{"id":2415876,"date":"2026-05-14T01:09:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T01:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2415876"},"modified":"2026-05-14T01:09:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T01:09:51","slug":"blending-resonances-chatterpdxs-new-lateworks-series-oregon-artswatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/blending-resonances-chatterpdxs-new-lateworks-series-oregon-artswatch\/","title":{"rendered":"Blending resonances: ChatterPDX\u2019s new LATEworks series \u2022 Oregon ArtsWatch"},"content":{"rendered":"

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L to R: Jon Greeney, Sergio Carreno, Chris Whyte, and Stephen Kehner at ChatterPDX\u2019s LATEworks at Hallowed Halls. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

On April 17, ChatterPDX<\/a> debuted their LATEworks series. The ensemble took to the Hallowed Halls studio to perform music by Steve Reich, Andy Akiho, Kaija Saariaho, John Luther Adams, and ChatterPDX artistic co-director James Shields. They also premiered Slip<\/em> by Kimberly Osberg, one of Chatter\u2019s three composers-in-residence, who wrote the piece in only forty-eight hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ChatterPDX have spent the last few years building up an audience for their Sunday morning shows downtown. Now the group is branching out, much like their mother ensemble in Albuquerque. ChatterABQ have their own performance space in downtown Albuquerque that they use for all sorts of projects beyond their Sunday morning series. Chatter\u2019s Lateworks series is thus of a kind with their performances at the Gordon House outside Silverton, where the group is exploring new spaces, new repertoire and new ensembles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The performance was part of the Oregon Symphony\u2019s Bang It!<\/em> festival of percussion music. Oregon Symphony percussionists Sergio Carreno, Stephen Kehner, Jon Greeney and Michael Roberts (as well as Portland Percussion group member and PSU\u2019s percussion area coordinator Chris Whyte<\/a>) joined Shields, his fellow artistic co-director Trevor Fitzpatrick and the rest of the Chatter crew. For its association with the Oregon Symphony\u2019s Bang It<\/em> festival, there wasn\u2019t a ton of percussion music on the program. What we did get, however, was great: Music for Pieces of Wood<\/em> by Reich, Karakurenai<\/em> by Akiho, and Dark Wind<\/em> by Adams.<\/p>\n

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\"L
L to R: Stephen Kehner, Chris Whyte, Jon Greeney, Sergio Carreno, and Michael Roberts. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Hallowed Halls<\/a>, like many recording studios and performance venues, didn\u2019t begin its life as one. The building sits near the intersection of Foster and 64th. It opened as a Carnegie library in 1919 before being purchased by the city in 1972. From their website: \u201cthe studio was founded as a recording studio by Greg Allen in 2015 to honor the legacy of his mother Susan Joyce Linowes Allen, a passionate musician and music therapist, who died from cancer when he was a toddler.\u201d Justin Phelps is the lead engineer of the place now, and has experience working at similar studios such as Tiny Telephone in San Francisco. It is a multi-purpose space, hosting events, recording sessions and rehearsals for touring acts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One finds littered around the halls posters and stickers from bands that have passed through. One corner of the building is done up like a tiki lounge, with couches, barstools and a pirate\u2019s skeleton hiding above the fake bamboo leaves. Before the concert began, composer Ro\u015bsa Crean hosted a \u201cspeed-friending\u201d in the lounge space. It was pretty loose, intending to match people with potential collaborators, and the conversations seemed lively, but we will have to see if any collaborations come of it. Maybe it was a test-run for future, bigger speed-friendings within Portland\u2019s musical community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"ChatterPDX's
Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As guests continued to enter, Oregonian composer Ryan Francis began his preshow performance of his Quartet for Synthesizers<\/em>. Francis really enjoys working within textural limitations: what can he do with a four-voice synthesizer and a sequencer? The quartet was constantly evolving; the timbre and texture never stayed static for long. A filter was always opening or closing, a new melodic phrase would enter, an element would come forth or retreat back in the mix. Each movement had a distinct character, emphasizing arpeggios, swelling chords, portamentos, or polyrhythms, all in the synth\u2019s mellow tone with a soft attack. As the audience clapped between movements, Francis would peer up with a small grin before returning to fiddling with faders and knobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Ryan
Ryan Francis. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The set proper opened with percussionists from the Oregon Symphony performing Steve Reich\u2019s Music for Pieces of Wood<\/em> and Andy Akiho\u2019s Karakurenai<\/em>. Music for Pieces of Wood<\/em> is composed for an ensemble of claves. Greeney held down quarter notes the whole time, but still grinned and grooved with the music. The other four percussionists built up layers of polyrhythms note-by-note, each new entrance marking out the slow process unfolding before fading into the background texture to let the next percussionist build up their part.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Portland<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Carreno described Akiho\u2019s music as a \u201cpuzzle, like a Rubik\u2019s cube,\u201d in reference to its polymetric grooves. Through all Karakurenai<\/em>\u2018s groupings of threes, fours and fives, one could follow a consistent pulse with a solid backbeat. The piece blends pitched mallet instruments playing melodic ostinati with unpitched instruments providing the fundamental groove the polymeters spin around. The percussionists were tight, bobbing to the rhythm. After the performance, Shields said with his usual ice-breaking humor, \u201cfor a festival called Bang-it y\u2019all have a lot of finesse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title of Saariaho\u2019s Oi Kuu<\/em> means \u201cto the moon,\u201d or \u201cfor the moon\u201d in her native Finnish. Shields on bass Clarinet and Trevor Fitzpatrick on cello had many call-and-response movements with plentiful reverb to create a massive sense of scope. The clarinet\u2019s multiphonics growled like the call of distant animals in the night. The duo pulled gestures forth from the hazy atmosphere that accumulated through the piece. Like Saariaho\u2019s best work, Oi Kuu<\/em> is strange yet evocative. The piece was only five minutes long, but it felt like you were listening to the echoes of a deep underground cave, where your sense of time distorts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Trevor
Trevor Fitzpatrick and James Shields. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Kimberly Osberg composed Slip<\/em> in forty-eight hours as a challenge from Chatter. She explored multiple meanings of the word, all circling around the essence of the world \u2013 things going unexpected ways. With so little time to compose, the music had an immediacy and rawness to it \u2013 it\u2019s unpolished, which fits the theme quite well. The piece opens with a multi-timbral chorale that falls off balance, while the main section trades between different rhythmic feels quite rapidly. There was plentiful sound painting, for instance using microtonal glissandi to depict a long fall. The ensemble of Shields, Fitzpatrick, Will Pyle and David Felberg playfully bounced musical ideas between each other. I would love to hear it again to hear more of the subtleties Osberg brought to Slip<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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L to R: Daniel Feldberg, Will Pyle, Trevor Fitzpatrick, and James Shields. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Blending resonances<\/h2>\n

