What's There to Do in a Eugene July?

By Anthony St. Clair
From Bootsnall.com

Review Sections:
Oregon Bach Festival
Mass in B Minor
Water Passion After St. Matthew
Crouching Tiger Concerto

Oregon Bach Festival

"I always get goosebumps at this part," I said to my companion at the first raising of the instruments, the first notes, the dozens of voices sliding and rising into one, into the beginning of J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, the first performance of the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival, my first time attending.

Since its informal start in 1970, the OBF is now a major event in Eugene. For 2 weeks in July (and a couple of days at the end of June), the OBF draws audiences, performers, composers and conductors from around the world. Some of the top names in modern classical music were coming, such as Chinese composer Tan Dun (whose credits include the Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) and German bass-baritone singer Thomas Quasthoff.

However, in the weeks coming up to the opening night, and throughout the OBF, I kept wondering why I felt I should be writing about it for the Eugene Guide. It is a major event, to be sure, but when you're backpacking around, why shell out cash to watch some tuxed-up ponces perform stuffy ol' classical music? And what in blazes do a dead German composer, a Chinese former rice farmer, and a bunch of Eugene hippies have in common with travel, anyway?

I thought about this long and hard. Through each performance I attended, the question was always in my mind to one degree or another. But no answer followed. Travel. Bach. Classical music. Phillip Blazdell. Backpacks. Tubas. I'm reaching, I kept thinking. I'm reaching like a baritone trying to sing soprano. The questions kept occurring, at the Mass in B Minor, at Tan Dun's Water Passion after St. Matthew (the OBF was its U.S. debut) and the Crouching Tiger Concerto, after the Crouching Tigersoundtrack, both of which he composed and conducted.

But still. Bach composed over 1000 pieces of music. He fathered 20 children. Even 250 years after Bach's death, his influence over music in Western and other cultures is strong, his music still in demand, current and relevant. Tan Dun grew up during China's Cultural Revolution; he was "re-educated" in rice fields as a peasant, before being admitted to a newly reopened Chinese national conservatory. Now he is one of the most respected composers in modern music. And Eugene? In 1970 another German composer, Helmuth Rilling, came here for workshops and a concert – and from there the OBF was born. Rilling continues today as its artistic director. Between its affiliations with the University of Oregon and the Hult Center for the Performing Arts (one of 26 world-class performance centers in the U.S.), the festival is one of the U.S.' top celebrations not only of J.S. Bach, but of music itself.

Back at the Mass in B, and by the time the Crouching Tiger Concerto finished, answers started to come together. It only took the music.

The interesting thing about the OBF – the worthwhile thing, whether you're a music "aficionado" or just want to try something different and take in some tunes – is that it is not a bunch of togged-out ponces out to harumph to some classics before breaking out the scotch and cigars. Is there some of that? Sure – but just as one overly belligerent drunk shouldn't ruin an Oktoberfest, a music snob or two shouldn't tarnish the OBF into a thing to be avoided.

Something became clear. I'd been asking the wrong question.

I should've been asking, "What does the Oregon Bach Festival have in common with independent travel?"

The answer is simple: It brings together.

Cultures, ideas, people, good times – the OBF helps bring them together. Flipping through the schedule for this year's OBF, I kept thinking of how amazing it was, that the scratchings of a German 250 years dead, could bring together New Yorkers, Germans, Italians, Asians (perhaps the most striking example being Tan Dun himself) – in a town in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. And why? To do something anyone with half an ear, from the pub to the car stereo to the concert hall can appreciate: listening to some bloody good music.

I was drawn to the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival not just because of my love of music, but also because of my love for travel. When you travel, you are presented less with differences and more with the commonalties we share, across continents and cultures, as human beings. And in every piece of music I have ever encountered, there is that humanity, that human spirit: what I share with other people, from the composer to the orchestra to the audience around me to someone on the street who has never heard of J.S. Bach or Tan Dun. What we know can often wind up irrelevant; what we are, across 6 continents and 6 billion minds and selves, is immutable.

The OBF isn't just about music, isn't just about notes and premieres, instruments and performers, anymore than a night in the pub – an Irish trad session, let's say – is just about music. It's about what music, like travel, does. Like travel, music makes you extend yourself. Like travel, music confronts you with foreign languages, surrounds you with instrument and voice, like being in the midst of throngs of people at a marketplace.

Through music, you can understand things better – people, the world, yourself – because music works on a visceral, humanly universal level. It is inspirational, emotional, painful, dreadful, delightful. It can drag on in places like a 12-hour Indian bus ride – yet the show is always done too soon, or just at the right time, or you never want it to stop. Much like a trip (well, save for the Indian bus ride).

