
October contains several holidays, contradictory in many ways, yet in a sense all of a similar “here comes the fall” spirit.
For instance, the High Holy Days of the Jewish tradition all involve solemnity, repentance, and awe; this year they started last week and run through Yom Kippur this Saturday. Consider this passage from the Unetaneh Tokef Prayer:
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: how many shall pass on, and how many shall be born; who shall live, and who shall die; who in his time, and who before his time; who by fire and who by water; who by sword and who by beast; who by hunger and who by thirst; who by storm and who by plague; who by choking and who by stoning. Who shall rest, and who shall wander; who shall be tranquil and who shall be harassed; who shall be at peace and who shall suffer; who shall become poor, and who shall become rich; who shall fall and who shall rise. But repentance, prayer and charity revoke the evil decree!
Next Monday is the holiday some have started calling “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” and others still call “Columbus Day.” It’s officially the first Monday after October 12, the date when – this was back in 1492 – the Genoese sailor Cristoforo Colombo landed in the Bahamas, initiating the Brave New World we still find ourselves in. The holiday goes by various names throughout the Americas, and since the quincentennial in 1992 various cities, states, and tribal authorities in the U.S. have countered “Columbus Day” with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” (in some places “Native American Day”). Oregon officially recognized it as a state holiday in 2021. And this Saturday, Portland State University’s Native American Student and Community Center will host the daylong “We Are Sacred: An Indigenous Peoples Celebration” event with Indigenous vendors, hip-hop musician Blue Flamez, and Bag & Baggage’s production of Blossom Johnson’s Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or, A Boarding School Play (the play runs at PSU October 10-13).
October contains a few other haunting holidays, but we’ll return to Halloween and Día de Muertos in a couple of weeks, and we don’t really have the stomach to discuss Crowleymas. We do, however, wish to share a bit of philosophical poetry (or is it poetic philosophy?) from the retired philologist and failed composer Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, whose birthday on October 15 makes him a Libra – not a Scorpio, as some have supposed.
Try on this horror movie of a thought experiment:
The greatest weight – What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say you: “This life as you now live and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
“The Gay Science,” Book Four, Section 341. Translated by Walter Kaufmann.
Jump into the boundless like the unknown and make it your home
We start today’s live music roundup with a band that occupies what we call “the middle distance” — the space where bands live who aren’t some “Best Hot New Southeast Portland Band of Mid-to-Late 2024” but also aren’t (yet) long-timers like YOB and Witch Mountain and Rollerball (sorry, sorry, RLLRBLL) and King Black Acid and Federale and Agalloch. These are your Nasalrods, your Gaytheists, your Blackwater Holylights, your Eight Bellses–bands that have been around roughly a decade, give or take a few years one direction or another.
One such, Abronia, caught our attention a few years back with this self-description:
A six piece based in Portland, Oregon USA – two guitars, pedal steel, tenor saxophone, bass, and a big drum.
Sextet – hell yeah. Pedal steel – into it. Tenor saxophone – always a yes, and we’ve already got pedal steel, too, so now we’re really getting somewhere. “A big drum”- – wait, what? What kind of drum? How big? Is that it for the percussion? So now we’re all interested and look up their videos, which reveal a band that looks and sounds like this:
Ohhhhh, that kind of big drum. A concert bass drum like you’d hear in an orchestra, turned on its side and played with big felt mallets and (*squints*) heavy plastic maracas. And the saxophonist sings too, sings like the ghost of Jim Morrison. Oh, and the music is good – like, really good. Ultimately that’s all that really matters, at least to this pair of ears. You can have all the cool sounds and rad gimmicky shit in the world – if your songs aren’t any good we’re gonna have to take a Hard Pass.
Anywho, the sextet has been performing here and there while they work on their next album, but their upcoming show October 18 at Lollipop Shoppe in Southeast Portland is special for another reason: the Thai psych band Khun Narin, who made a bit of a splash in 2013 when Dangerous Minds writer Marc Campbell wrote about them – which led, ultimately, to the band recording a couple of albums and eventually coming to Portland to play at Lollipop Shoppe with Abronia.
Here’s that original video:
And here’s their second album, from 2016:
Abronia and Khun Narin play the Lollipop Shoppe on October 18. More info and tickets right here.
