FearNoMusic closed their all-local composers season with a program featuring Nicholas Emerson, Nancy Ives and Dao Strom. The concert reflected the eclecticism that defined the season, as each piece was wildly different in tone, sound world and theme. There was also a melancholic undercurrent to the whole performance, reflecting the themes of the immigration, war and climate change.

Before the concert, Matthew Andrews published his preview and interview with Emerson and Ives, which you can read here. The way the two composers talk about the music shows their perspectives. Emerson talks about his music through gestures, instrumental colors and dramatic metaphor. Ives meanwhile discusses the themes and inspiration alongside some theoretical frameworks.

Emerson is a long-time sound engineer for FearNoMusic, and serves on their board. Nicholas Emerson’s EAS is inspired by spectral techniques, transcribing electronic sounds into the ensemble. The opening transcribes the dissonant beeps of the Emergency Alert System, bound to inspire fear of an impending disaster. Other sounds include sonar pings and telegraph morse code signals. The piece is full of incessant dissonant chords, similar to the Rite of Spring or Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho. Intense, chromatic gestures give way to spacious dust-settling silence. The novel textures and carefully-voiced chords were a highlight of the piece. 

Nancy Ives then came out to perform her solo cello piece …black snow, dark ocean… The whole piece was impressive and moving, especially given the context. Ives based the piece on the loss of Arctic sea ice. The program notes say that “the Arctic region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet,” though Ives clarified that now it is actually four times as fast.  In …black snow, dark ocean…, extended melodic phrases get interrupted by sudden pauses, leaving a harrowing silence. Ives sang harmonies with her cello at points in the piece, and her voice sounded like an ominous chant. The cycles of life are depicted musically via the passacaglia form, and we see those cycles get interrupted. 

The two words she incanted come from Inuktitut: aniuvat and uggianaqtuq. The words mean “snow that never melts,” and “a familiar friend behaving strangely.” (These could be useful borrowings into English, as the words describe rich concepts we don’t natively have, similar to schadenfreude, deja vu or apartheid.) Two words that when placed together form a much darker meaning: a disruption of the cycles that have governed human life for its entire history. That which we consider constant no longer seems as dependable, and the predictable becomes open to doubt. It was a beautiful piece, thoughtful and emotive. 

Dao Strom is a graduate of the famous University of Iowa MFA program. Her lyrics for Diaspora Songs reflect her experience in the Writer’s Workshop: they are introspective, nostalgic, and tend towards free verse, eliding a consistent poetic meter or form. The themes include her birth in Vietnam right before the Fall of Saigon, the enduring legacy of the war, her childhood growing up in Northern California, and Vietnamese mythology. Her poetry translates well into a musical context from the page, as you can hear through her half-dozen-plus albums on her BandCamp.

Strom by analogy translates sorrowful Vietnamese folk music into American folk music idioms. Throughout Diaspora songs one hears chord progressions and instrumentation familiar to Bluegrass, country and blues music. This extends to the themes as well. The second song, “Mother Lode,” points to California within the American mythos as the end of the frontier, the land of gold and broken dreams. 

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Throughout the set, Strom was joined by FearNoMusic’s musicians to accompany Strom’s guitar and voice. Kenji Bunch had some good fiddle solos throughout the set, and even sang some vocal harmonies with Strom. His arrangement for “<break the silence>” was fantastic as well, full of rich counterpoint and interplay between Jeff Payne, Amelia Lukas and Nancy Ives on their respective instruments. The final song, “Origin Tales,” was mellow and thoughtful.

I hope we consider this FearNoMusic season a success. It has prompted conversation amongst ourselves about the nature of an “Oregon School of Composition.” The decision to perform most concerts twice–once at Reed’s Eliot Hall Chapel, and again at The Old Church–was, I think, a good one, offering two opportunities for people to hear the music. (Though I did hear complaints that this resulted in smaller crowds for The Old Church concerts.) 

This season also helped foster a greater sense of community amongst Oregonian composers. These concerts gave us a chance to meet and hear each other’s music, something I especially appreciate. It also prompts some cross-generational listening and conversation. Across all the concerts, one could hear a good variety of different compositional styles and voices. The fun and serious, the accessible and avant-garde, the lyrical and dissonant, the programmatic and abstract, all co-existed on the same program and sometimes in the same piece.

But it’s important to remember that a concert season is never exhaustive. FearNoMusic does their due diligence when programming concerts, but they can never get to everything. There are dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands more fantastic musicians in the state that deserve as much attention as the forty-or-so composers programmed. 

It was a great pleasure to hear music by so many of my colleagues. We often chat, talk shop and like each other’s posts, but rarely do we get this opportunity to hear this much of each other’s music. FearNoMusic, alongside Cascadia Composer’s concerts, Third Angle’s Decibel series, the Oregon Symphony’s premiere of Ives’ Celilo Falls, and concerts by 45th Parallel Universe form a rich portrait of what’s happening among local composers. There are countless more great performances we haven’t had a chance to cover, and it can sometimes be hard to keep up–but that means there’s a lot going on. 

It’s also important to hear others create and share their music. There can be a “fiddling while Rome burns” feeling to creating art at this moment. It sometimes makes me want to quit. Artists ought to stay aware of what’s happening–artists possess a prescience that makes their work important. But cries that “the world needs art” can ring hollow when art can’t feed or house the unfed or unhoused, and art can’t bring back the dead. This cognitive dissonance is hard to reconcile. 

All three works on the program reflect this channeling of our experiences into our art. Emerson’s time in the military inspired the dramatic soundworld of EAS. Ives turned the decay of our Arctic glaciers into a harrowing piece for cello and voice. Strom’s song cycle reflects the effects war and immigration can have upon us, long after the rest of the world has moved on. 

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It’s easy at this time to be driven insane in depression and fear. If creating music keeps us sane, then it’s worth it. Better to live for what you believe in than to die for it. The world has always been full of misery. The difference now is that the constant churning of a twenty-four hour content creation machine thrusts this misery to the forefront of our thoughts. Yet we live on, making art, falling in and out of love. What else is there to do to keep ourselves going?