The whirlwind claimed us for a while there, and the only way back was to check on some of our colleagues.
Whirlwind? Well, it was nicer than that. We sat in on a rehearsal of Mary Oslund's new dance for White Bird Uncaged, for example. It's delightful in the intense way that Oslund's dances are delightful (look for a story about it in January's Portland Monthly). And we saw Center Stage's An Iliad and wished that we had time to meditate in print about the centrality of Rage in that reading of it (not to mention a great performance by Joseph Graves). Other stuff, too, but business intervened and we've moved on for now.
Fortunately, other folks were keeping track!
Arts Dispatch is predisposed toward the following proposition: The more classical music limits itself to the music of previous centuries the less interesting it becomes. It's not that we don't love the music of other centuries. We do. But we also believe that new music that collides with that tradition one way or another is critical to its health overall and to its responsibility to "comment" on our lives today, taking comment in the broadest possible way. And just to be fair, we enjoy that moment of true puzzlement that some new music affords.
Anyway, that's a long way into a link to Ultra, which details a new quarterly music series at Holocene that will combine avant-garde composers with traditional musical groups (classical and pop, as I read it). The first installment will be Dec. 9 and feature Classical Revolution PDX performing music by composers COPY, Daniel Menche, Matt Carlson, and Thomas Thorson (links via Ultra). Claudia Meza and Megan Holmes are the curators.
