If you happen to find yourself physically located in Portland and environs for the next few weeks, you’re in luck – several upcoming concerts give you a chance to hear a nicely representative spread of composers from across the Oregon School of Composition, ranging from one of its Big Names and a few of its Famous Recent Transplants through two Composer Cooperatives (one old and one new) to various longstanding and upcoming Oregon composers.

If you’re reading this outside of Portland (and environs) — whether you’re in Greenville, North Carolina or Redding, California – you can still follow along. Open the links and read the histories; listen to the embedded music; watch the videos. This is, yes, a guide to a specific series of live concerts situated in a specific time and place – Portland 2025 – but it’s also a snapshot of what Oregon classical music is all about.

Let’s dive right in.

No fear in love

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

1 John 4:18

It all starts this weekend, with the next installment of Fear No Music’s all-Oregon “Locally Sourced Sounds” season. This one’s titled “Scenes from Adolescence,” centered on the composition of the same name by David Schiff, one of the Big Four of the Oregon School; you can read his backstory in this 2015 ArtsWatch feature by Brett Campbell, written around the time of Schiff’s 70th birthday and the various Oregon concerts that celebrated it.

Now it’s Schiff’s 80th birthday (holy chao!) — he wrote Scenes of Adolescence in 1987, thirty-eight years ago, about halfway between said adolescence and the so-called present day. It’s scored for an instrumental configuration much loved by contemporary composers – the Pierrot Ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano) — and you can hear it on a lovely album of his music recorded in 1989 by the Chamber Music Northwest folks (CMNW honcho David Shifrin, a longtime friend and collaborator of Schiff’s, takes the clarinet part). Check out the lineup for this weekend’s performance: flutist Amelia Lukas, pianist Jeff Payne, clarinetist James Shields, violinist Keiko Araki, and cellist Valdine Mishkin. We say this all the time, but seriously, this crew represents five of the best musicians in Oregon.

Listen to the album here, and listen to Scenes from Adolescence right here:

Another composer on this weekend’s program has only started making waves in Oregon within the last few years, but they’re big waves, indeed: Deena T. Grossman has released three extraordinary albums since 2022, and her most recent album, Thrice-Burned Forest, made quite the impression here at ArtsWatch (read our latest interview with Grossman here). Word is that Grossman’s “Temenos: Sacred Space” from her album Becoming Durga is on the program, which probably means we’ll get to hear FNM artistic director Kenji Bunch (another of the Big Four) sing along with his viola. Huzzah!

The rest of the program is filled out by a trio of Oregon composers collectively calling themselves “Raindrop New Music.” The three are already known, in varying degrees, to Oregon audiences: Lisa Neher is probably the best-known, and perhaps the busiest as well (this is the second new organization she’s co-founded just in the last year, and you can read about her recent collaboration with fellow Cascadian Dianne Davies right here); Carolyn Quick is known to fans of Oregon choral and percussion music (she’s sung with In Medio, Resonance Ensemble and Cappella Romana; her music has been performed by New Wave Opera, Choral Arts Ensemble, Makrokosmos Project, Fear No Music, Portland Percussion Group, and so on). Drew Swatosh, a graduate of FNM’s Young Composers Project, is the newest of the three – but don’t let that fool you. Swatosh premiered their one-act opera Eurydice nine years ago, and Portland Symphonic Choir performed their Finding the Light just last year.

You can get the full story on these three in Charles Rose’s recent profile; catch the short version with these three videos:

Concert performances happen January 24 at Reed College’s Eliot Chapel and January 27 at The Old Church in Downtown Portland; De-Mystifying New Music conversation with Schiff and legendary radio host Robert McBride is 11 am, January 26, at Eliot Chapel. Tickets and more information available here.

Ringing down the resonances

Several composers currently share the title of Greatest Living American Composer, and we generally tend to think first of the Elders: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the Four Johns (Corigliano, Williams, and the Adamses), and so on. Then you have folks who have come along in the last few decades, composers like Gabriela Lena Frank, Jennifer Higdon, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, Eric Whitacre, Julia Wolfe. These are all fine composers, winners of Pulitzers and Grammys, earners of subchapters in the future history books of American Classical Music.