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The next evening, October 19, the lunatics that make up Portland’s Extradition Series are doing another of their single-composer deep-dives. Last time it was fourteen hours of Philip Corner, which you can hear on Extradition’s Bandcamp page right here:
This time around they’re performing twenty-odd pieces by Malcolm Goldstein, spread across four concerts between now and next February, all at their usual haunt, Leaven Community Center on Northeast Killingsworth. The first one features several of the usual Extradition players, all badasses in their own right: Catherine Lee (oboe and english horn), Collin Oldham (cello), Stephanie Lavon Trotter (piano and voice), Reed Wallsmith (saxophone), Daniel Reyes Llinás (guitar), Shao Way Wu (bass), Loren Chasse (percussion), and of course head honcho Matt Hannafin (percussion).
Here’s a nice long Goldstein quote, extracted by the Extradition folks (presumably Hannafin) from a 2016 interview with Jennie Gottschalk for Sound Expanse:
I don’t use the word experimental, [but] it’s a good word, because it’s related to the word experience. . . . For me, [this music is] an enactment, making it into an act, making it into a giving. It has to do with people. It has to do with relationships. It has to do with the moment sounding. . . . I’ll quote one of my favorite writers, Chuang Tzu, who says, ‘jump into the boundless like the unknown and make it your home.’ Well, he’s talking about life. So I say, yeah, the first part of it is wonderful. It’s the best definition of improvisation I could think of. But for living, it’s very hard. So the word experimental, then, comes down to really opening up the boundaries. What are the confinements of what is a through-composed piece? By that I mean, if you think of all the music you know except so-called experimental, it’s a linear piece that goes from somewhere, does something, and ends. And this is even in many cultures too, folk music. But there is an entrance into an experiencing of and either some sort of ending or some sort of resolution. But so-called experimental music, we don’t have to do that. And there are an infinite number of formats, like an open field format, a format which is more spiral, which opens up into other spaces, cyclic fields. There are many, many different formats or structures, whichever word you want to use, which are not linear. And that’s what I have gotten into, because, going back to Chuang Tzu, experimental then relates to my life, not just to writing a piece of music. I’m not against [linear music] . . . it’s still wonderful music, and I still love Bach and Beethoven and others: Messiaen, Ives, Bartók. But that’s another way of thinking. So this experimental then relates more to our living. . . . You know, you walk in, say, a farm field or an open field anywhere, and there’s no path to tell you which way to go and which way to get out. You can walk around it in many, many different ways. And that’s I guess what I would call experimental. You’re experiencing the whole thing while you’re passing through it as a living experience.
Extradition plays Goldstein starts October 19 at Leaven Community. More information and tickets available here.
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If that’s not enough “experimental” and “improvisational” music for you, why not plunge headfirst into Creative Music Guild’s annual Improvisation Summit? They’re in year eleven now, with fifteen days of stuff spread all over Portland. That starts October 15 at No Fun on Southeast Hawthorne, with trombonists Naomi Moon Siegel and Denzel “Illegal Son” Mendoza. Listen to their latest music right here:
Two other highlights of the summit (see the whole lineup here) happen at Leaven Community Center on October 25-26, when featured artist Lisa Mezzacappa – a bassist, composer, and bandleader from San Francisco – faces off with two different assemblages of CMG musicians. First up is “Lisa Mezzacappa vs. The CMG All-Star Improviser’s Orchestra,” a lineup that includes folks like bassist Shao Wey Wu, pianist Dana Reason, trumpeter Noah Simpson, drummer John Niekrasz from Methods Body, and so on. Also on that bill: pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri exploring Béla Bartók’s explorations of Transvylanian music.
The next evening it’s “3rio,” which, as you might suspect from the name, is what happens when Mezzacappa sits in with “2uo” — that’s CMG artistic director Mike Gamble (probably the most important guitarist in Portland) and composer/drummer/saxophonist/producer Machado Mijiga. Also on this bill is the latest trio incarnation of pianist/composer Todd Marston’s Integer project (with bassist Andrew Jones and drummer Dae Bryant).
Creative Music Guild’s Improvisation Summit of Portland 2024 happens October 15-29. More information and tickets available here.
