There’s an old joke around Portland: People who moved here five years ago complain about people who moved here two years ago. And those who moved here ten years ago complain about those who moved here five years ago, and so on. I honestly don’t have a problem with it: I think it’s cool that people want to live in the place I’ve lived my whole life, and that people see something special in the things that I take for granted. But it does speak to a general mistrust of the “transplants” who just moved to the city. 

There have been mutterings of a “Portland School of Music” for a while now. We already knew that the state has an abundance of talented composers, going as far back as Tomáš Svoboda, Ernest Bloch, Lou Harrison and Jacob Ashalomov. It has only been recently, though, that there has been a large push to showcase local composers as a unified force. Recent concerts by FearNoMusic, the Oregon Symphony’s OpenMusic series, and Third Angle’s Decibel series seem to be showing us what a “Portland School of Music” could be by placing a spotlight on many of our great local composers. 

But none have been as explicit as the recent 45th Parallel Universe concert on December 3 at the Old Madeleine Church, bearing the name “The Portland School.” At this concert the Pyxis Quartet represented what they called “the maverick ‘Keep Portland Weird’ spirit and the incredible natural beauty that surrounds the city,” through music by five local composers: Kenji Bunch, Kirsten Volness, Gabriel Kahane, Darrell Grant, and Caroline Shaw. 

Each of these composers took their own path to Portland (or back to, in the case of Bunch). There was something that pulled them here, followed by some reason to stay. After the concert I spoke to the two composers in attendance, Volness and Grant, and asked what brought them here. Volness came to Portland to teach at Reed College after David Schiff’s retirement, and Grant moved here to teach at Portland State University. (Grant also told me that he was encouraged by meeting jazz musicians here who owned houses, which would’ve been impossible back in NYC.) Kahane moved here as he took the post of Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony. Bunch’s homecoming to Portland happened in 2013 after living in New York for a few decades. Finally Shaw moved here at some point around 2021 or 2022 (for more on Shaw’s journey to Portland, read ArtsWatch’s interview with her and Danni Lee here).

Contemporary music concerts aren’t just opportunities to hear music. They promote further discussion, critical thinking and aesthetic debate beyond the concert hall, into the post-concert get-togethers at a nearby pub, on social media, and over coffee into the following weeks. More than just presenting an hour of great music, 45th Parallel Universe with this concert has invited us to consider what makes our local cadre of composers unique, and think hard about where our musical community is and where we want to head in the coming years. 

A diverse collection of music

Bunch’s solo viola piece “The 3 Gs,” like a lot of his music, draws from American folk music. In this case, the abundant blue notes, the “Dead Man’s tuning” of GGDG, the strumming and up tempo all give the feeling of a bluegrass jam. Under the hands of Pyxis violist Charles Noble, “The Three Gs” was fast and dynamic, with a scratchy tone in parts that would normally be considered a mistake, but to me added to the rustic sound.

Kirsten Volness’ Tree of Life was the highlight of the program. Inspired by the cross-cultural idea of the Tree of Life, and particularly the Shinto belief in the kami spirits, Volness sonified and brought to life her favorite trees. The composer sat behind her laptop during the performance, cueing up the electronic parts of the piece. The Pyxis Quartet was mic’d up, and Volness’ MAX/MSP patch interacted quite nicely with the ensemble.

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The opening sound palette reminded me of singing bowls, with refracted echoes akin to booking at shards of glass. The quartet’s counterpoint wove together like the splaying roots of the eponymous tree. Tree of Life easefully drifted between creeping, mysterious textures, rising to a majestic climax. You can find the recording on her album River Rising, if you want to hear it again (and I do, again and again).

Zach Galatis came onstage to sing Gabriel Kahane’s song “Little Love,” and gave a great performance. In addition to his flute playing for the Oregon Symphony, Galatis is also a talented singer. His voice moved with grace atop the swaying triplet arpeggios in the piano played by Maria Garcia and the string quartet chords breathing away beneath it all. I enjoyed the arrangement a lot, as the strings, piano and voice struck a pleasant balance.

Darrell Grant’s Crossing the Bridge: Vanport saw the composer join the quartet behind the piano. The music was inspired by the flooding that destroyed the eponymous neighborhood of Vanport in North Portland, the center of Oregon’s Black community at the time. Crossing the Bridge: Vanport builds upon a slow, hard-swinging groove with bright, impressionistic harmonies. The piece debuted on his album Our Mr. Jackson, an entire album drawing from the Modern Jazz Quartet, and I can definitely hear the influence of MJQ’s orchestration and harmonic language on Crossing the Bridge. Grant opened with a great octatonic run up the piano, and got a chance to take a solo in the middle. It was a solid solo, not straying too far out, but I did catch whiffs of “stank face” from the ensemble during the solo. 