And then you have Caroline Shaw. Where the others will have chapters and subchapters, she’ll have whole books. She’s a Lou Harrison type; a Harry Partch with normal instruments and a good singing voice; a popular maverick working across myriad genres from choral to film to percussion ensemble to pop; she’s someone everyone loves. And yet, a mere decade after her epoch-defining Pultizer win, Shaw is still just getting started. She’s one West Side Story away from becoming our generation’s answer to Leonard Bernstein.

About this time last year, we talked to Shaw and her partner Danni Lee Parpan about their new duo Ringdown (read that here), which they describe as “a cinematic electronic pop duo.” That sounds like this:

What’s hilarious to the present author is that these two have already played Carnegie Hall and been all over the world, and they’re playing a hometown show in Portland this weekend at a little warehouse bar called Holocene. This place has been haunting Industrial Southeast Portland since 2003, when it really was still a haunted and charmingly Weird part of industrial Portland (remember the Belmont Goats?); over the years they’ve hosted everybody from Billie Eilish to ARCO-PDX.

Also on the bill at Holocene this weekend is New Body Electric, a groovy trio centered on the work of engineer and trumpeter Aaron Peterson, a Portlander who also happened to work on Ringdown’s latest single “Ghost.” They sound like this:

Ringdown and New Body Electric play Holocene on Sunday, January 26. More info and tickets available here.

But that’s not even the biggest thing happening with Ringdown in Oregon – the main event is their concert February 8 at Aladdin Theater with Resonance Ensemble. Now, if Holocene is an appropriate venue for a “cinematic electronic pop duo,” then the almost-a-century-old Aladdin is the optimal venue for a Pulitzer-winning composer to declare herself a Real Oregonian (former Oregon band Y La Bamba returns from Mexico to play the Aladdin the week after Ringdown and Resonance). The only places still open in town with as much cred as these two venues are Mississippi Studios, which opened the same year as Holocene, and The Schnitz. No doubt Ringdown will perform both spots soon enough.

Anyways, every Resonance Ensemble concert is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for awesomeness, but this one is extra special in a variety of ways. Ringdown has a whole set, including a few songs they haven’t released yet, and Resonance will sing a couple of Shaw’s choral compositions (Its Motion Keeps and So Quietly). They’ll also sing some Gabriela Lena Frank and music by two other Oregon composers, Judy A. Rose (whose “RE-FLEC” appeared on 2023’s “Portland Protests” program) and Renée Favand-See (whose Only In Falling has played a central role in Resonance’s ongoing story).

The other big part of this concert is Cecille Elliott, a singer-composer-violist-violinist who’s been doing her thing with Resonance since 2020; check out their premiere of her We Are Murmurs right here:

And you can hear the other side of what Elliott does with this recent live-looping version of her “Tearing the Thread from the Seam”:

All of which makes her an ideal composer to pair with Shaw, who’s known for doing a whole lot of the same sort of thing. On this concert, Resonance will premiere a new work they commissioned, Elliott’s It’s So Quiet (which, inevitably, makes us think of Björk). Resonance will be previewing the concert on All Classical’s Thursdays@Three with Christa Wessel, at 3 pm on February 6. Reserve your seat for that right here–or just tune in.

We almost forgot the best part: This concert bears the title “Choir Grrrl,” a reference to the notorious Riot Grrrl movement of the nineties and maybe the most Pacific Northwest thing we’ve ever heard.

Resonance Ensemble performs at 3 pm, February 6 on allclassical.org and on February 8 at Aladdin Theater with Ringdown and Cecille Elliott. More information and tickets available right here.

***

Not enough Shaw for you? On February 3 & 4, Friends of Chamber Music hosts Danish String Quartet; their program on the 3rd pairs Shaw’s Entr’acte with the Haydn quartet (Op. 77 No. 2) which inspired it. You may remember Calidore String Quartet playing this one at CMNW 2017, aka the greatest CMNW of all time.