And it brings people together. I've made more than my share of friends over a few scoops at a music-minded pub, and the concert hall is more similar than I sometimes realize. Travel brings people together, forges unity and common bonds, and is a reminder of how powerful togetherness is, and how commonly, similarly we are in our shared humanity. So too with music – and to see that bond and unity come to life, you need look no further than the performers themselves: dozens of people, in choirs and orchestras, singing and playing in unison, in harmony, together. I have found few more stirring examples of unity, than before the concert, when a violinist bows a "C" that soon is taken up by the entire orchestra.

The OBF is really a journey, a trip – through one's own self, through humanity as revealed and examined through music. I will say that this year I traveled to the OBF. And it has made me long for the road, to extend myself, to better understand myself and the world around me. Such is the effect of music, of the Oregon Bach Festival, on this writer; such is the desire to learn more, see more, do more, all over this wide world. It's a great thing. Come by next year, and let's chat it over after, down the pub. But I'll warn you now: I'll probably still have goosebumps.

Mass in B Minor

If you're religious, then what I'm about to say might offend you. If you are a music student, aficionado or snob, what I'm about to say might offend you. So you're warned, but here it: J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor is a head-bopper whang-dang of a helluva piece of music.

I attended a performance of the MIBM, the opening concert for the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival, having frankly no blooming idea what to expect. Luckily my companion and I attended a workshop/talk on the MIBM beforehand (the OBF has many such sessions before major concerts, which really help both layman and aficionado better understand the music they will soon hear). Snippets of segments of the MIBM were played; the effect on me, and apparently on the rest of the attendees, was akin to walking past a pub, a man coming outside with a bottle in one hand and a pint glass in the other; he then approaches you, proceeds to pour the best-smelling, nicest-coloured beer you have encountered otherwise only in the heavenly brewery of your hoppingest dreams.

Then he turns around and walks back into the pub.

What else are you going to do, but follow, and snag a glass of your own of that brew?

When I walked into the concert hall that Friday night, it was with a similar sense of anticipation. The Mass in B Minor is one of Bach's most enduring and influential works – and saying that about Bach isn't exactly easy. This wasn't a one-off sort of composer, no one-hit wonder that had the choirs singing from Kiev to Kent but then never heard from him again. Bach authored at over 1,000 pieces of music, from various masses to his famed Brandenburg Concertos, to his fugues, such the well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – the perfect song to scare kids by on Halloween, the piece of music Captain Nemo plays in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

From the same pen and from the same mind came the MIBM. Yes, it's a piece for worship; its reason for being was religious and spiritual; its composer was, after all, a devout Lutheran in 18th-century Germany. But you don't have to be a Christian, don't have to be anything remotely religious, neither Wiccan nor Wesleyan, to appreciate this music. Much like walking backpack-laden down the high street of a new vast crowded city, the MIBM requires nothing more than a spirit of adventure on your part.

I won't try to relay details, or particulars of verse, or score, or of solos vocal or instrumental. I do not possess the technical vocabulary of music to explain what I could hear, and even if I did, the music is more than my words can bear. It takes speakers, not HTML, to properly render the power of full orchestra, 4 vocal soloists (tenor Christopher Cock, bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, soprano Karina Gauvin, and alto Ingeborg Danz) and a double choir (yup, 2 choirs, one performance – it's a lot of singers, mate, and they could bring the house down if they wanted). I just can't bring it across. I might as well, as the old saying goes, try to dance about architecture. Bach as composer, and Helmuth Rilling as conductor and artistic director of the OBF, and all the players and singers, let the music speak for itself.

I can say that to listen to this music, to really focus on the music and the performance and nothing else, is to reach out for a moment and with your fingers to move back a veil over things you once thought were obscure. It is to turn your soul inside-out to a shower of warm water, and to turn it back in clean, fresh. It is to breathe deep beauty and power that we humans can probably only ever barely begin to understand or to appreciate.

Forgive me for going on at such length, and in such passionate terms. I recently heard a bit of amazement in a concert hall, and I have not quite been the same since.

Water Passion After St. Matthew

I'm not exactly a music aficionado, much in the same way, I hate to say, that in a blind taste test I probably couldn't tell the difference between a Swisher-Sweet and a Cuban cigar. I'm not up on the classical music scene of today. I've heard of guys like John Cage, but I certainly couldn't rattle off a list of his musical accomplishments. Hell, when I hear the word "opus" the first thought that still comes to my mind is the penguin from the Bloome County comic strip.

