Crater Lake Meets Classical

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) 
Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947) 

Great things can arise from small beginnings. In 1920, the French journal La Revue Musicale requested short compositions to honor recently-deceased Claude Debussy; many of the era’s most prestigious composers, including Bartók, Ravel, Satie, Dukas, and de Falla, responded with contributions. 

As did Igor Stravinsky. He was an A-list musical celebrity, thanks to his ballets The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. His style was at the time strongly nationalist, infused with Russian and Ukrainian folk music, and typically required supersized orchestras. His contribution to the Debussy memorial was a short chorale for the piano, but he ultimately decided to fold part of that work into his new Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which he dedicated to Debussy. 

The Symphonies (from the Greek for “sounding together”) marks the beginning of a stylistic change for Stravinsky, towards the elegant "neo-classical" idiom he was to adopt in the 1920s. Audiences weren’t sure what to do about this “new" Stravinsky and the 1921 premiere wasn’t successful. “I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this,” sniped the esteemed critic Ernest Newman. But that was then. Nowadays the Symphonies ranks amongst the most esteemed of Stravinsky’s early works, shot through as it is with the litanies of the Russian Orthodox church, particularly the panikhida, or memorial service for the dead.

Michael Gordon (b. 1956) 
Natural History  (2016) 

Michael Gordon’s Natural History got its start 7,700 years ago. That’s when volcano Mount Mazama erupted, leaving behind Crater Lake, which fills the caldera to a depth of 1,949 feet and is treasured for its utterly pure, brilliant water. 

“Natural History was commissioned by the Britt Music & Arts Festival in celebration of the 2016 National Park Service centennial,” explains Michael Gordon. “Writing the piece took me on a journey through Crater Lake National Park at the height of summer and dead of winter, and to Chiloquin, Oregon to work with the members of the Klamath Tribe’s Steiger Butte Drum and Singers. It led me to the naturalist writers Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, among others.” 

“The native people who lived at the lake at the time of the explosion still live there today. This place is sacred to them.” That led Gordon to the Klamath Tribe and the Steiger Butte Drum and Singers. “The members of the Drum Group are a part of an extended family. They sit in a circle, beat loudly on one drum, and sing. The singing is a fast sophisticated syncopated yodeling. It is amazing.” The Klamath Tribe sustains a long relationship with the lake; they call it Giiwas, and for them it is a place of worship. 

Thus Natural History refers to more than the landscape: it is about the powerful symbiosis between the Klamath Tribe, the mountain, and the lake. Gordon, together with conductor Teddy Abrams, found the perfect place for an outdoor performance: Watchman Overlook with its panoramic views, where the work was performed by the Britt Orchestra, a chorus, thirty brass and percussion players out on the cliffs, and of course the Steiger Butte Drum and Singers. After the premiere on July 29, 2016, the Klamath Tribe Chairman exclaimed that “I could almost envision the sounds of our ancestors reverberating through the ages.” 

Happily for posterity, we have a commercial recording from August 20, 2016, at the Britt Pavilion in Jacksonville, Oregon. To call hearing it an "experience" is putting it mildly. Over the course of its nearly half-hour duration, Natural History portrays the wonder of Crater Lake and its surroundings in stunning orchestral guise, soon joined by the passionate voices of the Steiger Butte Drum and Singers as they invoke the sacredness of this magical and precious place.

Grace Miedziak (b. 2002), Rizzo-Cummings Emerging Composer Fellow at the Oregon Symphony
Cascadence (2026) 

Oregonian Grace Miedziak’s musical language is broad, ranging from contemporary pop to concert works to film scores. “Sometimes I feel pressured to choose one genre over another,” she says, “but instead, I’ve decided to embrace my individual voice and incorporate aspects of both styles into my music. For example, I put classically-inspired string parts in my pop music and use modern electronic sounds inspired by pop in my classical music.” 