James Shields described John Luther Adams\u2019 compositional method as \u201cblending resonances.\u201d To really enjoy it one has to listen to the notes that hang above the notes. The bass clarinet creeps in under the piano\u2019s chords tolling in the low register, followed by vibraphone and marimba also playing crescendo-decrescendo tremolo chords. Maria Garcia\u2019s piano performance drew out notes from the muck of the low register. The piece was long, but it draws you in with its expansive soundworld of pulsating dissonances hidden within these cresting chords.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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L to R: Stephen Kehner, Michael Roberts, James Shields, and Maria Garcia. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

After an intermission, the ensemble returned to perform two pieces by James Shields. His Duo no. 7<\/em> is also cheekily called \u201cMusic in Twelfths,\u201d as a reference to Philip Glass\u2019 Music in Fifths<\/em>. The music was a barrage of ascending phrases in irregular meters. You can hear Shields taking quick catch-breaths in between these phrases, since he admits that he left himself nowhere to breathe in the music. Shields and David Feldberg played off each other very well during the piece, even as the notes just kept coming and coming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Moderate, Turning<\/em>, pianist Monica Ohuchi joined Shields. The piece was somber, drenched in melancholy. Some moments featured a slow, repeated tolling of dense chords; others felt more prismatic, with single notes drifting through the resonance space of the piano. The whole thing danced around a minor key, with the open textures leading time to breathe in these moments, including what Shields called a \u201csuper emo, faux-Baroque passage\u201d that felt of a piece with the rest of the music\u2019s dark sound world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"James
James Shields and Monica Ohuchi. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Like all Chatter performances, there was poetry too. John Beer chose to read a poem that fit with the final piece of the program, Steve Reich\u2019s Violin Phase<\/em>, performed by Feldberg. His poem had only two words, \u201cdrip\u201d and \u201cdrop,\u201d permuted into new orders. You stop listening for a traditional sort of meaning and instead to the natural cadence of these two words that rise and fall like a melody. Violin Phase<\/em>, similarly, was one simple pentatonic phrase that repeated and phased so much it became a texture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Orchestra<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The program bifurcates into two sorts of music: rousing, post-minimalist percussive pieces built from a torrent of notes, and spacious night music. For a show called LATEworks, both felt appropriate, regulating the flow of energy throughout the night.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Poet
Poet John Beer. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Daniel
Daniel Feldberg. Photo by Rick Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.orartswatch.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L to R: Jon Greeney, Sergio Carreno, Chris Whyte, and Stephen Kehner at ChatterPDX\u2019s LATEworks at Hallowed Halls. Photo by Rick Martin. On April 17, ChatterPDX debuted their LATEworks series. The ensemble took to the Hallowed Halls studio to perform music by Steve Reich, Andy Akiho, Kaija Saariaho, John Luther Adams, and ChatterPDX artistic co-director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2415877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[472895,423975,472896,472897,472898,345061,472899,472900,472901,472902,472903,472904,21800,472905,472906,472907,445519],"class_list":["post-2415876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-andy-akiho","tag-chatterpdx","tag-chris-whyte","tag-daniel-feldberg","tag-hallowed-halls","tag-james-shields","tag-john-beer","tag-jon-greeney","tag-kimberly-osberg-monica-ohuchi","tag-lateworks","tag-maria-garcia","tag-michael-roberts","tag-music","tag-ryan-francis","tag-sergio-carreno","tag-stephen-kehner","tag-will-pyle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Blending-resonances-ChatterPDXs-new-LATEworks-series-\u2022-Oregon-ArtsWatch.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2415876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415878,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415876\/revisions\/2415878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2415877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2415876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2415876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2415876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}