No Tux Please, We’re Jamming

[August 27th, 2008] Mattie Kaiser was on track for a career as a classical violist when she saw the world’s greatest string quartet, the Emerson, play a piece by one of her favorite composers, Dmitri Shostakovich—and hated it. “It seemed lifeless to me,” she says, missing the passion and spontaneity that make music come alive. The performance was technically immaculate, but “they’d played it so many times around the country for years, again and again. They were on autopilot.”

Not long afterward, Kaiser worked for months with fellow Carnegie Mellon University grad students to master Claude Debussy’s luminous trio for flute, viola and harp. But aside from the academic jury that evaluated their performance, they had no outlet to play it. “We’re playing some of the most gorgeous music in the world,” she thought. “Why is there no one here to listen to it?”

Frustrated, Kaiser dropped out of grad school and returned to the West Coast. “I saw the conventional classical career and ran the other way,” she recalls. As much as she loved playing chamber music, she realized that it’s almost impossible to make a living at it unless you’re one of the lucky and immensely talented few who can get the rare grants and university residencies. “It has to be more about the music,” Kaiser thought, “and less about these huge nonprofit organizations.”

Kaiser also detested the antiquated context that suffocates most classical music performances: high ticket prices that deter all but the most affluent listeners and the stiff concert hall format that distances audiences—especially newbies—from the performers and the music.

“There’s this atmosphere that you can’t clap between movements, you can’t have a drink in a bar while listening to it, my God!” she says with a sarcastic giggle. “All these barriers make the music so inaccessible.”

But Kaiser knew there was an alternative model. In San Francisco, where she’d obtained her bachelor’s degree in viola performance from the city’s Conservatory of Music in 2006, Kaiser had played a few gigs with the original Classical Revolution ensemble in a South of Market cafe and enjoyed the easygoing atmosphere. So two years ago, when she moved to Portland and saw other “underground” classical groups (Opera Theater Oregon and Portland Cello Project, among others) rescuing the music from concert hall entombment, Kaiser put out some feelers, using craigslist and other outlets, for other disaffected, classically trained musicians. She soon compiled a list of more than 100, including some who’d played with some of the city’s conventional classical ensembles. In April 2007, Kaiser founded Classical Revolution PDX, an ad hoc aggregation “dedicated to breaking down stereotypes about classical music and making chamber music accessible to everyone.”

What the group’s relaxed “chamber jams” (at Someday Lounge and Costello’s) might occasionally lack in polish, they make up in the performers’ edgy passion for the music and close connection to the listeners. “I’m trying to make it no different than any jazz or rock or electronica show, where there aren’t those weird expectations,” Kaiser explains. And when the group played a Shostakovich quartet at Holocene last winter, “I was so blown away that the audiences were quieter and more attentive than even a classical audience,” she recalls. “The music should make you sit up and pay attention.”

CRPDX’s programming is growing more ambitious, and Kaiser has plans for “guerrilla chamber music” that go well beyond the chamber jams, but she struggles with the demands of teaching and coordinating rehearsal and performance schedules for many busy musicians who play many different instruments. (She encourages anyone interested in playing to sign up at the CRPDX website.) But playing the music without the off-putting pretensions and snooty atmosphere is worth it.

“We all love this music so passionately,” she says. “For us to play it and make that connection with each other and with the audience is so rewarding.”