Poetasters
The new opera company New Wave Opera continues its inaugural run of productions with this month’s “Night of the Living Opera” on October 21 & 23 at Raven’s Manor in Downtown Portland. We recently chatted with composer and NWO co-founder Kimberly Osberg, and in the midst of a conversation about cartooning as a compositional technique she dropped this line:
When Lisa started the company I think she almost called it “Night of the Living Opera” because she just loves the title so much.
“Lisa” is, of course, Lisa Neher, another composer and NWO co-founder, whose relentless activity has found her on ArtsWatch’s radar many times: filming a jogging opera during the pandemic, singing as part of the Evergreen & Oak Trio at Lady Hill Winery last year, pairing up with fellow Cascadia Composer Dianne Davies earlier this year, doing spooky NWO stuff at Raven’s Manor last month, and so on.
It’s a good title, to be sure, and it certainly fits the evening’s program: Serial Killers and the City by Del’Shawn Taylor and Joanie Brittingham, which is more or less exactly what you think it is; Felix Jarrar’s The Oval Portrait (based on Edgar Allen Poe’s “Life in Death” and “The Oval Portrait”); Osberg’s “psychodrama” THUMP (based on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”); and Neher’s micro-opera she conjures.
Behold the program note for she conjures:
she conjures places us in 1666 in North Berwick, Scotland. Grissall’s mother has been burned for witchcraft and a mysterious spell of endless snow has fallen upon the land. With the help of her mother’s feathered familiar, Caraid, Grissall seeks answers and justice, with the help of a little magic of her own. This feminist tale of witches, crows, curses, revenge, and redemption is infused with Scottish folk music elements. With a dramatic libretto by Bea Goodwin, the work can be performed in concert as a song cycle or staged as an operatic scene.
Optional: the singer may play a bodhrán or other simple skin drum in movements i and iv of the piece, or alternatively may stomp with their foot.
You can check out the LunART Festival premiere of that one right here:
Each night features two complete runs of the whole program, and ends with a final “encore” performance of THUMP and she conjures – meaning you could sit there in this gothy bar and spend about seven hours listening to all of this music, two or three times, getting sloshed on absinthe, breaking only to pop outside and smoke Djarums and touch up your eyeliner.
Each night’s run also has a guest slot, ‘round about 7:30. On the 21st it’s a performance of yet another Poe-inspired work, this one by Carolyn Quick (yet another Oregon composer, yet another Neher collaborator – she’s in Raindrop New Music with Neher and Drew Swatosh, and you’ll hear from the three of them when Fear No Music plays their music next January). On the 23rd it’s Renegade Opera, presenting a preview of their Poe work: The Raven, composed by RO tenor Jesse Preis. Preis recently co-starred in RO’s Orlofsky’s Party (read Lorin Wilkerson’s review right here), and you’ll hear more about The Raven when we get closer to its November premiere.
Oh, and just because we loved it so much (and couldn’t find a place for it in Lorin’s story), here’s a portrait of Claire Robertson-Preis as Orlofsky and Jesse Preis as “Gabe”:

New Wave Opera’s “Night of the Living Opera” happens at Raven’s Manor on October 21 & 23. More information, tickets, reservations, and more are available right here.
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Here’s the hilarious thing about the poetry that lies at the heart of Mahler’s “Definitely Not My Ninth Symphony, Nope, Not Quite Ready To Die Yet” song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde: they’re “free adaptations,” in German, of prior German and French translations of poetry originally written in Chinese over a millennium earlier. Talk about cultural appropriation! But – and here’s the funny part – it doesn’t really matter, because their function for this Austro-Bohemian-Jewish composer was, according to Theodor Adorno, to be a mask for the composer’s sense of otherness in German society, which in general was not friendly to Austro-Bohemian-Jewish folks. We can’t help thinking of another Jewish artist, Al Jolson, whose blackface performances continue to defy attempts to find simple answers to these complex questions.
Anyways, the music is Mahler; you like this stuff or you don’t. On October 22, the 45th Parallel Universe Chamber Orchestra, with mezzo Abbe Drake and tenor Katherine Goforth, will perform the work in its Schoenberg-Riehn arrangement under the baton of Metropolitan Youth Symphony music director Raúl Gomez-Rojas.
45||’s “Das Lied von der Erde” happens October 22 at First United Methodist Church in Portland. More information and tickets are available right here.
