Also: Freddie Vilches Meneses with Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Nancy Ives and Giancarlo Castro D’Addona and Sylvan Talavera with Portland Youth Philharmonic. Also also: bands, bands, bands, and more bands.
The music of Iran and America explored current issues with a concert of music by all women composers.
Last Monday’s concert at The Old Church featured ebows and superball mallets in music by Skye Neal, Kirsten Volness, Rachel Modlin, Bora Yoon, and Kimberly Osberg.
The new year takes flight with a festival of Portland bands, a local pop star, and a bevy of chittering contemporary classical music.
A longitudinal study of everything we loved (and a few things we didn’t) in Oregon music this year, and last year, world without end, amen.
Fresh as ever, the music of four women composers received a superb outing.
FNM followed its mandate, with two days of demonstrations and performances of electro-acoustic and chance-based music by Annie Gosfield, Eve Beglarian, Kaija Saariaho, Hannah Ishizaki, Adina Izarra, and Kamala Sankaram.
Working hard with Renegade Opera, Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival, Cascadia Composers, Lose Yr Mind Fest, Ural Thomas, Amenta “Yawa” Abioto, and more.
In which we consider the meanings of music with a Fresh Air Fest, a Columbia Riverkeeper composer-in-residence, a pair of rowdy rock concerts, and a sampling of Chamber Music Northwest.
NMG 2023 acknowledged loss and celebrated recovery with concerts indoors and outside.
The vocal ensemble partnered with Indigenous artists for a rained-in festival at Lewis & Clark’s Agnes Flanagan Chapel.
In which the Merry Month promises premieres, percussions, a plethora of Bandcamp Friday pickings, and plenty more.
Portland music ensemble’s unique education initiative celebrates its 25th anniversary with a concert on April 17 featuring new compositions by program alumni.
FNM’s recent “Legacies” concert featured music by Young Composers Project grad Ian Guthrie alongside Negrón, Ko, Kernis, Balch, and Beethoven.
The Shivas and !mindparade shimmy into Doug Fir Lounge; 45th Parallel illuminates the Universe; Machado Mijiga’s new “Uncharted,” “Loss” and Third Angle; MF Zakir.
The violist-comedian joined Kenji Bunch at The Old Church for a concert of music and jokes.
FNM’s recent concert at The Old Church celebrated 25 years of the Young Composers Project.
January brings a city-wide music festival, Fear No Music’s “Generations,” a PJCE celebration of women in jazz, and more.
Listening backwards and forwards to the trends and traditions which (we hope) will continue into the next year.
FNM’s Legacies 1 concert followed a throughline backwards, from YCP composer Nathan Campbell and Ukrainian-Swiss composer Victoria Poleva past Schnittke and Mahler to Brahms and Wieck-Schumann.
FNM’s upcoming concert celebrates artistic cooperation and compositional traditions through time and space.
In which we discuss Niel DePonte’s chair change, Aminé with Oregon Symphony, Caroline Shaw at The Reser, PCSO premieres Nicole Buetti, Cappella Romana premieres Robert Kyr, Young Composers Project alumni with FNM and MYS and PYP, Dvořák galore, and more.
A PSU choir’s link to Leonard Cohen’s most famous song; a Covid cancellation; Afro-Topia Pop-Up; remembering Hilary Mantel & Louise Fletcher; Corey Brunish & “The Music Man.”
Pride Month, Juneteenth, and more.
FNM performs music by Asian and Asian-American composers at The Old Church.
Reser Center marches forth in Beaverton; Black music still matters; “Ladies’ Night” with Third Angle.
Biannual event moves online, produces virtual concerts to be released this month.
Eschewing the “return” to “live” music in favor of a relieved, sustained, sustainable isolation.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Oscars, Oregon Book Awards, operatic triumph, strange tales and a stranger firing.
Looking forward to a wild summer where the masks start to come off and the concerts slowly start coming back.
Poetry, podcasts, theater, dance, and music are all available virtually from the McMinnville school.
Cut to December: It didn’t get less weird. Seeing the music and larger worlds from our almost front-row seats.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Planning for post-Covid culture; pancakes & the art of dissent; good things come in multiples.
In which we lament Geter’s Requiem, remember Menomena, and set Kevin down on the PDX Couch.
Oregon has two winters as well as two summers. We’ve just wrapped up First Winter: the time when it hasn’t gotten too terribly cold and miserable, holiday cheer is in the air, and everybody’s all excited for the solstice and the new
• Portland Opera has named Sue Dixon the company’s sixth general director, replacing Christopher Mattaliano, who departed in June after 16 years. She’s served the company in other capacities since 2014. PO also temporarily assigned Mattaliano’s artistic direction responsibilities to Palm Beach
Hip-hop haven, profiles in gender, museum Loverules, a new opera, un-holiday tunes, gibassiers & more.
FearNoMusic commemorates the Portland murder of immigrant Mulugeta Seraw by white supremacists.
What’s up? Big bands, big choirs, chamber classical, and hybrid music from Indonesia and the British Isles.
Our most excellent wrap of November music classical, new, jazzy, and hybrids in between.
Matthew Neil Andrews tells all: Your guide to choosing a balanced musical diet.
It’s a busy month of music in Oregon, from classical to hip-hop to experimental and more.
There’s an old Oregon saying: “April showers bring May showers.” Our famously persnickety springs tend to veer from warm noon-times of glorious blooming sunshine to those long desperate afternoons of deep drizzling gloom that have our S.A.D. souls begging the gods, “when
This state is just crawling with composers, though you might not know it if you only go to Oregon Symphony and Third Angle concerts—just to arbitrarily pick on a pair of robust local organizations with rather different ideas of what constitutes classical
Music, like any other art form, must prove itself to each generation if it’s going to last. That’s why classical music and jazz organizations increasingly sponsor shows suited to kids and families, like Oregon Symphony’s Sci-Fi at the Pops shows Saturday and
Kenji Bunch is either an oenophile or he’s been reading Jeff VanderMeer. The Fear No Music artistic director introduced the ensemble’s fifth annual Locally Sourced Sounds concert post-concert Q&A with a discussion of the somewhat esoteric term terroir, used to describe the
As 21st century America belatedly recognizes that gender isn’t always a binary phenomenon, artists have increasingly illuminated its fluid, spectral reality, as Oregonians have seen in recent Time Based Art Festival performances, last fall’s Contralto show by Third Angle, and more. Now
When violist Kenji Bunch left his native Portland for music school in New York more than a quarter century ago, contemporary classical music wasn’t much on the city’s radar. Outside New York, “there wasn’t a lot going on anywhere, compared to today,”
Best known as the premier exponent and explorer of the musical traditions of Byzantium and other early Christian music, Cappella Romana has recently branched out into other Orthodox Christian music descended from Byzantine origins, including Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian and more. You’re unlikely
Last year’s music roundup first looked homeward. ArtsWatch’s 2017 music coverage focused, as we have from the outset, on our state’s creative culture: music conceived and composed in Oregon. We touched a lot of other bases, too of course, and homegrown music
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