One day in 2010, composer Matthew Packwood was driving from his Portland home for his first visit to Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. As he took in the region’s renowned splendor, he found himself almost overcome by a feeling of connection to the land.

“When you have an experience in the outdoors — a mountain, a waterfall, the coast — it creates a sense of wonder, a kind of awe you can’t put words to,” Packwood says. “It’s almost biological. Indigenous people would tell you that we’re connected to the land. Once I started to take in these impossible wild places and landscapes and understand them, in that response of awe, I started to wonder: How can we think about this creatively?”

That “we” is significant. Packwood didn’t just mean figuratively mining Oregon’s landscapes for his own musical inspiration. He wanted to find multiple artistic avenues for channeling Oregon beauty into art. 

That experience was the seed for what became the Oregon Origins Project, which Packwood conceived and directs. Its latest show, The Birth of Cascadia, features a multimedia concert at Beaverton’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts on June 21st and 22nd. The accompanying exhibition including ten Oregon-based artists is on view at Portland’s Stelo Arts through July 12, and those images will also be projected behind the orchestra at the Reser performance. (Read Laurel Reed Pavic’s ArtsWatch review.) The sounds and images represent Oregon artists’ original creative evocations of the natural forces — from floods to volcanos and more — that shaped our home, and created the beauty that so moved Matthew Packwood and so many others.

Origins

Packwood came to Oregon from Boston, where he worked as a radio producer for esteemed public media station WGBH, including creating the excellent Art of the States program devoted to showcasing contemporary American concert music to audiences around the world. When he first visited a couple of decades ago, Packwood was transfixed by the region’s magnificent landscapes. 

“If you haven’t been to the West, it feels like another planet,” Packwood told ArtsWatch, citing the age and variety of geological features, many microclimates and other aspects of the region that drew so many of us here. “Part of the appeal of the West is that it wears its geology on its sleeve. In New England, the mountains are older, subtler. Here it’s begging to be noticed. It’s a whole different scale. Oregon contains multitudes. It was easy to fall in love with it.” He decided to move to Portland in 2007. 

Packwood is also a composer who studied at Northwestern University and London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In Oregon, he’s been commissioned by Fear No Music and the Oregon Symphony. As a composer, “for me, it’s always a question of finding the thing that inspires,” he says. And his adopted home provides abundant inspiration. “These ideas about the ancient qualities of places were my way in to start diving deep,” he remembers.

After his Wallowa epiphany, Packwood began engaging in conversations with other artists and Indigenous culture bearers about finding ways to evoke Oregon’s history and landscape through art. As with so many other artistic projects, the process intensified during the pandemic pause, which provided a space for broader, deeper consideration. Packwood conducted a kind of virtual, year-long “listening tour” via Zoom. 

“We spent a year talking to Indigenous culture bearers, asking: How can we take the arts and bring community by exploring the places and things we love?” he says. “Oregon is such a phenomenal and diverse place. Let’s dig deep creatively and performatively, through art, theater, dance, music.” 

Packwood wanted the projects to be broadly accessible. “Most people, especially Oregonians, have a love of place,” he explains, so that became a natural starting point. 

Their ideas coalesced into Oregon Origins Project, which, according to its mission statement, “explores the ancient origins of the state of Oregon through creative expression.” It also aims “to cultivate a deeper appreciation of Oregon’s first peoples and their fundamental relationship to the land; provide a platform for Indigenous artists and culture bearers to share their living traditions and artistic work; to offer an opportunity for artists of all disciplines and backgrounds to create new work inspired by the state’s origins; to creatively explore the state’s varied landscapes and microclimates, its geologic and natural histories; and to awaken the many senses of place in this diverse place known as Oregon.”

They decided to present two events each year, initially at Reed College, where Packwood works. The fall program focuses on Indigenous creations. “Indigenous culture bearers connect the land to their society,” he says. “That’s the basis on which their culture is built. Indigenous people bring this incredible power and good-heartedness. They get carte blanche to determine the fall project. We have an incredible body of inspiration at our doorstep that deserves our exploration of it. Let’s highlight these remarkable Indigenous peoples and cultures here and explore that experience.” 

OO’s first edition, in 2022, brought five Indigenous culture-bearers from across the state to share their stories to audiences at Reed College. The third explored the seasonal traditions of the southwest Oregon coast Indigenous peoples. Read Gabriel Lucich’s ArtsWatch review of last fall’s event, Keeping Traditions Alive.

 The spring shows feature the second pillar of Oregon Origins Project — performing art that channels the state’s natural history and landscapes. While Packwood would compose original music for the project, “I’m a collaborative person,” he says, “and I really benefit from the back and forth” with other artists. So he sought out artists from other artistic disciplines.

The second OO iteration, Seven Wonders, presented “a new contemporary music and dance work exploring the ancient forces that shaped Oregon’s wild places,” with Packwood’s original music for string quartet accompanying choreography by Makino Hayashi, and a geology presentation by former Oregon State Geologist Ian Madin, who became an important contributor and “muse” to Packwood, who’s not a scientist.

Last year’s fourth OO project, Convergence, presented a new play by award-winning Portland writer Sara Jean Accuardi “inspired by the formation of the Cove Palisades and the confluence of three desert rivers.” The next two OO editions, for next fall and spring, are already scheduled.

Cascadian Creation

This year’s sixth installment, The Birth of Cascadia, actually grew out of 2023’s Seven Wonders. Packwood had enjoyed collaborating with geologist Madin so much that he resolved to team up with him again — and go even bigger. “I proposed taking on whole geologic history of the state,” Packwood recalls. “He was totally game from the get go.” 