The concert ended with Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint. Built upon a harmonic reduction of Beethoven’s Op. 18 no. 6 string quartet, the piece takes inspiration from Japanese wood carving art–particularly the aizuri-e “Prussian Blue” dye Japanese artists imported during the 19th century that Hokusai used for his famous prints. From this blueprint of Beethoven, Shaw crafts a string quartet that moves unpredictably between moments of delicate beauty and dissonance. The best of which were the chromatic runs, slinking up and down searching for a key to settle into. 

So what we have here with these five pieces are: a bluegrass-inspired solo viola romp, an electro-acoustic tribute to trees, a Baroque-pop ballad about aging love, a socially conscious Third Stream tone poem, and an upbeat but fractured neoclassical closer. It’s a diverse collection of music, even if it all broadly fits within “contemporary” music. But do these five pieces exemplify a distinct “Portland School of Music?”

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What Makes a School

45th Parallel Universe is making two big statements with this concert: that there is a “Portland School,” and that these five composers are representative of this school of composition. From these declamations we must ask: what is it that makes these composers unique? Are they representative of a “Portland School”? Does the “Portland School” even exist? What would it mean if it did? 

Pyxis Quartet violinist Ron Blessinger’s pre-concert blog post says that a “school” of art, “refers to artists who developed a similar style through proximity, sharing a similar development path, which may be the best way to describe what’s happening [i]n our contemporary music scene in Portland over the past few years.” This quote will be our guide through the weeds of these complicated questions. 

We assume that the music from a place exhibits some characteristics inherent to that place. In the Pacific Northwest, we have a common theme running through many of our composers’ work, which is a dedication to nature. We take inspiration from our abundant and diverse sound- and land-scapes, which reminds me a lot of contemporary music from Iceland. We also share an interest in progressive social and political awareness.

There are some common themes running through these five pieces. Bunch’s incorporation of folk music feels like a genuine engagement with American musical traditions, seeking out a distinctly American musical language, akin to Aaron Copland. Volness’s Tree of Life addresses the connection we have with nature and technology, the dialectic between the “natural” and the “artificial” worlds. Kahane’s Book of Travelers, from which comes “Little Love,” is about the multifaceted perspectives of everyday Americans he learned from his travels across the country. Grant’s music is indebted to Portland’s jazz community, and addresses the city’s social and political issues with gentrification. Finally, Shaw’s music (especially Blueprint) has a playful energy and unpredictability, defying genre conventions in a way that is very Portland.

You can hear some musical similarities too, but they are so general as to be completely unhelpful. Atonality and extreme dissonance is out; unashamed tonality and careful, expressive dissonance is in. The deadly serious and avant-garde is out; a sense of gaiety and whimsy is in. Whatever unites these five composers can’t be defined through a consistent musical language, as once defined the “Mighty Five,” the “Second Viennese School,” the “Polish School,” or the “Darmstadt School.” 

If there is something that unites these five composers, it could be a general ethos and approach to music-making. These composers share a lack of concern with genre boundaries, the “maverick, ‘Keep Portland Weird’ spirit” mentioned above, a DIY, making-it-happen approach, and a willingness to experiment and not take themselves too seriously. 

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So if the nascent “Portland School” has some unifying aesthetic, it’s difficult to nail down. From what I’ve heard, these composers do not have an obvious collective and distinct musical language that can be given a neat -ism such as serialism, sonorism, or minimalism. Then again, those -isms foisted upon these “schools” by critics and academics were hardly the invention of the composers themselves–they often rejected and hated those terms. 

Maybe the nature of the “Portland School” is to always change and shift as people pass through the city. On the other hand, thanks to globalization and the internet, the musical world has moved past the need for provincialism and cleanly-delineated regional scenes. Perhaps people find the open-ended nature of Portland’s musical culture and the general acceptance of what we call “New Music” to be encouraging. There’s no need for strict adherence to ideological or aesthetic dogmas here. Then again, some degree of aesthetic coherence is necessary for there to be a distinct “school” of composition.

I don’t think you can have a “school of music” whose defining characteristic is eclecticism. A “school” of music has to have an aesthetic throughline. A menagerie of talented but disconnected composers does not constitute a school of composition. If a “school” of composition merely meant, “there are many talented composers living and working here,” every major city in the country (or even the world) would have their own school of composition, thus rendering their uniqueness moot. For a “Portland School of Music” to exist, it would have to either display a unique and groundbreaking musical language, or be an exemplary case of the prevailing musical trends of the city. 

So maybe the things that compel composers and artists to the state are the same things that pull everyone else here: abundant hiking trails, mild weather, drinkable tap water, good coffee and beer. It’s a good place to live for anyone, not just musicians and composers. And it seems as though musicians are drawn here exactly because we lack the artistic self-importance that leads us to write artistic manifestos, clearly drawing lines in terms of what music we ought to be writing. You can, for the most part, do whatever you want, and people are willing to hear what you have to say.

This is the paradox: the very same things that make Portland a great place to write music are at the same time the very things that prevent us from neatly defining a “Portland School of Music,” in the way that previous “schools” were defined. I’m not saying that a “Portland School of Music” doesn’t exist, only that the five composers we heard on the third of December do not offer a complete picture of what is happening in the city. And no collection of only five could do that. 

