On October 22, Third Angle New Music presented “Evergreen” at the World Forestry Center. The program featured the Third Angle string quartet (Greg Ewer, Ling Ling Huang, Wendy Richman and Valdine Ritchie Mishkin), along with a brief appearance by James Shields. With music by Caroline Shaw, Dai Fujikara, Quinn Mason and a world premiere composed by 3A violist Wendy Richman, “Evergreen” paid a loving tribute to Oregon’s forested landscape with great music.
“Evergreen” was a collaboration between Third Angle and Oregon’s former Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. In between movements Stafford would come up and read a poem to introduce each piece, interleaving words and music. The poems Stafford read from were from throughout his large oeuvre, but all were about nature. (Stafford’s poetry touches on many topics, of course, but the narrowed focus was apropos of the music.) Third Angle loves to cast its performances in low, colored lighting, inducing an introspective atmosphere during its concerts. At “Evergreen,” the humming primary color hues illuminated the musicians, Stafford, and the ASL interpreter.
The venue, the World Forestry Center, is in Washington Park, across from the city’s delightful Zoo and the now-shuttered Portland Children’s Museum. I mostly associate the Forestry Center with its large Discovery Museum, but there are many buildings that are part of the complex. Peggy, a shay locomotive donated to the center in 1972 and a massive totem to the state’s logging industry, keeps her watchful eye on the road in front of the Forestry Center. Third Angle’s show took place in Miller Hall, tucked away past Peggy, behind the tree line. The hall is a large octagon, with wooden four-by-fours reaching up to a modest spire, walls striped with lively wood paneling. I was a bit disappointed we didn’t get a performance in the museum after hours, musicians and patrons scattered around the two-story building. Alas – next performance, maybe. (Perhaps a commission is in order?)
I was beset with an ominous feeling that evening. During the day, especially during the summer, Washington Park teems with families, but on this brisk October night the park stood disturbingly still. Lone wanderers passed beneath the bright corona of streetlamps, looking up to the navy and fuchsia sky. Washington Park’s MAX stop is the deepest underground transit station in North America. This liminal space, two hundred and sixty feet underground, feels purgatorial. As distant trains approach, an eerie breeze blows through the tunnel between ancient basalt deposits. I’ve thought to myself many times waiting at that stop, “man, this would be the worst place to get stuck if and when The Big One strikes.” This was the attitude I came with into “Evergreen,” but it did not one bit detract from my enjoyment of the concert. If anything, the onset of fall strengthened my awareness of nature’s influence on us.
Caroline Shaw’s The Evergreen is among the best of the composer’s many string quartets. (Anything of hers that inches towards Entr’acte is welcome to me.) Third Angle themselves commissioned the work and premiered it back in 2020, which you can read more about here and here. Shaw’s interviews in both articles reveal a lot about her inspiration for The Evergreen.
Shaw’s music achieves a rare balance between a depth of timbre and texture on one hand, and careful, largely tonal harmonies on the other. Lyrical melodies and thoughtful chorales also abound, plus some spicy chromatic movement, often stratified with tonal harmonies. The opening movement of The Evergreen contrasted a soft chorale with delicate tremolos and harmonics, while harmonies popped out occasionally. The foggy impression this created fit nicely with Stafford’s poem. Other movements created other arboreal images, such as a slithering along a mossy forest floor in the second movement, pizzicato rain drops in the third, and cloudy chord swells in the fourth.
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The quartet premiered Reclamation by Wendy Richman, with Richman herself on viola. As far as I can tell, Richman is not particularly known as a composer – her own website lists no compositions of her own. If this is indeed a debut for Richman’s composing career, it’s a promising one. Reclamation opened with iceberg chords, moving at glacial pace, bleak like the winter tundra. The ensemble explored the overtones of the open strings and other delicate textures. At times, the ensemble felt a bit hesitant and uncertain, but once the group built in intensity to a noise drone on D, the group felt more comfortable. I also enjoyed the way the overtones built up in the air, dancing above the ensemble. Reclamation held the audience in its desolate atmosphere with a richness and subtlety of harmony and tone color.