Obviously a project of such scope — hundreds of millions of years! — would need a bit of focus. Madin and Packwood settled on ten signal events in that vast timeline as points of artistic inspiration, plus a prologue and epilogue. 

“Geology was the way in,” for all the artists, Packwood explains. “In Oregon, so much of it is visible. We can see the remnant shape of Mt. Hood, or the Gorge scablands created by the Missoula Floods. Here’s what I’m looking at. Here’s what the geologists’ data looks like. Part of the reason it’s easy find inspiration in geology is that you can take a geologic fact, like an earthquake, and ask ‘What does it feel like, sound like, look like?’ Mt. Hood is an incredibly beautiful mountain, with spectacular lava flows and glaciers, even if you know nothing about the geology that created it.”

But what’s immediately apparent, no matter how impressive, is only a point of departure for artists — even those working in relatively abstract forms like music and dance — and visitors alike. “Part of what people experience in these places is imagining those dramatic events” that produced them, Packwood says. “When you go to a place like the Gorge and have that experience, you’re tapping into something ancient. The place for artists is in the space between what we see, and what the geologists are telling us about its origin. We thrive on those liminal spaces where there’s mystery, something we don’t understand — but we feel it. Artists are really good at connecting visceral feelings to more tangible expression. For me personally as a composer, it takes almost no effort to experience something and make something about it. My music lives in a kind of space where the audience can bring their imagination into it.”

The subject’s immense scope also suggested a larger venue, the Reser Center, and ensemble — string orchestra instead of the previous project’s quartet. Packwood enlisted veteran conductor and Portland State University music professor Ken Selden, who also runs his own independent chamber orchestra, to assemble and conduct the 21 musicians, who are paid union scale. “Ken was a consigliere for me,” Packwood says, who contributed conceptual as well as practical advice.

This time, Packwood also wanted to add a visual art element to the mix. With help from his friends in the art world, including Nan Curtis and Reed’s Stephanie Snyder and Juniper Harrower, they chose ten Oregon visual artists for this spring’s show. After an initial gathering and exchange of ideas at Stelo, most took site visits to places that showcase the ten chosen phenomena, gleaned from Madin extensive information about the geological process at work, and then worked independently on their own pieces. You can read more about the visual art in Laurel Reed Pavic’s ArtsWatch story.

“One thing people will find surprising is the incredible variety of geology we’re trying to capture,” Packwood says. “We get everything from immense volcanic explosions to slow-paced glacial movements, the rushes of the Missoula Floods through the [Columbia] Gorge. I feel so lucky these artists brought all of their creativity to this project.”

Along with visual art, music is a vital part of The Birth of Cascadia. When we encounter geological features, they can seem fixed, a moment frozen in time. Visual art provides creative snapshots of those moments. But viewed on a geological time scale, even apparently immutable objects are merely evanescent, part of a long and continuous evolution. And music as a time-based art form is well-positioned to capture that continuous, time-lapse flow of our gradually changing landscapes. So Oregon Origins’ combination of music and visual arts can provide a richer evocation of geology’s essence.

Packwood cites other composers who use music to evoke historical and natural phenomena, such as John Luther Adams, or Philip Glass in his Koyaanisqatsi music and Godfrey Reggio’s film. (The gradually evolving repetitive structures of minimalist-influenced music like Glass’s seems particularly apt for reflecting geological development.) Closer to home, Packwood mentions recent works like Darrell Grant’s The Territory and Michael Gordon’s evocation of Southern Oregon landscape and history, Natural History. Perhaps the pioneering American composer in this vein was Seattle’s late, great Alan Hovhaness, who never met a mountain, including St. Helens, he couldn’t musicalize.

For his original score for The Birth of Cascadia, Packwood tailored the music to the geologic phenomena that inspired his creative response. For example, to accompany a section on glacial movement and deposits, he used devices such as portamento, pizzicato (including the tart snap or Bartok pizz) and overlapping bending of notes in a descending pattern. 

For a movement depicting the creation of the High Cascades, Packwood’s music used repetitive descending patterns to evoke the slow, relatively gentle lava flows that gradually built those expanses, along with the lava’s brittleness (again evoked by pizzicato). As the program note for the accompanying art, Leah Wilson’s Bloom, put it: “Lava flows cooled and froze in time. Subsequent flows became interwoven with previous flows. Forms created by lava and ash rose, accumulated, collapsed, and rose again. Time and forms are entangled in this strange and wondrous landscape.” The music accordingly also falls and rises, pauses and flows, reflecting the natural phenomena that sculpted our mountains. 

Packwood used the same method to inspire his music for the other movements: ancient geologic processes informed musical form and movement.

For Packwood, though, the art spawned by Oregon Origins Project — even his own — isn’t the project’s primary goal. The art really exists to celebrate the natural landscapes that have inspired him, and to summon in others the exaltation he’s felt in those cherished landscapes ever since that first drive through the Wallowas.

And there’s one more objective: “How can we as artists help bring community together around place?” By convoking so many artists, culture-bearers, scientists and others together each year, and commissioning and showcasing new Oregon-inspired creations, “I want to show that we’re a community that creates the work as well as experiences it. I just love this place so much that I want to share that love however we can.”

***

The Oregon Origins project’s The Birth of Cascadia concert happens at 7:30 p.m. June 21 and 2 p.m. June 22 at The Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 S.W. Crescent St., Beaverton. Tickets and information here.

The art exhibition continues Thursdays-Saturdays through July 12 at Stelo, 412 N.W. Eighth Ave., Portland.