In these times, these ever-startling times, it has become all too commonplace for us to quote The Famous Lenny Lines to each other. You know the ones, the lines he wrote in 1963 commemorating the Just Fallen King:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

You can read the whole thing, and the story behind it, right here. This bit is particularly good:

It is obvious that the grievous nature of our loss is immensely aggravated by the element of violence involved in it. And where does this violence spring from? From ignorance and hatred– the exact antonyms of Learning and Reason. Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

But to be brutally frank with you, dear reader, the whole “more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly” thing is wearing a little thin, here in 2025, which is not 1963. More often we find ourselves quoting Yeats in numbed despair:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Which is a fair description of our times, is it not? Hell, it’s been a fair description of our times since it was written–in 1919, as the First World War (the War To End All Wars, lol) gave way to the Irish War of Independence, which in turn gave way to the Irish Civil War, just like happened in Russian at the same time, and that all worked out just great for everyone, and everybody lived happily ever after. To continue being brutally frank, this one’s wearing a little thin too (that rough beast just keeps on slouching).

So what lines are strong enough to surmount this tide and keep us going in the face of constant fractiousness? “Oh friends, not these sounds! Let us instead strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones!”

The present author has always taken a great deal of inspiration from the gratuitously quotable and perpetually misunderstood linguistics professor Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who in his The Gay Science (1882) had this to say:

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” Book IV, section 283 (translated Walter Kaufmann).

Or how about this solemn and joyful prayer:

Oh, Lord, if Thou wert music, this then would be Thy voice, and no discord could ever prevail against Thee. Thou wouldst cleanse the ordinary world of every troubling noise with this, the fullest expression of Thy most intricate and wondrous design, and all triviality would fade away, overwhelmed by this resounding perfection.

Which is from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Armand (1998), young Armand’s prayer as he lies in a Venetian sickbed recovering from being poisoned and seeing visions of the afterlife.

Or how about the line that gives this month’s column its title:

Listen to my music
And hear what it can do
There’s something here that’s as strong as life
I know that it will reach you

Which is the hero’s plea from the Rush epic 2112.

We end this little opening soliloquy with Icelandic superhero Björk, whose 2008 lullaby “Declare Independence” includes these provocative lines:

Start your own currency
Make your own stamp
Protect your language

We join our story already in progress

Chamber Music Northwest and Oregon Bach Festival are now well underway, and in both cases the heat is on. The present author was in Eugene last week for Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard and Shunske Sato’s take on the Brandenburg Concertos, and they were both–well, you’ll read about those in detail soon enough, but for now just know that the immediate reactions, from myself and everyone else, have been variations on “holy wow!” and “wtf these guys are monsters!”

You can read all about both festivals here and here, but we’d like to call attention to a specific pair of concerts (one each) coming up in mid-July.

From CMNW, there are plenty to choose from, but we’re especially excited about the concerts on July 13 (at PSU) and July 14 (at Reed), when they’ll perform music by Bach, Mozart, and Messiaen. It’s a characteristic of CMNW that they’ll throw together a Baroque piece, a Classical piece, and a Modernist piece on the same program. The Bach is “Bete aber auch dabei,” the soprano aria from BWV 115. The text for that one goes like this:

Bete aber auch dabei
Mitten in dem Wachen!
Bitte bei der großen Schuld
deinen Richter um Geduld,
Soll er dich von Sünden frei
Und gereinigt machen!

Oh I forgot you don’t read German. Here it is in English:

Pray nevertheless also
during your vigil!
Beseech, for your great guilt,
mercy from your Judge,
that He make you free from sin
and purify you!

Hyunah Yuh will sing this cheery piece, with backing from flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, cellist Clancy Newman, and Yekwon Sunwoo on the organ.