String theories
Way over on the other end of the cultural appropriateness spectrum, we have a group of Indian classical musicians playing Indian classical music on Indian classical instruments, under the auspices of the very fine Indian-Oregonian arts organization Kalakendra. On October 26, at First Baptist Church in Southwest Portland, veena player Nirmala Rajasekar and santoor player Sandip Chatterjee will present an evening of Carnatic and Hindustani music with a pair of drummers, Thanjavur Murugaboopathi on the Carnatic mridangam and Ramdas Palsule on the Hindustani tabla.
Let’s take a moment to break all that down. Let’s start with the drums: According to legend, the two drums of the tabla were created by splitting the older, more complicated double-headed mridangam in half. “Carnatic” and “Hindustani” are, respectively, Southern and Northern Indian styles; you generally hear tabla in the North and mridangam in the South. You can hear both on this concert and decide for yourself (the present author, having listened to a lot of this stuff, is convinced that the legend is, in essence, accurate).
The santoor is similar to the hammered dulcimer or the Hungarian cimbalom, in the sense that it is an instrument comprised of strings stretched across a soundboard and struck by mallets. It has 25 bridges with four strings each, hence this concert’s title, “One Hundred Strings” — the original Sanskrit name for the santoor is “shatatantrivina,” meaning “one-hundred stringed veena.” The instrument Rajasekar plays is not just a veena but a Saraswati veena, named for the Hindu goddess of learning and music, who is generally depicted playing one:

Kalakendra presents “One Hundred Strings” on October 26 at First Baptist Church in Portland. More information and tickets are available here.
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We close, for now, with two concerts featuring that finely distilled essence of Western European Classical Music, the string quartet.
In Ashland on October 26, Chamber Music Concerts presents the Italian group Quartetto di Cremona. They’ll perform a program of Dvořák (F Major, Op. 96, “American”), Schumann (A Minor, Op. 41 No. 1), and Bartók (No. 4, Sz. 91). The Dvořák and the Schumann are well and good and all, but it’s the Bartók that stands out.
You probably know The Three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), but might not know The Other Three B’s (Bartók, Bernstein, and Britten). Bartók’s six string quartets occupy a special place beside Shostakovich’s as foundational works of their time, place, and setting; they are as important to the tradition as Beethoven’s. And of the six, the Fourth is particularly special – it has a little bit of everything, from nasty dissonance to beautiful folk song and dance to Bartok’s famous “night music.” It’s got a whole movement of pizzicato, and is in fact the origin of the notorious Bartok pizz (unless you’re one of those heretics who believe Mahler got there first).
Here’s QdC playing an Italian composer, Puccini, a few years ago:
Quartetto di Cremona performs at 3 pm, October 26, at Southern Oregon University Music Recital Hall in Ashland. More information and tickets are available right here.
Staying with Bartók–one of the best recordings of his complete cycle was made in 1998 by the Hungarian Takács Quartet (nothing against the Juilliard String Quartet or the Emersons, who also made some fine recordings of this cycle). The Takács approach to Bartók is, um, how shall we describe it–exquisitely Hungarian. They’ve also earned well-deserved praise for their intense recordings of the complete Beethoven cycle, plus Schubert and Brahms and all the other European stuff that string quartets are supposed to do.
The group (now based in Colorado) comes to Oregon pretty regularly, usually at the invitation of Friends of Chamber Music, who host their next appearance here on October 28 & 29 at PSU’s Lincoln Performance Hall. Two nights, two different programs (and, alas, no Béla).
On the 28th, it’s mostly contemporary composers–Bryce Dessner, Julien Labro, Dino Saluzzi, Clarice Assad–alongside Bach (“Wachet auf”) and Ravel (the ubiquitous String Quartet in F Major). Labro himself will accompany the quartet on bandoneon, a rare treat for a band who (compared to, say, Kronos Quartet) is not exactly known for its wide-ranging collaborations.
The next night, the 29th, it’s all regular quartets: Haydn (C major, Op. 54, No. 2), Britten (Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op. 36) and good old Ludwig van Beethoven (Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 “Razumovsky”). We therefore leave you with the Takács recording of the beautiful, middle-period Rasumovskys, from 2002:
Friends of Chamber Music presents Takács Quartet on October 28 & 29 at Lincoln Performance Hall. More information and tickets are available here.
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