So when I attended the performance of Tan Dun's Water Passion After St. Matthew, I was pretty damn confused, and surprised, and in pain, and delighted, and completely blooming blown away. I'm assuming, well, hoping, that much of the audience was right there with me; this was, after all, the Water Passion's U.S. premiere, after being debuted in Stuttgart, Germany. The Water Passion was the result of a commission Tan Dun received: to compose music based on J.S. Bach's Passion After St. Matthew, in honor of the 250th anniversary of the composer's death (3 other composers received similar commissions).

Tan Dun... well, Tan Dun. Tan Dun ain't exactly your rich grandma's pretty parlor-boy tune-writer. A comparison to John Woo comes to mind, and that might and might not be apt; I'm not sure because I don't know enough about either man, other than that what they each do has a certain haunting quality, and a dramatic overtone that listener and viewer each winds up following with, as if jumping in a river, simply because you want to flow with it and see where it all turns up.

On the official biography side, Tan Dun grew up in an educated family in China. Unfortunately that was also during the Communist Cultural Revolution, and Tan Dun and his family were assigned, like many people of that time, to be "re-educated" amongst peasants. Tan Dun's affinity to music did not necessarily find much fruition as a rice farmer, but he did organize folk song rituals, sing-alongs, etc., and later, when changing political tides allowed for the reopening of the Chinese national music conservatory, he was one of the first students to go there – for his next re-education.

By 1985 he had received a fellowship from Columbia University in New York City; he relocated – and it has all been downhill from there. Tan Dun is now one of the world's top composers; his music has wide respect and following; as such it also entertains much criticism, a great deal of which seems to stem from Tan Dun writing music that has the audacity not to be snobby. A modern-day classical composer, he is nonetheless fairly well-known in the world outside the realm of classical music, mainly for his Academy Award-winning work on the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

So after taking a highlighter to my program so that I could pad out the notes for this article, I sat back in my chair in the Hult Center's Silva Hall as the lights dimmed. I had a feeling that I was in for something very different from the Bach Mass in B Minor, which I had experienced a week before. I just had no idea what I was really in for.

The Water Passion incorporates a choir, an orchestra, a soprano soloist, a bass-baritone soloist, and a solo cellist. In addition, 17 large, clear plastic bowls of water are set up, down and across the stage, in the shape of a cross. The water – in addition to symbolizing birth, rebirth, baptism, etc., to wax symbolic for a moment – also is one of the prime musical elements throughout the Water Passion. The bowls would be "played" by three percussionists, who would alternate between playing gongs and bowls submersed in the water, to simply running their hands through and shaking water and letting it drip back into the bowl in rhythm.

Rocks and stones themselves, even, sing in the Water Passion. The choir bangs rocks; the percussionists shake them and strike rocks they hold in their hands. The turning of pages becomes part of the music. Different-colored lights further combine concert hall with theater – a stated goal of Tan Dun, to take down the barrier between performers and audience members, to help return music, even that of the performance hall, back to its roots in folk music: interactive, and engaging far more of the senses than just that of sound.

Like the Mass in B Minor, I will not attempt the vanity and futility of rendering in font what is best left for flute. The Water Passion is to me a much more disturbing piece of music – not every song is pretty, of course – and for most of the Water Passion I could not shake a sense of unease, a sense of impending pain and suffering, which, well, is much of the Christ story: betrayal, torture, humiliation and suffering, as the story goes.

Then, in the last moments and movements of the piece, the feeling abated. In the score and libretto, Jesus died, and accordingly the orchestra and choir shook the hall with a vocal, instrumental earthquake – in accordance with a section called, for the death of Jesus, "Death and Earthquake". When the ground finished shaking, the sense of dread was gone, as if swallowed up in a final, earthly catharsis. Softer music began to play. Members of the choir and orchestra got up, left their chairs, and walked to the 17 bowls, all but three of which had been untouched until now. They ran their fingers through the water; one woman, in accordance to part of a story from the Bible, wet her hair. The sense of suffering and pain was gone, the disturbed feeling, replaced by a sense of release, and serenity, and sheer relief that all would turn out well.

It was a performance of a piece of music, and I go at length of a long heart to relay its effect on me. It was haunting, like a moonless night in an unfamiliar, foreboding place; its lingering memory, when recalled, calls up smiles, like dawns and new days. I'm not enough of a music aficionado to explain why. It's just been that way.

The Water Passion after St. Matthew, I hope, is a work Rilling, for commissioning it, and Tan Dun, for composing it, and for the performers, for singing and playing it, are proud of. For this man, from the audience, I am only glad to have heard it, and while I may not be an aficionado, I do know something amazing when it crosses my way.

Crouching Tiger Concerto

I love Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

I'm a romantic, I dig kung fu flicks, and that cinematic buffet of simple effects, beautiful martial choreography, and a painful yet touching story gets me in the writer's heart like an arrow, with every viewing. I'm a kung fu sap, what can I say? That... well, and yes, I think Jen's really cute.

