
Happy New Year!
Do you have a favorite New Year tradition? A favorite image of the passing from one year to the next? One theme that always haunts our mind’s eye this time of year is Baby New Year, generally paired with Father Time (as in the above image). There might be a stork or something, but generally the idea is “Out with the Old, In with the New.” You can find pre-echoes of this in the myth of Zeus rebelling against his pops, Cronos, and establishing the Olympian Age.
You can catch a different whiff of it in the Stephen King novella The Langoliers, which was made into a TV miniseries starring David Morse, Dean Stockwell, and Bronson “Balki” Pinchot. Spoiler alert: A group of airplane passengers get accidentally transported to Yesterday, where everything is worn out, and have to use their cunning and their teamwork skills to escape into Today before they get eaten by the titular bouncing-ball predators whose job it is to consume The Past and make way for The Present. The premise can also be found in various Twilight Zone episodes, et alia. It’s a popular trope.
Cartoonist and animation pioneer Winsor McCay created a rather complex “Baby New Year and Father Time” cartoon in 1906, as part of his surrealicious Little Nemo in Slumberland series. Here’s that one in its entirety:

“Ephemera”
ArtsWatch contributor Charles Rose recently received an intriguing email from Constant Reader and professional Modern Music Gadfly Bob Priest:
Thanx to your recent OAW article on the “Portland School of Music,” I rummaged around in my memory bank, did a wee bit o’ research, and gradually stumbled upon the rather amazing discovery below. See if you recognize the names of ANY of the composers listed towards the end of this document!
chEARS, Bob
https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv40963
Oh my. This one provokes all manner of questions. For instance: “Who the hell are all these people?” And: “Why don’t we ever hear about them, or hear their music?” How can we even begin to make sense of “The Oregon School of Composition” (a major goal for the present author in the coming year) without knowing about Oregon’s compositional history?
Fortunately, Bob has brought us the good stuff. The link is to “Society of Oregon Composers records, 1902-1941,” and here’s what the summary says:
This collection reflects efforts by the Society of Oregon Composers to gather a library of Oregon musical compositions, and to promote and support musical composition in the state. The collection consists primarily of musical scores for voice, piano and strings (1902-1941), with other materials relating to the music library, membership in the society, and competitions.
The collection consists primarily of musical scores for voice, piano, and strings, with an accompanying index. Composers represented include Lauren B. Sykes, Dent Mowrey, Emil Enna, and Blythe Owen. Other materials in the collection consist of a small quantity of correspondence; membership lists; miscellaneous music programs; and ephemera.
A quick search on a few of these names yields such tidbits as this Oregon Encyclopedia entry on Sykes:
“Lauren B. Sykes has done as much or more for music in Portland than any individual in the history of this city,” wrote Oregon Journal music critic Martin Clark in 1967. Governor Tom McCall described Sykes’s significance to Oregon’s cultural history this way: “Thousands of Oregonians know personally about your contributions to music in our metropolis and, in fact, to the entire state.…You have been a moving force in the musical world of our state.”
If you’ve enjoyed The Old Church in Downtown Portland, and particularly its weekly free lunchtime concerts, you have Sykes to thank–he initiated those in the ‘60s. Likewise Portland Symphonic Choir, which he co-founded with C. Robert Zimmerman in 1945. Here’s what he looked like:

And that’s just one composer! One of these days someone will get a few major Oregonian music directors in a room together–Kevin Bryant Lay and Jeff Winslow from Cascadia Composers, Kenji and Monica from Fear No Music, KFG and Liz Bacon Brownson from Resonance Ensemble, Lisa and Ron and Greg from 45th Parallel, Sarah and Evan and Will from Third Angle, Amelia Lukas, Lisa Neher, David De Lyser, David Hattner, Raúl Gómez-Rojas, Nancy Ives, Hannah Penn, Madeline Ross, Robert Kyr, and Ethan Sperry would be a good start–to discuss the founding of a record label devoted to Oregon classical music.
Surely there’s some grant money in that?
Here’s how you could do this. Start by committing to learning old and new music by Oregonians, rehearsing it, and performing it. Record the concerts, have some students from PSU’s SAMP program master them, release all of it on Bandcamp. Start building an audio library of Oregon composers and compositions. The project would never be done, especially not if you also performed music by living composers young and old.
There are hundreds of performing groups in Oregon, vocal and instrumental, from soloists through trios and quartets all the way up to massive choirs and symphony orchestras. There’s room on every single program for an Oregon composer alongside the Sibelius and the Beethoven. Every single one.
Start thinking now about the next few seasons. A few years of this and we could really have something special here. We’d be the envy of the entire country. Orchestras in Idaho and Ohio would stop looking to New York and Los Angeles and look to us as an example of what they could be doing in their own hometowns.
When all that happens–well, then and only then can we really start talking about an “Oregon School of Composition.”
“Rich and ambitious”
We recently received the news that Portland’s James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, a longtime supporter of the arts in Oregon, has selected the first cohort of recipients of their new Spark Award (get the whole story from OAW executive editor Bob Hicks right here). From the press release:
The Spark Award for Oregon Artists is a new three-year pilot program investing $1,500,000 in individual artists. The program is inspired by the Foundation’s belief that the self-directed pursuit by professional artists of new ideas, opportunities and skills is essential to our state’s cultural vitality.
The goals of the program are 1) to support the creative development of professional artists; and 2) to create career advancement opportunities for Oregon artists. The Foundation will award a total of $500,000 each year ($25,000 per grantee) to twenty mid-career artists in each year of the pilot program, providing flexible funding for their overall creative development, rather than tying the award funds to a specific project.
“We were thrilled with the range and diversity of the applications that we received across all the performing arts disciplines. We are heartened by the reminder of the rich and ambitious artistic work happening in our state, and excited to see the positive impact this funding will have at pivotal moments in these artists’ careers,” said Carrie Hoops, the Foundation’s Executive Director.
Glory be! Eight of these Spark Award recipients are musicians, and a few of these names will already be familiar to Oregon ArtsWatch readers. Here they all are:
Okaidja Afroso
Marisa Anderson
Adam Eccleston
Ethan Gans-Morse
Jimmie Herrod
Talilo Marfil-Tran
Lamiae Naki
Luke Wyland
Congratulations, everybody!
GTFO
You may have noticed that we are 1500 words into the New Year and you haven’t heard about a single event yet. That’s intentional–this column is always in danger of drifting towards Eventcalendarland, a place we have no intention of residing. Click on one of the lovingly crafted ads you find running up and down both sides of the column and occasionally within the text itself. That’s what they’re there for!
That said, we still want to bring you a handful of excuses to go outside and live in person every month. If we neglect to mention Oregon Symphony’s January Beethovenfest (eins, zwei, drei) it’s because we assume you already know all about it. By the same reasoning, we might mention two similar concerts you probably don’t know about: Portland Youth Philharmonic’s “Sound Garden” concert Jan. 10 at The Reser and Metropolitan Youth Symphony’s “A Powerful Voice Rises” concert Jan. 12 at The Newmark.
Note that PYP will not be playing the music of Seattle legends Soundgarden, awesome though that would be; they’re performing Joaquín Turina’s Rapsodia Sinfónica with pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, plus Saint-Saëns and Jessie Montgomery and Bruce Stark. The MYS concert will also feature a guest pianist: Hunter Noack of “In A Landscape” fame, performing in a concert hall for a change, is the soloist on Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Also on the MYS program are the winners of their concerto competition (violinist Leena Karmarkar and clarinetist Kaden Pritchard) and the premiere of Seas of Glass by Young Composers Project student Frazar Henry.
See, everybody? That’s really not so hard. Now they just need to record Seas of Glass and put it on Bandcamp, perhaps sharing an album with Matthew Kaminski’s Hidden Voices, Koharu Sakiyama’s Untold Tales, Jake Safirstein’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and David Schiff’s 4 Sisters Concerto featuring Regina Carter.
Or we might mention a pair of back-to-back Sibelius concerts this month. On the 23rd, the Eugene Symphony conductor playoffs continue when Tania Miller conducts The Mighty Finn’s First Symphony (and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4). Then, on the 24th and 26th, Beaverton Symphony Orchestra’s new director Pierre-Alain Chevalier leads the BSO in Sibelius’ Second Symphony.
Bam! You’ve been wanting to get into Sibelius ever since you read The Rest Is Noise, right? Well, here’s your chance.
Or we might dare you to brave the Oregon Coast in the middle of winter to hear Newport Symphony Orchestra on Jan. 18-19. NSO’s perfectly-named “The Land, The Sea, and The Birds” program features Haydn’s Symphony no. 83 “La Poule” (The Hen), Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea), Rautavaara’s Concerto for Birds and Orchestra “Cantus Arcticus”, and Sara Carina Graef’s Yakona. Haydn and Debussy together is an inspired choice: We can hardly think of two classical composers more different from each other while being beautifully complementary. Rautavaara (another Finn) composed his “concerto” by incorporating recordings of songbirds in Northern Finland and the Arctic Circle.
As for the Graef piece–you can read all about it in Lori Tobias’ preview of the 2023 premiere, and listen to it right here:
Or we might direct your attention to The Florestan Trio, one of Oregon’s longest-running chamber groups. They’re playing thrice at The Old Church for Friends of Chamber Music in the near future, starting with Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn on the 26th.
We might also remind you that FOCM is hosting the Jerusalem Quartet in March, when they’ll be playing the entire Shostakovich Cycle. This astonishing feat should not be taken lightly, and we mention it now, two months ahead of time, so that you can get your tickets before they sell out. You may also wish to consider spiritual preparations, perhaps a regimen of fasting and prayer, before exposing yourself to fifteen of the twentieth century’s twenty-one great string quartets (Bartók is responsible for the other six).
“Warmth and inconsistencies”
One concert we’ve been excited about for awhile now: On the 12th Cascadia Composers pays tribute to founding composer David Bernstein, who passed away in 2023 (read Brett Campell’s tribute here). Hey Cascadians! Specifically Jeff Winslow and Kevin Bryant Lay! Record this concert and put it on Bandcamp!
Another one we’re excited about: On the 28th at The Reser, 45th Parallel’s percussion group The Gemini Project (Sergio Carreno, Stephen Kehner, Ian Kerr) will perform works by Andy Akiho, Aeryn Santillan, and Daniel Wohl. The Wohl piece is called Holographic, and the composer describes it like this:
Holographic is about exploring different worlds–improbable combinations of sounds–hidden and imaginary sonic landscapes both acoustic and electronic. By processing or re-sampling more traditional instruments like strings, percussion, or the human voice, I wanted to create music that has a strong link to the past while at the same time being rooted in what we listen to on a daily basis. I wanted to retain the warmth and inconsistencies of human playing while interfacing with the technologies that are available to all of us.
All live performances of Holographic will also feature projections from Los Angeles-based visual artist Daniel Schwarz, engaged and commissioned by The Film Society of Minneapolis St. Paul.
And it sounds like this:
And yes, the Gemini performance will include the projections. That’s worth it all by itself. The Akiho and Santillan pieces are both premieres, and apparently have yet to be titled–unless Andy is going to call his piece West Coast Premiere, which would be pretty rad, but to stay in character he’d have to style it WEst coAst pREmiere.
We represent the lollipop guild
We leave you with two pop shows. The first is on the 8th: Oregon psych band !mindparade at Lollipop Shoppe in Close Southeast Portland. Also on the bill are two more Oregon Psych Bands, Twingle and Darci Phenix. You can get a taste of all that, as usual, on Bandcamp:
The other is on the 11th at The Showdown, also in SEPDX. This one is an album release show for Aan, whose second album Over The Mountain is available on a pair of vinyl records (to accomodate run time, according to the band). Here’s what they have to say about that:
Pressed across 2 pieces of vinyl, to ensure maximum audio fidelity without having to edit any of the album’s run-time – the first 9 tracks of the album are on 1 standard-sized 33 RPM 12″ LP, with the last two songs, “Cold Grey Eyes” and “Smile,” split onto a separate 45 RPM 7″ record, included inside with its own polybag sleeve (not pictured in the example above) and a fold-out lyrics sheet / poster.
And that looks like this:

And sounds like this:
We heard about this show from the opening act, one of our favorite working Oregon bands: The glorious sextet Abronia. They’re not playing a ton these days–too busy working on their fourth album–so if you wanna see that Big Drum in action anytime soon you’d better grab on while you can.
Bonus rant: The goddamn man strikes again
Are you reading music critic Ted Gioia’s “The Honest Broker” over on Substack? If not, you’re missing out, dude. A couple weeks ago he wrote this essay, “The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed,” which is remarkable not only for its restraint (Ted manages to not say “I fucking told you so” too forcefully) but for the way he contextualizes and boosts his primary source, journalist Liz Pelly.
Now, we’ve all known for a long time that there’s something seriously amiss in the streaming world. It’s not just the usual Luddite criticism of technology as a means of concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands (you probably thought we just didn’t like looms); nor is it the deadening effect of social control passing into the spergy hands of pasty overlords intent on leaching you and everyone else–musicians and audiences alike–of every last drop of your precious spiritual energy (yes, I went and saw Nosferatu last week).

Gioia and the rest of us who care about music and humanity have been moaning about this for years. But Pelly actually went out and talked to people, got the whole story. She went and got the receipts.
And what she found is breathtakingly damning, not only of Spotify but of the industry as a whole. A few choice quotes jumped out from her Harper’s article “The Ghosts in the Machine” (which is an excerpt from her upcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist).
Chew on these, dear reader:
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

Hi Matt, Wonderful article! (Sorry it took me 2 weeks to get to it.) It cheers me to think we all could get together and create a place for the “Society of Oregon Composers”. I’m up for it! Cascadia Composers is planning next season, so it’s a good time to figure something out. Cool idea – creating a Bandcamp site … Let’s talk more.
Hey Matt, Charles, and Brett,
It’s great that you pro sleuths have taken the long gone, but happily not completely forgotten, Society of Oregon Composers to the hearts of your mind’s ears! I so look forward to hearing about what you dig up during your ongoing research – please keep us posted . . .
Matthew Neil Andrews, you are the most stylish of gauntlet throwers imaginable! As always, there is much to ponder, digest and otherwise osmose in this monthly missive.