, I was asked to envision a staged version of this song cycle. I knew then that I wanted to follow in the spirit of exploration by physicalizing the drama and painting stage pictures with the movement of both the set and the singers. The many permutations of connection, and sometimes disconnection, through the written word felt like an ideal opportunity for singers to dig into character work and hone their storytelling skills. As I began discussions with my artistic partner and co-founder of Papermoon Opera Productions, Jefferson Ridenour, we agreed that the set should feel fluid like an art installation to reflect the ebb and flow of the varied subjects in these letters. We created an atmosphere full of the textures of paper which moved and changed from vignette to vignette.

As we approached this new version with Portland Opera, we found some different inspiration working with the creative team here. This time around, I got to dig into a costuming aesthetic with (Costume Director) Christine A. Richardson. We mined for sartorial storytelling in the textures of the clothing and the exchange of pieces. The performance space also played an integral part of our re-imagining. The Papermoon team worked closely with (Technical & Production Director) Kyle Spens and (Scenic Artist) Sumi Wu to find new ways of creating more intimacy to make the show more interactive and immersive for the audience within the Artists Repertory Theatre space. Nate Wheatly (Lighting Designer) and Jefferson Ridenour collaborated on new lighting and lobby looks with (Lighting Supervisor and Staff Assistant Lighting Designer) Carl Faber and (Props Director) Cindy Felice.

Portland Opera’s “The Juliet Letters” runs November 15-24 at Artists Repertory Theatre in Southwest Portland. Tickets and more information available here.

Still sounding

Last month we tried our best to capture Oregon’s symphony orchestras (we missed a few, but we’re still adding on to part two so keep those disappointed comments coming). You can follow all of that, if you like, on the various orchestras’ websites, but today we’d like to limit ourselves to three notable symphonic concerts happening in Oregon this month. Two of those involve students: Metropolitan Youth Symphony’s “The Force of Love” on November 10 and Willamette Valley Symphony’s “Young Musicians Showcase” on November 23 & 24.

The MYS concert would be exciting enough just for its inclusion of Missy Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone alongside overtures by Beethoven (Leonore) and Tchaikovsky (Romeo & Juliet)–Mazzoli is a contemporary composer we can’t get enough of, and probably the one we’d most like to see lured here from the East Coast by New Oregonians Akiho, Kahane, and Shaw.

Also on the MYS program is the premiere of Innamorata by Elishiya Crain-Keddie, a cellist and Young Composers Project alum and one of the composers involved in last year’s Music for an Imaginary Cartoon (read more about that here).

The WVS concert features the winners of both its concerto competition and its student composition competition. Cellist Jason Han and violinist Bethany Christensen will both perform music by French composer Édouard Lalo (the opening movements of his Cello Concerto in D minor and the terribly popular Symphonie Espagnole), and french hornist Bastian Sorenson will perform the Morceau de concert of Saint-Saëns. The orchestra will also premiere La Esperanza by violinist-composer Abe Tsai and Look At All The Stars by cellist-composer Flash Inouye, who also wins this month’s Oregon ArtsWatch “coolest composer name” competition.

Finally, there’s the Philip Glass Ensemble performing Koyaanisqatsi live-to-film with the Oregon Symphony and the PSU Chamber Choir, conducted by longtime Glass interpreter Michael Riesman. A match made in heaven! It’d be worth it just to watch the classic Godfrey Reggio movie on a big screen, and it’d be worth it hearing this music live if it were only the orchestra playing it. And there’s a weird symmetry–a kind of balance, perhaps–to having this show come to The Schnitz.

Funny story. Twenty-some-odd years ago, shortly after I arrived in Portland (and shortly after the Tool & King Crimson concert I referenced last week), Philip Glass and his Ensemble rolled into town for a weeklong run of concerts at the Portland Art Museum. They were on tour performing five different Glass scores, all live-to-film, with mixed results–their performance of Koyaanisqatsi’s successor Powaaqatsi was transformative, while their performance of La Belle et la Bête was very entertaining but subtly marred by a mismatch between the singers and their counterparts on the screen (to be fair, matching those up was always a Herculean task). It was the first time I’d seen Glass perform live, and I was mesmerized. Who the hell conducts with their hair?

Anyways, that week of film score shows was set to climax with a performance of Koyaanisqatsi. But the concert was canceled due to the customary “unforeseen circumstances.” I can’t confirm it, but I have always believed and always will that it had something to do with a concert that was happening over at The Schnitz that same night: Glass’ old friend Ravi Shankar.

And yes, my friends, I too chose Shankar over Koyaanisqatsi. I had already bought my tickets, had already decided to pass on yet another night of PGE for what would probably be the great Indian master’s last tour. Wouldn’t you?

Metropolitan Youth Symphony performs on November 10 at The Schnitz. Willamette Valley Symphony performs on November 23 in Albany and on November 24 in Corvallis. Your Oregon Symphony has been performing in the same place every week since The Jimmy Years.

Following the last glacial retreat

We leave you with ArcoPDX (Amplified Repertory Chamber Orchestra of Portland), back in action for the first time in what feels like ages, performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at Holocene in Southeast Portland alongside music by Quincy Jones protégé Jacob Collier, Django Reinhardt’s buddy Stéphane Grappelli, and more. The soloist is David Brokaw, whom you may remember from ArcoPDX founder Mike Hsu’s Concerto for Piano & Strings:

That all sounds great, but honestly these guys had us at “sound-responsive visuals.”

ArcoPDX performs at Holocene on November 30. Tickets and more information available here.