This year’s festival of “Black American Music” featured hot touring artists and returning Oregonians alongside up-and-coming new locals.
Portland Center Stage sinks its teeth into “What the Constitution Means to Me”; The Old Church’s “Moon Series” goes musical; Chapel Theatre hosts 10 new works; a Wilde “Earnest” & more.
The Cuban-born keyboardist and Senegalese kora player returned to Oregon for another popular concert of high musical energy.
CQ concert for CMNW at The Old Church featured Fanny Mendelssohn, Germaine Tailleferre, and short works by several contemporary composers.
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.
New funding program benefits Portland new music organizations, and other news in Oregon music
FNM’s recent concert at The Old Church celebrated 25 years of the Young Composers Project.
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.
Japanese musician Yosuke Fujita brings his custom built pipe organ to The Old Church.
Pride Month, Juneteenth, and more.
Fluid music evokes nature in a new recording and benefit concert.
FNM performs music by Asian and Asian-American composers at The Old Church.
As musicians play canary in the Covid coal mine, youth orchestras play concerti; cellos haunt The Old Church and Dante’s; Gaytheist and Eight Bells get hard.
Music for clarinet and strings by Benny Goodman, Schiff, Schickele, and Mozart in Chamber Music Northwest concert.
Love and loss seesaw deliciously in CMNW lieder recital at The Old Church.
Reser Center marches forth in Beaverton; Black music still matters; “Ladies’ Night” with Third Angle.
Gordon Grdina at Holocene with Creative Music Guild; Circuit Des Yeux’s visceral psych-folk.
Virtuoso pianist performs the complete J.S. Bach ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ for CMNW at The Old Church.
David Danzmayr’s inaugural in-person season opens with Mahler, Bunch, Gabriela Lena Frank, and the massive “Constellation” sound system; Open Music finally commences at The Old Church
Symphonies, concerti, chamber collabs, extra-curricular improv, progressive jazz, and Zoomer B.S.
Last week we talked all about how everyone should be making albums right now, and hopefully you all nodded your heads and muttered, “hell yeah!”
The good, the bad, and the adaptable: Oregon musicians make the best of a socially isolated summer.
Covid-19-inflected arts news: Literary Arts, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, BodyVox, The Old Church, more.
Defining “American”: Caroline Shaw, nyckelharpa and hardanger fiddle, Carnatic voice & violin, harps & drums, American gothick.
Notes for an extra day: A weekend of concerts and a Portland Weird undectet.
Tonight, tonight, tonight! Your busy music editor has to miss a bunch of cool stuff tonight, dear reader: I’ll be schlepping gongs and playing reyong with Gamelan Wahyu Dari Langit, opening for Wet Fruit at Mississippi Studios. If you followed our adventures
In which we bid adieu to Neil Peart and comfort ourselves with winey classical marimba, saturnalian psalms, and an operatic sistah.
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
New Year’s Eve, like Death, is the great equalizer. We all celebrate the solstice-adjacent holidays differently–Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule, Festivus, Hogswatch, and so on–but those of us who follow the Gregorian calendar all come to the end of 2019 at more or less
There are a handful of things that make a city’s musical culture feel complete. You need several symphony orchestras and large choirs, and they all have to be pretty damn good. You also need several smaller choral and instrumental ensembles overlapping with
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.
The present author normally adheres to a strict “no promoting your own shows” policy, but since I spent a month telling you all about band camp in Bali, I feel it’s only fair to let you know that the results of that
We stumble upon a Hall of Fame inductee, learn about joiking and konnakol, and hear from the audients.
What’s up: Retro rock, math punk, psychedelic cumbia, shredded metals, and Jimmie Herrod.
A concert is never about only the music. Otherwise we’d just listen to a recording on headphones. At Pyxis Quartet’s Feb 15 concert at Portland’s Old Church, which on that rainy evening felt like the most consequential performance I’ve attended in Portland,
The three members of the New York theater ensemble the TEAM don’t call Tomorrow Will Be…, which they’ll present Friday and Saturday in Portland at Boom Arts, a show. “I feel weird calling it one thing,” says Zhailon Levingston. “A person who
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
by MATTHEW ANDREWS This year, 45th Parallel goes through a double shift, as the Portland-based classical music organization enters its 10th season and adds “Universe” to its appellation, reflecting a broadening of its roster and repertoire. This happens just as founder and
Two recent concerts of Indian classical music—one presented by Kalakendra, the other by Dance Mandal and Michael Stirling—made a good contrast in listening experiences. One was a family affair, local vocalist Stirling accompanied by his friend Joss Jaffe on tabla and his
As the pre-show jazz band finished up a generous hour-long set at The Old Church on Saturday night and began packing up, Lawrence Howard sidled downstage, took a look at the big prop perched on a stand behind him, and turned to
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