Opus13 Quartet will perform one of Mozart’s few minor key quartets, K. 421 in D minor. It’s one of Mozart’s famous set of six “Haydn Quartets,” which bear this dedication to his teacher:

To my very dear friend Haydn. A father who had decided to send his sons into the great world saw it as his duty to entrust them to the protection of a much celebrated man who, moreover, happened to be his best friend. In like manner I send my six sons to you, most celebrated and very dear friend. They are, in truth, the fruit of a long and very laborious effort, but the hope which many friends have given me that this toil may be in some degree rewarded encourages me, and I flatter myself that these children may one day prove a source of consolation to me. During your last visit to this capital, you yourself, dearest friend, expressed to me your approval of these compositions. Your good opinion encourages me to offer them to you and leads me to hope that you will not consider them wholly unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly, and to be to them a father, guide and friend! From this moment, I surrender to you all my rights over them. I beg you, however, to be indulgent to those faults which may have escaped a father’s partial eye, and in spite of them to continue your generous friendship towards one who so highly appreciates it. Meanwhile, I remain with all my heart, dearest friend, your most sincere friend.

The “six sons” are of course these six quartets. The story turns a little weird and tragic when you learn that Mozart composed this particular quartet while his wife Constanze was giving birth to their literal son, Raimund, who died two months later. The son of Mozart’s mind lived on–Opus13 is playing it this month, over two centuries later–while the son of his flesh perished in infancy from a fever. Of course Wolfie himself died young, as did most of the children Constanze bore him, as did the majority of children in the 18th century, as do all of us eventually. Ultimately it’s the way of all flesh–yet the music lives on. Is there a lesson in that? Or is it just one of those things?

The real reason we wanted to bring this concert to your attention is the Messiaen. The French composer was a deeply religious man who had no difficulty marrying the oldest of musical traditions with the most cutting-edge modernism, deep theology with birdsong, hummable melodies with difficult harmonic textures. In this sense he’s quite a bit like Bach, and his Quartet for the End of Time absolutely feels like something Johann Sebastian could have written if he’d lived in the 20th century and spent time in a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

You know the story of this one, probably, and if you don’t you can get all caught up right here. What you need to know is that CMNW’s former long-time Artistic Director David Shifrin will be playing the Quartet’s glorious clarinet part; he trots this one out every few CMNWs, and it’s always a good time. Joining Shif are pianist (and current CMNW co-artistic director) Gloria Chien, violinist Alexi Kenney, and cellist Clancy Newman.

CMNW’s “Timeless works by Bach, Mozart, and Messiaen” happens twice: on July 13 at PSU’s Lincoln Performance Hall and on July 14 at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium.

***

Like CMNW, OBF has plenty of lovely stuff still in store. The one we’d like to call attention to is the “reconstructed” Markus Passion on July 11 at Eugene’s Soreng Theater.

Unlike the B Minor Mass, this is one that Bach heard performed in his lifetime, not too long after the Johannes Passion and Matthäus Passion. The manuscript, of course, vanished down the musty corridors of time (this happened all too frequently with Bach’s music). A century after Bach’s death, one of his Leipzig Thomaskirche successors–Wilhelm Rust–did a bit of detective work in an attempt to discover what this Passion might have been, using as his guide the original published libretto and the handy fact that Bach repurposed a ton of his music. After another century, the results of Rust’s work were published and premiered in the 1960s; since then a number of others, including such luminaries as Ton Koopman and Jordi Savall, have created reconstructions with varying degrees of success.

Musicologist Malcolm Bruno put this one together in 2019, and this year OBF commissioned a touring stage production in collaboration with Concert Theatre Works, actor Joseph Marcell, and Portland Baroque Orchestra artistic director Julian Perkins. You can catch that at OBF, again in Portland, and again in Seattle.

“Bach: Markus Passion” will be performed thrice in the Pacific Northwest: on July 11 at Soreng Theater in Eugene, on July 12 at First United Methodist Church in Portland, and on July 13 at Town Hall in Seattle.

O Cascadia

A number of Cascadia Composers have concerts coming up this month, both in association with the organization itself and on their own. You can hit two of those on the same day, July 12, if you’re so inclined: Cascadia’s annual “In Good Hands” concert runs from 4 to 7 pm at PSU’s Lincoln Recital Hall, and then New Wave Opera’s “Summer Splash” starts up at 7:30 in Westmoreland. It’s an easy ride, half an hour by bike or Tri-Met and even less by car. Plenty of time.

