How do composers turn words and stories into purely instrumental music? Out of the infinite number of choices of pitches, rhythms, sounds and structures available, how do they choose right notes played at the right time in the right combinations to evoke or complement texts?  Where do they even start?

That’s the mysterious process we’re exploring (avoiding technical terminology as much as possible) in a pair of stories tied to a couple of November concerts that pair Oregon composers with works by Northwest writers. You can read the books, hear both concerts for yourself, and find out yourself how the words and music match. 

This first installment looks at three compositions among six commissioned by Portland Jazz Composers for its Playing With Words concert Friday, November 1 at Portland State University, presented in partnership with Literary Arts. Next month, we’ll do the same with a trio of Cascadia Composers in conjunction with their similar project, Fearless Lieder.

This weekend’s jazz concert includes music and words by:

• Hans Barkliss inspired by his friend Josephine Woolington’s Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest, 

• Nicole Buetti inspired by Tove Danovich’s Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them,

• Andrew Durkin inspired by his friend Erica Berry’s Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear,

• Gordon Lee inspired by Stephanie Adams-Santos’s Dream of Xibalba,

• Ryan Meagher inspired by Patrick DeWitt’s The Librarianist

• Tim Willcox inspired by Waka T. Brown’s The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura.

PJCE’s bookish show, featuring a dozen member ensemble of some of the city’s top jazz musicians, naturally coincides with Literary Arts’s Portland Book Festival neé Wordstock, which happens Saturday, Nov. 2. (Read ArtsWatch’s coverage of this year’s fest.)

Stories into Sound

Even though most jazz recordings feature instrumentalists these days, combining words and music isn’t new territory for the organization. PJCE had earlier presented a compelling project called Oregon Stories, three radio documentary pieces about exceptional Oregonians from minority communities, in 2016. (Read ArtsWatch’s story, and check out to the album.) The organization had also sought inspiration in Oregon sounds, not words, in 2017’s fascinating Oregonophony project. And PJCE had worked with Portland’s Literary Arts last year on a project involving then-Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mogjani, three other spoken word artists, and a half dozen composers. 

PJCE artistic director Ryan Meagher conceived Playing with Words as part of a larger strategy to partner with like minded organizations. In conversations with Literary Arts Senior Artistic Director Amanda Bullock, Meagher says, the subject of books by Oregon writers popped up, and shortly thereafter, the notion of creating new music connected to books nominated in the different categories for the Oregon Book Awards.

Meagher passed the list of this year’s nominees to composers he selected for the project, leaving it up to them to pick the literary works that spoke to them. In choosing the composers, he aimed for a diversity of musical styles across the program.

As you’ll see, diversity also characterizes each composer’s approach to creating music from these literary sources. There’s no single formula for such transformation; even a single composer might use different approaches on different projects. To shed more light on just how composers work their magic, we asked three very different participating PJCE composers to tell us what drew them to the literary source they chose for the project, and how they turned those words into instrumental music. 

Fowl Play

Classical bassoonist Nicole Buetti, recommended by Metropolitan Youth Orchestra music director Raul Gomez, has been a prolific, award winning composer for a quarter-century. She also plays in the Vancouver Symphony, Orchestra Nova NW and the Oregon Coast Music Festival and freelances for various other orchestras. Buetti isn’t known as a jazz composer, but is a skilled orchestrator for bands, so Meagher wanted to give her a chance to write for jazz band.

“I love jazz, I did some jazz studies during my master’s degree [studies], but this was still outside my wheelhouse,” she admits. After her panic had subsided, she checked the list of books. One jumped out at her. It wasn’t a literary masterwork or even written by a Famous Author. It was about chickens.

Buetti didn’t raise chickens herself, but she did have some experience channeling animals with music. (Read my ArtsWatch story about Buetti’s YouTube series.) And because everything else about the assignment “was so out of my comfort zone, I needed to have [a subject] I was comfortable with,” she says. A little research into Milwaukie author Tove Danovich’s Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them revealed “the crazy, quirky chaos involved in raising backyard chickens,” Buetti recalls. “I can imagine that. That’s what I like to do.”

She ordered and read the book, a finalist for this year’s Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction — and learned a whole lot about chickens. At first Buetti considered writing a piece based on a chapter describing chicken shows (think Best in Show but for poultry instead of pooches). Then she found another chapter that seemed more amenable to a musical treatment. 

“It was about how to train your chicken,” Buetti recalls. “This is a real thing. People train chickens. People who have to train bomb sniffing dogs have to learn with chickens first. I started picturing people wrangling chickens.”

Buetti creates videos that are essentially simple stories, so narrative comes naturally to her. “I wanted to have some kind of story in my head, whether [listeners] know the story or not,” she explains. “So I used the tools I have of creating stories.”

Training suggested a narrative structure for her piece: in a classroom, the instructor smoothly demonstrates how to use the clicker and other techniques, then the student would-be trainers make their first fumbling attempts, chaos ensues, until “by the end, they get the knack,” she says, “and it all comes together.” Listeners won’t ever hear the story she imagined, but its structure gave her ingredients for each succeeding section. 