Danish String Quartet performs Shaw, Haydn, and Schubert on Feb. 3 & 4 at Lincoln Performance Hall. More information and tickets available here.

Newkiho on the block

The only living composer we like as much as we like Caroline Shaw is Andy Akiho, and it’s probably no coincidence that we all ended up in Oregon (it’s the moss). They’re about as different as two composers occupying the same approximate field can be, which is part of the point we’re trying to make about Oregon music: Our diversity is the defining feature of our unity; our rugged individuality is an expression of devoted community; e pluribus unum, in saecula saeculorum, etcetera etcetera, amen.

If we know Andy – and we do, somewhat, having spent nearly a decade following his work and chatting with him about it – we suspect that his new piece Copper Variations got its name juuuuust in time for the 45th Parallel Universe folks to send the program to the printers. This is utterly normal for Akiho, standard operating procedure for one of the most Absolute Music oriented composers of our time. While everybody else is out there drawing on social themes and history textbooks and Argentinian fantasy literature and interviews with coal miners or whatever, Akiho is busy writing this beautifully abstract music that could just as well be called Jeffrey Zeigler Concerto No. 1 (aka Nisei) or Music for the Sandbox Percussion Guys (aka Seven Pillars) or “Red” (aka “Aka”). The title almost always comes later, because it’s not how Akiho thinks. He’s thinking in terms of texture, color, relationships with other musicians.

45|| impresario Ron Blessinger recently wrote one of his famous blog entries about Akiho’s new piece, which the Universe commissioned. Ron begins by enthusing about the pop band Toto, and goes on to say this:

“I often get asked what Andy’s scores look like. Here’s the first line from his new work, to give you an example of what we use to begin assembling the piece:

“Andy tells us everything we need to know to start this piece:

*It’s scored for 13 instruments, arranged in high/middle/low ranges
*The tempo is 90 = ¼ note or beat, with 90 beats per minute
*The time signature indicates that the primary beat (or pulse) is a ¼ note
*No surprise, the number of beats changes each of the first four bars.

“Frankly, this is about as simple an example of an Akiho score as you’ll ever see.”

Sponsor

He’s not wrong! What’s wild about Akiho is that his music looks like this, but still sounds groovy as hell, which is exactly Ron’s point. If you were to transcribe, say, a few measures of a song by Swedish metalheads Meshuggah (my own go-to frame of reference for this sort of complex pocket) it would look just as complicated.

Oh, and the rest of the program is quite nice: Daniel Wohl’s trippy lightshow percussion trio Holographic, a bit of Philip Glass, and Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet. That last one is worth hearing live, even if two-thirds of the material is pre-recorded; we heard this same quartet (with Charles Noble on viola instead of Amanda Grimm) play it back in 2016 when they were still called Third Angle. It’s dense and weird and Bartóky–a perfect complement to Akiho’s work.

45th Parallel Universe performs January 28 at The Reser. More information and tickets available right here.

Reimagining Cascadia

We come now to a series of concerts that ambles outside of the Portland metro area to include performances in Eugene, Corvallis, and Salem. Yes, we’re talking about Delgani String Quartet, one of several groups in Oregon that could very plausibly apply for one of those “record a lot of music by Oregon composers and release it all on Bandcamp” grants we mentioned a few weeks ago. They’ve already recorded one album of music by Tomáš Svoboda – the Godfather of the Oregon School of Composition – and have over the years performed several concerts of music in collaboration with Cascadia Composers, which is what they’re doing again next month.

The Cascadians love a good theme concert, especially concerts themed around some other composer (their superb 2023 concert “A Ligeti Odyssey: The First 100 Years” being a prime example). This time around it’s “Beethoven Reimagined,” riffing on a composer whose life and work cast such a long shadow we’re commemorating the bicentennial of his passing two years ahead of time. Here’s how the Delgani folks describe this program:

“Beethoven Reimagined features one of the most ambitious works ever conceived for the string quartet: Beethoven’s Op. 130. The heartbreaking Cavatina moved Beethoven to tears as he was composing it, and the 15 minute Grosse Fuge finale was so challenging to audiences that Beethoven published his quartet with an alternative ending. The first half of this program features short new works inspired by Beethoven’s remarkable quartet, from a collaborative call-for-scores with Cascadia Composers.”