“In Good Hands” is at the heart of what Cascadia does, and they’ve been doing it for years: in a sort of an inversion of Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project, seasoned composers work with young performers (and, usually, their teachers) to weave a multi-generational community of local music. You can read Brett Campbell’s profile from a couple years back right here. Here’s how the Cascadians themselves describe it:

Pre-college students will perform pieces written by Cascadia Composers: some students will perform pieces written specifically for them; others will present works selected by their teachers from a score call to all 100+ Cascadia members. In either case, the composers and students collaborate to develop their performance and further their understanding of the piece and of contemporary music in general—a rare opportunity for students to work with living composers. Admission is free.

Sponsor

That evening, New Wave Opera–brainchild of the restless Cascadian composer Lisa Neher–hosts their second annual mid-summer season preview party. It’s a backyard neighborhood shindig, and it’s a fundraiser (suggested donation at the door), and it’s also a preview of NWO’s September double-bill “Atoms & Artifacts.” Also on the bill at the Summer Splash (which, sadly, does not appear to be an actual pool party): music by Neher, her Raindrop New Music co-conspirator Carolyn Quick, and a number of others.

Cascadia also hosts two “deep listening” sessions this month, on the 13th and 27th, both at Tualatin Public Library (register here and here). It’s good that someone is doing this, celebrating the lasting impact of the Pauline Oliveros deep listening exercises, framed as a specific gathering rather than a haphazard “let’s just get together and do this in the park” sort of thing (nothing against just getting together and doing these in the park). Here’s what Oliveros had to say about Deep Listening:

“What Is Deep Listening?

For me Deep Listening is a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.

Deep Listening is a practice consisting of listening and sounding exercises and pieces I and others have composed since 1970. The results are processed by group discussions in workshops and retreats. Deep Listening is for musicians as well as participants from other disciplines and interests. Previous musical training is not required.

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.

Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”

Next up is the most notorious of Cascadia Composers: Jennifer Wright, the Queen of Spectacle. You’ve likely heard about her antics here before, dear reader, whether it’s piling up toy pianos, playing harpsichord dressed in flashing blue lights, transmogrifying pianos in various ways, or what have you. Read just a sample of that history here, here, and here. Check out Wright playing her infamous Skeleton Piano here:

Anyways, Oregon’s favorite ever-roaming, hungry-hearted maven of the weird has finally gone full Harry Partch and spent the last couple of years down at Zidell Yards on Portland’s south waterfront constructing instruments–sorry, “sonic installations and sound machines”–out of a couple tons of scrap metal and ship parts.

Yes, you read that right. Here’s what the composer has to say about all this:

Join me for this once-in-a-lifetime concert event featuring my newest (and by far my biggest!) musical creation: ARACHNE, the world’s largest steel-cable Long Strings Instrument, comprised of 7 massive tuned strings over 160 feet long!

Joining this creature will be two other sets of (somewhat shorter!) Long Strings and several of the experimental instruments and sound machines that I have built at Zidell Shipyards from over 3000 lbs. of metal industrial debris!

Sponsor

Joining Wright and her bevy of Frankensteins will be cellist Diane Chaplin, Lucas Marshall Smith doing “spoken word and throat singing,” and fellow Cascadian Paul Safar playing, of all damn things, “medieval hurdy gurdy.”

Our awe is palpable. That’s going down for two performances on July 18, at 5 and 7:30 pm (with a private show on July 19 to which you are not invited). If you’re in striking distance of Portland, go check it out–then report back here and we’ll decide whether or not to believe you.

About Safar and that hurdy gurdy: Paul’s ordinarily a piano guy, but lately he’s been hanging around with Catalan hurdy gurdy player Marc Egea and no doubt has picked up a few tricks. That duo will be performing a mini-tour at the end of July and start of August, with three concerts in Eugene (7/31), Portland (8/1), and Springfield (8/3). You can get a taste of what that’ll be like with this, their duo concert from 2023:

Cascadia Composers “In Good Hands” is at 4 pm in Lincoln Recital Hall on July 12 (tickets and info here). New Wave Opera “Summer Splash” is at 7:30 pm on July 12 in Westmoreland (tickets and info here). Jennifer Wright’s “Long Strings” is at 5 and 7:30 pm at Zidell Yards on July 18 (tickets and info here). Paul Safar and Marc Egea are at Tsunami Books in Eugene on July 31 (tickets and info here), at 7:30 pm at Lincoln Recital Hall in Portland, and at 3 pm at Richard E. Wildish Community Theater in Springfield (tickets and info here).