That simple structure set, what would her piece sound like?

Animal trainers often use a clicker to stimulate their charges to perform a desired behavior. That provided her first inspiration for her composition: using a percussionist to mimic the clicker.

If chicken music evokes clicking, mustn’t there also be clucking? “That’s mostly happening in the winds,” Buetti says. She asked the author what instruments she might want to hear in the piece. The result: soprano and alto saxophones, flute and clarinet. “At the beginning, you hear clicking in the percussion, and then clucking from the clarinet,” she says. 

Her chosen animals even supplied some melodic content. “Chickens actually sing a song when laying their eggs,” Buetti explains. Of course they do. “Well, actually, it’s more like a lot of clucking. Very deliberate kinds of clucking. Tova pointed me toward recordings of egg laying songs.” Ah, the wonders of the internet. 

Egg laying didn’t necessarily fit the training narrative, but she couldn’t resist the lure of the siren chicken song. So the ever-imaginative Buetti decided to include in her musical narrative what might happen if, during a rookie chicken trainer’s learning experience, one of the trainees (the chickens, that is, not the humans who are learning to train them) decided to ovulate. That episode, mimicking the egg laying song, is enacted by brass and wind instruments. 

From there, Buetti fleshed out the unheard musical story her piece tells. “For the opening section, I wanted it to have the feeling of eager people ready to train their chickens,” she sats. “Then there’s a teacher showing them how it’s done. Then let all the students loose with their chickens — and the chaos breaks free.”

The students trying to train their chickens are each represented by improvised solos by different soloists. To evoke the feeling of chaos, she chose the musical form of a fugue, much used device by classical composers (and famously J.S. Bach) for centuries. As each “student” enters the mix by playing the same musical pattern one by one, “it kind of sounds like clucking and bopping and it gets crazier and turns into one big hot mess, until it all comes back together at a cadence point when they get back together.”

“Then it comes back to the beginning, where the teacher says ‘Let’s try this again.’ You hear the clicker percussion, then each of the soloists tries to each train their chicken, then everybody’s got it by the end and you hear this happy theme that sounds triumphant.”

Buetti’s piece is among several in the program that channel sounds from animals mentioned in their respective literary sources. In Andrew Durkin’s response to Erica Berry’s Wolfish, winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, “the entire composition is built around a four-note phrase that is very loosely based on a wolf howl,” he said in a PJCE announcement. And Hans Barklis’s response to Josephine Woolington’s Where We Call Home, which won the 2024 Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, “features melodies based on the flight patterns of Sandhill Cranes, the morphology of Slender Beaked Moss and Western Cedar, and the whistle-calls of Olympic Marmots,” according to the release.

Underworld Journey

Buetti was a newbie at jazz writing, but Meagher also turned to a veteran jazz composer, one of Oregon’s most esteemed. Unfortunately, Gordon Lee told Meagher he’d already planned a trip out of town for the concert weekend. Then Lee realized that even though he wouldn’t be able to attend the premiere, the trip itself — to Oaxaca for the annual Dia de los Muertos festivities and a couple weeks of study at a Spanish language immersion school — dovetailed with the project. And it could actually inform his composition for it.

What prompted Lee’s realization was discovering on the list of books for inspiration Stephanie Adams-Santos’s Dream of Xibalba, a finalist for this year’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. “I wasn’t familiar with her or her poetry,” Lee explains, but “I like to study the culture before I go somewhere.” Even though the Mayan underworld described in the book didn’t exactly match Oaxaca’s Zapotec heritage, he found plenty of pertinent cultural references, and admired Adams-Santos’s “dreamlike mixture of images, like in a surrealist painting.”

The subject matter also suggested an additional collaborator. “Luciana Proaño is an old friend of mine, and she’s really into costumes and masks,” Lee says. He thought the renowned Portland-based, Peruvian American dancer/musician (whom he’d even performed with in Peru decades ago) could add visual charge to the performance. Adams-Santos agreed, and Lee’s “A Fool’s Journey through Xibalba” will be the only composition with dance accompaniment. The title refers to the tarot card The Fool; both author and composer have dabbled in tarot. 

The book-length sequence of poems chronicles a journey — it’s roughly what the Greeks called the Orpheus myth and which exists in many cultures. That gave Lee a rough tripartite structure for his composition: entry to the underworld of Xibalba, action there, and emergence. 

Lee didn’t want to write music that reflected actual events recounted in the book. “There’s not a tight correlation between the poems and the music,” he explains. “It’s more the feeling of passing through hard times. You through some serious shit and emerge on the other side a little bit wiser.”

He did strive to evoke the feelings he detected in each of the three sections: fear and trepidation (using free time signatures) as listeners enter the underworld, with appropriately slow and dark music. Then “an angry slog through it — let’s get through this fucking thing,” written in an unruly 11-beat meter. Finally, the triumph of escape and survival that starts out in a minor key (which traditionally sounds “dark” to Western listeners), then moves into a major key section that feels like “sort of a release, like coming up into the air again from underground,” Lee says. “Stephanie has a passage that goes something like, ‘Feel the new life when the grass is growing up through the rotting body.’ This is the rebirth, where finally we have the new growth.” 