Four Cascadia Composers are featured on this program: Adam Eason, Theresa Koon, Bill Whitley, and Nicholas Yandell. Let’s consider all four.

Eason is mainly known as a cellist and cello teacher, but has an abundant catalog of original compositions exploring a wide range of musical traditions. Here’s the ubiquitous Lisa Neher singing his Covid-era “Held Inhalation” and “Beyond Exhalation”:

You probably remember Koon’s Mother of Exiles from Resonance Ensemble’s 2020 concert “Safe Harbor”:

Enough said!

Check out these lines from Whitley’s bio:

“Bill Whitley organizes music into shapes and patterns, likening musical materials to objects such as natural elements, landscapes, or kinetic sculpture. His music has been described as ‘interlocking, hypnotic patterns interspersed with passages of intense rhythmic energy, while placing melodic content in the foreground.’ At the core of all his work is an abiding fascination with meditation traditions and mysticism. A native of the PNW, Bill was born into a multi-generation cattlemen family at the confluence of the Okanogan river into the Columbia in North Central Washington, and will forever call The Northwest home.”

Lately he’s been teaching at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, and his most recent album Absent Light: In Paradisum sounds like this:

Which brings us to Nicholas Yandell. The present author happens to think of Yandell as “the composer on the cover of Subito, Vol. 2” — the PSU School of Music and Theater featured Yandell in the second issue of its student-run journal, edited by yours truly. The occasion: Pyxis Quartet’s performance of four compositions inspired by the poetry of Micah Fletcher, survivor of the infamous 2017 Max attacks. You can read all about the concert itself in Brett Campbell’s 2019 review, and you can read that issue of Subito right here.

It looked like this:

And it felt that way too.

Delgani String Quartet performs music by Beethoven and Cascadia Composers on February 2 & 4 in Eugene; February 7 in Corvallis; February 8 in Portland; and February 9 in Salem. More information and tickets available here.

Meanwhile, in Milwaukie

We end back where we started, in Southeast Portland this weekend. Normally, when you hear “James Shields” you think “clarinet.” And that’s fair–he is, among other things, principal clarinetist for the Oregon Symphony. But he’s also a composer, and you should always pay attention when virtuosi perform their own works (cf. Akiho above).

On the 26th, Shields heads to Milwaukie (not technically in Portland, but try telling that to the Dark Horse folks) for the latest in Third Angle New Music’s John T. Montague Memorial Decibel Series at Decibel Sound & Drink (read Charles Rose’s reflection on three of these from last year right here, and read about Montague in Brett Campbell’s memorial right here). Between works by Bobby Ge and Marc Mellits, Shields will play his own works Bark and Black is the Color (the latter an arrangement of an old folk tune; listen to Shields’ version here).

This program happens twice at Decibel, once at 4:30 and again at 6. What this means is that you could squeeze a whole lot of Oregon School of Composition into one long weekend. That could look like this:

1. Roll into Portland Saturday night, check into your Airbnb, order Thai food, go to bed.
2. Get up early Sunday morning, skip church, head to Reed College for Fear No Music’s De-Mystifying New Music with Schiff and McBride, enjoy the free pastries and coffee provided by Bella’s Italian Bakery and Badbeard’s Microroastery;
3. Take the bus down to Milwaukie, snap a few boring photos outside Dark Horse Comics, pop into Pietro’s for some truly gnarly Old School pizza, and check out James Shields;
4. Take the bus back up to Southeast Portland, mourn the closing of Cascade Barrel House, buy some overpriced groceries at the Market of Choice where the goats used to graze, and console yourself with Ringdown at Holocene;
5. Go to bed!
6. Brave the wastelands of Downtown Portland on Monday night for Fear No Music at The Old Church;
7. More Thai food, watch TV, go to bed;
8. Tuesday, take the Max out to Beaverton for 45|| playing Andy Akiho at The Reser;
9. Go home!