Too Cool For Words
NYC’s Wordless Music Series comes to Portland.
July 1st, 2009
Punch Brothers | Chamber Music Northwest gets patriotic.0 comments
June 24th, 2009
Risk/Reward New Performance Festival | Hand2Mouth marries art pop and pop art. 0 comments
June 17th, 2009
Inviting Desire (Dance Naked Productions) | Whips, gangbangs, fisting and Obama.0 comments
June 10th, 2009
Store For A Month | Art bargains and food for thought—now available at a “store” near you.0 comments
June 10th, 2009
The Blue Room (Portland Actors Conservatory) | Sex, drugs and rampant regret.0 comments
June 3rd, 2009
Rush + Robbins (Oregon Ballet Theatre) | The insect women will devour you!0 comments
June 3rd, 2009
Grey Gardens (Portland Center Stage) | Jerry may like your corn, but I do not.0 comments
May 20th, 2009
Everyone Who Looks Like You | Hand2Mouth’s family life: Food, fights and farts.0 comments
May 13th, 2009
Rigoletto (Portland Opera) | Murder with a side of Hunchback.0 comments
May 13th, 2009
Three Sisters (Artists Rep) | Who shot Baron Nikolai Lvovich Tusenbach?0 comments
![]() STRINGS AND THINGS: Stars of the Lid at Holocene. |
[April 16th, 2008]
Despite corporate music’s attempts to squish creativity into tidy, discrete pigeonholes, the more out-there manifestations of alt rock, free jazz, post-classical avant garde and electronica share overlapping audiences who care more about adventure than category.
That’s the philosophy behind Wordless Music, a not-for-profit concert series in New York City that since 2006 has transgressed genre boundaries by bringing rock, electronic and so-called classical musicians to intimate chamber music spaces. With acts from John Adams to Wilco’s Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche to the American premiere of Radioheadman Jonny Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” the series has forged a strong, young audience, selling out 400- to 800-seat venues. Now the series is branching out to other cities, starting with Minneapolis and Portland.
Of course, New York isn’t the only source of this exploration-trumps-genre attitude. San Francisco’s Classical Revolution, for example, takes classical and postclassical music into bars and clubs. One of its members, violist Mattie Kaiser, moved to Portland last year and started Classical Revolution PDX, which now counts more than 30 local members and will perform Shostakovich’s gripping String Quartet No. 8 and Arvo Pärt’s mesmerizing “Spiegel im Spiegel” at the first Portland Wordless Music show at Holocene on Thursday. The concert also stars the inventive Bay Area composer-guitarist-electronic musician-video artist Christopher Willits, and Austin ensemble Stars of the Lid, whose somber, murmuring ambient soundscapes will be accompanied by a string trio and layered 16 mm films by Luke Savisky.
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Wordless Music continues the next evening at The Old Church with two ambitious local faves: Eno-influenced ambient wizard Eluvium and always-intrepid new music ensemble Third Angle, who’ll play string quartets by Chinese-American composer Chen Yi (her 1986 “Sprout,” and “Burning,” a response to the Sept. 11 attacks) and by the dean of Portland composers, Tomás Svoboda (a new quartet that reacts to the unprovoked American war on Iraq).
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Too Cool For Words”
This should be a very interesting series. My friend was able to interview some of the artists and has a write up at http://northwestreverb.blogspot.com/2008/04/nycs-wordless-music-project-connects-it....