To reflect the book’s mythological feeling, “I tried to get this incantatory, ceremonial kind of mood,” Lee says. For that, he looked to flamenco music scales and chords. There’s an implied suggestion of musical colonization in that European musical connection, Lee points out, because the arrival of European settlers “really was hell for Meso-Americans.” 

Although he’s long been fascinated by Indigenous Latin American cultures, embarked on serious study of the relevant history, read the book and connected with its author, Lee lacked any personal connection to the culture the book describes. “I’m an American, and I’ve seen Hollywood movies” depicting ancient cultures. “Some of those sounds may have influenced me.” 

So did the instruments the Mayans used: conch shells and percussion, which Lee translated into prominent passages for flute, drums, cymbals. He sent electronic versions of the score to both Adams-Santos and Proaño. Because he’ll be in Oaxaca for the show, the fabulous Portland pianist Kerry Politzer will be at the keyboard.

The other band members are all musicians Lee’s extremely familiar with, which helped a lot in setting up the improvised sections. Although Lee notes that “classical” composers such as Mozart and Beethoven knew some of the soloists they originally wrote parts for, and in many cases expected them to improvise in some sections (especially when the soloists were the composers themselves, like J.S. Bach and Mozart), improvisation is the essence of much jazz. Lee left clear guidelines for the solo passages, but left ample space for the creative improvisers to do their thing. “If I hadn’t been familiar with Ryan [Meagher] or Owen [Broder] or Kerry [Politzer] or Eric [Gruber],” he says, “I would have approached the solo writing very differently.”

One of his regular bandmates, ace trombonist James Powers, gets an especially challenging solo. “I can throw anything at him, and he’s very open to whatever it is,” Lee says. “He has no problem playing a kind of strident obtuse solo.” 

Besides the convergence with the Day of the Dead, Lee notes another coincidence of timing: Election Day (or maybe Dec. 11), with all its attendant hostility, anxiety and maybe worse. “To me, that would really be hell, if we had to immerse ourselves in four more years” of the previous ruling regime, Lee says. Or maybe not. “Maybe this election is Xibalba and maybe we come out the other side.”

Sonic Scenery

For his own contribution to the project, Meagher knew he wanted to channel a novel. “Fiction has always been my favorite kind of book to read,” he explains, “because it allows so much imagination.” At the top of the list of OBA novels: Patrick DeWitt’s The Librarianist, which won Literary Arts’s 2024 Ken Kesey Award in Fiction, which is mostly set “in Portland, the city I live in and love,” Meagher says. He enjoyed deciphering which of the book’s fictional locations corresponded to real life areas. 

“My wife and I drove around town and took pictures of places that represented each section for me,” Meagher says. “We want to real places to take pictures that represent the fictional places.” Some of those images will be projected during the performance.

In fact, Meagher found the book to be so visual that he wanted a “a cinematic score because it could easily be made into a movie, with what I hear in my head accompanying what we’re seeing on screen,” he explains, “as if I were composing a film score for movie that doesn’t exist yet.”

Now he had to turn those imagined images into soundscapes for his new piece, titled “Bob Comet,” the name of the novel’s protagonist. For example, the novel opens on a rainy day in Portland. “What does rain sound like?” Meagher mused. “Open sounds.” He turned to a keyboard and played some tinkling notes for me. Then he constructed harmonies to give it [geekspeak alert] “a floating kind of sound that doesn’t land like a big major chord in second inversion would.”

Beyond visual inspiration, Meagher derived his composition’s quaternary structure from the book’s four distinct sections. And he took cues from various themes he found in the novel. “There’s a character who has his heart ripped out and he doesn’t know how to deal with it,” Meagher explains. “So I used harmonies that have darker qualities and colors, along with some more triumphant parts” as appropriate to the story. 

How those feelings translate to exact notes and rhythms… well, that’s what composers do, and the some intuitive parts of the process don’t really submit to verbal description. Some just comes with experience, noting what sorts of tunes and harmonies used by other composers can produce certain emotional reactions in listeners. For example, Meagher did note that at times he used “angular melodies with wide leaps in the intervals,” that is, the number of pitches between two notes played consecutively, a term often applied to the music of, say, Thelonious Monk. “That can create a feeling of mystery or romance,” he says. 

By contrast, “if you use more stepwise melodies, that can feel more familiar or even joyous at times,” Meagher explains. “I was using some of the old tricks that Tchaikovsky and some other Romantic composers used — loosely. I’m not doing some kind of Wagner [leitmotiv] thing!”

But he did assign particular instruments to various characters in the novel when creating the solos. Then he left the details to the soloists, and even asked the background horns to improvise with each other, rather than (as typical in jazz writing) notating those sections. Meagher knew his professional players were capable of coming up with spontaneously created material that nevertheless responded to each other’s improvisations, just as people do in conversations, either in novels or IRL. Thus music imitates art — and life. 

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Literary Arts and Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble present Playing With Words at 7:30 pm Friday, November 1, at PSU’s Lincoln Recital Hall, Room 75, 1620 SW Park Ave. Portland. Tickets.