But nevertheless. Something else I've always dug about CTHD, from the first time I saw it, was the soundtrack. So, when I heard about the Oregon Bach Festival, and decided to write about it for BootsnAll, Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger Concerto was one of the performances that I considered a must-see. For one, it wasn't a full performance of the soundtrack. That would've been awesome, but this was something different. I just didn't quite know what, but that was enough for me.

The Crouching Tiger Concerto was a first attempt at a new format Tan Dun was experimenting with: the fusion of orchestra and film, but in the concert hall instead of the movie theater. "But Anthony," you may be saying, "film and music are already fused – and weren't you just talking about how much you like the soundtrack in the movie?"

Well, yeah. But here's the thing. Composers compose movie soundtracks (generally) after the film is done and edited. The music is cut to fit, so to speak. Tan Dun's idea was to reverse this: Where in cinema the music supports the film, and the music is composed around the film, so in the concert hall the film would support the music, and the director would return to his chair – to direct and create a video based around the music.

Something new. Something original. What can I say? It was pretty damn exciting.

This, perhaps more than any other performance I had attended, was what I also considered to be the most travel-minded. Yes, the Oregon Bach Festival helps connect cultures and people; and yes, this year, for example, it has brought together, in honor of a German composer 250 years dead, a Chinese composer, German and American musicians, an audience with a variety of passports, all in a small city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. But the Crouching Tiger Concerto also reflected the mingling of cultures and peoples on many scales: historical, economic, musical.

The basis of much of the Crouching Tiger Concerto could be found in the instruments played. Tan Dun included instruments from many different cultures – from the tar, a North African frame drum, to the bawu, a bamboo, copper-reed flute that migrated to China from Southeast Asia; in addition to many components of traditional Western music. Why? Because Tan Dun is fascinated by the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that for centuries connected East and West and promoted travel as well as trade. How the Silk Road connected and melded cultures is similar to how Tan Dun merges East and West, old and new, in his music, and the Crouching Tiger Concerto is a representation of the intermingling of culture, from people to musical forms and instrumentation.

This is what I'd been waiting for.

To me, the entire performance is best illustrated by two events:

In one, Renyang Gao begins to solo on the bawu. Just previously cellist Maya Beiser had her solo piece; now it was Gao's turn and after, the two began to play together. Or really, not together; they played their instruments at the same time, but for the first couple of minutes their duet was more like a duel, instruments copying and throwing notes back at the other, tempos racing and tunes bouncing like blows from bawu to cello and back again. If you want to read it symbolically, in terms both of music and of culture and world events, you could say the duel demonstrated the clash of East and West, that has dominated so much of the past few centuries of human history.

But suddenly the instruments mellowed toward one another, and even the body language of the performers changed, from straighter backs and faster movements, to more flowing motions and smiles from one to the other. Like so, the music changed, became slower, smoother; began to harmonize – more like, to wax symbolic again, East and West today: not quite always getting along, and at times old tensions rising and new ones flaring up, but also working together, and better, and learning to live with and learn from one another – and sometimes, even, liking each other.

The second part was in some ways more striking. Percussionist David Cossin played an electric guitar, a flute, a bongo, and bhoran (and these are only the instruments whose sounds I heard and know well enough to name) – but on a cardboard mailing tube with a mike taped inside the bottom end.

Cossin held the tube near a speaker that sat on a chair. Before the performance began, Tan Dun mentioned that the orchestra would be "recycling sound", and Cossin had demonstrated. Holding the mike-end up to a nearby speaker of course created a hellish feedback – "hellish, isn't it?" noted Tan Dun to the grimacing audience – but then Cossin flipped a switch on some equipment on the floor, held the mike-end of the tube near the speaker again, and began to strike the opening at the top with his hand. The feedback noise was changed, altered – renewed and recycled, into a full, graceful, melodious tone, at first like a flute but later, as we found in the performance, as many other things.

When all was done, the audience rose up and roared, and clapped, and "bravo'd!" their hearts out. It was the least we could do. I clapped heartily, shouted and whooped and stamped my feet. I love Croucher Tiger Hidden Dragon – and its soundtrack, and the Crouching Tiger Concerto. I clapped and clapped, whooped and whooped, but my mind wasn't quite all there. I don't know if many, or if any, other audience members had this idea, but suddenly I very, very badly wanted to throw on my backpack, head to Asia, and travel the Silk Road. I suddenly wondered who I would meet, and I wanted to hear what songs I would be singing when I came back.

Anthony St. Clair is a writer for Bootsnall.com, and can be reached at ant@BootsnAll.com.