For instance, last month FearNoMusic put on a concert featuring their own idea of a “Portland School,” with music by Shaw, Bunch, Andy Akiho, and Ryan Francis. In this case, the program consists of “East Coast composers who have arrived–or returned–to make Portland their creative habitat.” That same night, the Oregon Symphony’s Open Music series featured Kahane and Shaw at the Reser. So despite these difficulties in defining a “Portland School,” there are a few composers mentioned more often than others as part of these conversations. I suspect that this isn’t because they are the most representative of what is happening in the state, but because they are the most recognizable names for people outside the city. “The Portland School” may ultimately be partly a marketing tactic to convince people outside the Pacific Northwest that something cool and unique is happening here. 

We can’t forget that there is an overabundance of great composers in Oregon. There is a vibrant community in the state for what we call “New Music.” There are over a hundred members of Cascadia Composers, by far the largest branch of NACUSA. Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble continues to put out new releases at a staggering pace. Students at Portland State University, Reed College, Lewis and Clark College, PCC, University of Oregon, University of Portland, Linfield University, and elsewhere are finding their own voices. Back in October FearNoMusic featured eight local composers spanning multiple generations (including myself) on one concert program, as part of an entire season of local composers. 

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New Music USA did a profile of Portland as part of their “Different Cities, Different Voices” series back in 2022. A similar story by James Bash appeared in Classical Voice North America that same year. The DIY-musical culture frequently brought up in the aforementioned NewMusicUSA profile helps artists hone their individual artistic voice.

Monica Ohuchi said:

Portland is well known for its vigorous DIY ethos that embraces creativity and grass-roots initiatives with a cheerful lack of regard for the credentials that traditionally grant “permission” for such undertakings. Everywhere you turn, someone is brewing their own beer, bottling their own hot sauce, writing a novel, or building their social justice-driven non-profit from the ground up. The spirit of imaginative resourcefulness that keeps Portland “weird” and alive is exactly the reason the new music scene thrives. The music community is intimate and supportive of one another. Portland new music groups mostly pull from the same roster of musicians, so we all feel like one big family and celebrate each other’s successes. And just as Portlanders love their books, there’s also a voracious appetite for experiencing live music, and open minds eager to discover new sounds and ideas.

Also in that profile, Darrell Grant had this to say about Portland’s music community: 

The music scene here reflects a great deal about the city’s ethos. Portland’s progressive reputation attracts creative people of all stripes to the region. It is a large city that feels like a small town. Instead of six degrees of separation, there are usually no more than two. That interconnectedness and proximity makes for some strikingly original ensembles, and has presented opportunities for me to interact with urban planners, scientists, political activists, entrepreneurs, winemakers, coffee roasters, chefs, and artisans from many fields. Added to this is Portland’s DIY culture, which makes for a fertile environment in which to start and incubate new projects. On the downside, the lack of a substantial philanthropic base can make it hard to scale those projects beyond the startup phase.

Back in 2022 I had this to say about Andy Akiho’s inclusion within the “Portland School” of music: 

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Some of the people I’ve asked about the prospect of a ‘Portland School’ of composition often cite Akiho as one of the top composers in the city. I’m a bit skeptical of this: he has such a unique voice in the community that he can hardly be the head of a ‘school of composition,’ which usually implies some continuity of aesthetic principles and compositional techniques. I think Akiho is just a damn good composer we are lucky to have in our midst.

Matthew Andrews here at Artswatch has said on multiple occasions that the Oregon School of Composition has “Four Big Names”: Kenji Bunch, Nancy Ives, Robert Kyr and David Schiff. Additionally, “the powerhouse duo of composer Ethan Gans-Morse and librettist Tiziana DellaRovere…have been holding down the southern end of the Oregon School of Composition for years.” I appreciate how he broadens the concept out to the entire state rather than just the Portland-Metro Area.

If the “Portland School of Music” does indeed exist, I still think we are a ways away from reaching the pinnacle of what we are capable of. We are awaiting Telegraph Quartet’s recording of Bunch’s complete string quartets. Nancy Ives recently got a large profile in Musical America by James Bash, and will have her piece Celilo Falls performed by a Grammy-nominated ensemble called the Oregon Symphony. There’s not enough in the way of record labels or publishing companies to act as a one-stop spot for people who want to hear and perform music composed by Oregonians. There could be some budding interest from outside the state for what’s happening here musically. But that would lead to more people coming here to seek it out for themselves.

We really need to ask ourselves what we want out of Portland’s musical culture. Do we want something that is insular, or do we want something that garners national attention? Do we feel like whatever makes Portland’s musical culture special is ours and we’re not sharing, or will we allow others to join us? 

45th Parallel Universe brought forth some tough questions with this concert, and I have done my best to share what came to my mind. I hope we keep this conversation going as we continue to explore the prospect of a “Portland” or “Oregon School of Composition.”