Perpetual Spring by Dai Fujikara evoked the growth of plants with its complex textures: one can tell that it is governed by strict rules, but rules too complex for us to easily grasp. There were plentiful beautiful colors throughout the ensemble. The opening clarinet solo, wonderfully performed by James Shields, slinked around the low register before exploding upwards and all over. With the clarinet, the strings dwelt softly on pensive chords.
The show ended with Evening Prayer by Quinn Mason. This brief postlude was mellow, like a chorale that occasionally fades into contrapuntal moments. The rising pizzicato arpeggio in the cello provided a welcome contrast to these textures, which to me felt like a long, white satin sheet: beautiful and comforting, but lacking character.
All of the composers depict nature in their own way. For Shaw’s The Evergreen, nature is dynamic, active and spry. For Richman’s Reclamation, nature is still, bleak and impersonal. For Fujikara’s Perpetual Spring, nature is stochastic and unpredictable. The short conclusion provided by Mason’s Evening Prayer is peaceful, reflecting a loving relationship with the natural world. The progression between the pieces also seemed to trace the seasons from fall (via Shaw’s mossy and foggy imagery) to winter (via Richman’s frigid textures) back around to spring (via Fujikara’s overabundance) and towards summery optimism (via Mason’s reverent finale).
The points of comparison for “nature in music” are far too vast to enumerate. But one that comes up a lot for American composers is Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Appalachian Spring is rustic and pastoral, but still careful. The opening bars are all diatonic – not a single accidental in sight. One can hear traces of those opening bars throughout the ensuing decades of American classical music: its austere beauty, its diatonic dissonances, wistful lyricism and contrast between vast, evocative textural writing and driving, syncopated dances.
We discuss a lot of what makes Portland a unique place for composers. Nature is a persistent thematic preoccupation; but it’s a specific sort of relationship with nature. “Nature” as a concept is complicated, and not so simple as “all that is not within civilization.” Composers in Portland (and Oregon and the Pacific Northwest more broadly) take a particular sort of frame to their relationship with nature: a peaceful coexistence between humanity and its others. What is out there is not to be used for our economic benefit, nor utilized as a metaphor for our internal suffering, as is common within Romanticism. It simply is.
This willingness to let nature simply be, absent our own manicuring of it for our own purposes, is something I sense in common between Portland composers and composers in Iceland. (Both places also have an abundance of landscapes to be inspired by: beaches, volcanoes and snow-capped mountains are within close reach. Oregon also has plentiful valleys, deserts and temperate rainforests, while Iceland has massive glaciers.) Deena T. Grossman’s compositional voice offers the most obvious representation of this theme. Celilo Falls by Nancy Ives, recently premiered by the Oregon Symphony, makes this theme explicit as well. A similar attitude appears in the music of Japanese composers, as Fujikara’s inclusion on the program shows.
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Many of the oldest surviving works of literature, tales of our origins are explicit about this theme of our relationship to nature. The Epic of Gilgamesh asks the question, “what makes us more than mere animals?” The Iliad and Odyssey address similar questions, relating to how to build a civilization, and what values we must embrace to allow ourselves to coexist. (Our relationship to nature and to civilization are obviously entwined.) In the Book of Genesis, one of the first promises God makes to the first humans is our dominion over the earth; God made the earth for us. To some, it is our right – nay, duty – to make use of the earth’s bounties as we see fit, for our own benefit. To others, it is our responsibility to be stewards of the land, sea and sky, to ensure they remain for future generations.
Hard as we try however, we can never escape the forces of nature. We are still at the mercy of storms, earthquakes, floods and thunderstorms. Our relentless pursuit of new technology has largely avoided attempts to control the weather, despite what some conspiracy theorists might tell you. One pesky solar flare or stray asteroid could completely upend life as we know it. I sense that composers of the Pacific Northwest address nature in their work with a detached reverence, as we do in other aspects of our lives. Anyone who has slowed down their car to let a squirrel or crow cross the street, went foraging in Forest Park, or let whatever sprouts up take over their yard will understand. I can sense this tone within Kim Stafford’s poetry as well, complementing the music we heard at “Evergreen.” It could prove fertile for the World Forestry Center to host more concerts like “Evergreen” – or perhaps support a composer-in-residence – to give more Oregonian composers opportunities to explore the state’s wonderful landscapes, flora and fauna through their art.