Currently based in Los Angeles, her Oregon roots run deep. Her first orchestral commission was for Portland’s Metropolitan Youth Symphony, and one of her compositions was played by Oregon Symphony Mr. & Mrs. Edmund Hayes, Jr. Principal Cello Chair Nancy Ives. She has remained deeply connected with Oregon’s artistic community. 

“I believe that music is one of the most powerful vehicles of human expression and communication,” she says. “And at a time when technology is starting to blur all that a bit, I think it’s even more important that we highlight the authenticity of each person’s musical voice.” 

Miedziak keeps her musical options as broad as possible. “Everything is an inspiration, and sometimes I don’t even know what my inspiration is until I’m halfway through the piece. Then I realize that I’m writing about this place or this natural landscape the whole time and I didn’t realize it.” 

But she very much realizes what she’s about with Cascadence, her first commission from the Oregon Symphony as an Emerging Composer Fellow. In a nutshell, she’s all about Oregon’s spellbinding natural beauty as well as its wonderfully diverse population. “There is just this creative vibe that exists in Portland that I feel is truly unique. I feel that people in Portland aren’t afraid to be just radically themselves.” 

The title Cascadence is a bit of a play on words, of course. “It dances a little bit, but not just like plain dance music with predictable rhythm. It dances in a quirky way…sometimes it can be a little unpredictable, and then sometimes it really shines, the way a melody can really shine, and then it’s more like a consistent thing.” 

Among her influences for Cascadence, Miedziak cites Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, in particular Copland’s wind and brass brightness and Bernstein’s quirky, memorable themes. Keeping with Oregon’s proud tradition of individualism, the piece is filled with instrumental solos, including for English horn, bass clarinet, and clarinet. “It’s a celebration of the Pacific Northwest,” she says, “and it’s like an appreciation piece, for both the area’s natural beauty and for the incredible creativity that comes out of Portland.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 
Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21 (1800) 

Concert programs were a lot longer in Beethoven’s day than in our own. Consider Beethoven’s benefit concert of April 2, 1800: a symphony by Mozart, two arias from Haydn’s brand-new The Creation, and from Beethoven himself a piano concerto, the Septet Op. 20, an improvisation, and finally, Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21. The concert doesn’t seem to have gone very well. According to contemporary reports, it was all the orchestra’s fault. 

Badly played or not, the concert helped cement Beethoven’s stature as the frontrunner amongst Viennese musicians. Student of Haydn and Salieri, he had been publishing steadily since his 1793 arrival, electrifying Vienna with the freshness, verve, and novelty of his compositions. His piano playing was the talk of the town, as was his steadfast refusal to play the part of dutiful lackey to aristocratic patrons and his intolerance of inattentive audiences. With the First Symphony, Beethoven made his entry to a genre that had been dominated by Haydn and Mozart. Now he was to make it his own. 

Many Viennese Classical symphonies with slow introductions open with a loud wallop—a call to order, as it were, quite practical given the open layout and chatty socializing typical of the era’s concert venues. Beethoven’s First dispenses with all that in favor of a subtly insinuating prologue in which both key center and meter are kept slightly blurred until the onset of the “Allegro con brio" proper, a stellar example of textbook sonata-allegro form. (Which is hardly surprising, since textbooks on sonata form tend to use early Beethoven as models.) 

Beethoven might not have been an instinctive tunesmith on the order of a Mozart or Schubert, but he certainly had a song in his heart when it pleased him to do so. In the "Andante cantabile con moto” he comes up with a friendly Haydnesque melody that he mines for the materials of a luxuriant and exquisitely well-structured sonata form. And even if he calls the third movement a “Menuetto,” it’s really a Scherzo—fast, fleet, and funny, a headlong sprint that lightens things up a bit for the midway Trio but never really lets up on the chase.  

That loud wallop missing from the symphony’s opening kicks off the finale. But what comes next is a whimsically indecisive passage that sounds for all the world like a pianist noodling around on the keyboard while trying to figure out what to play next. But then he finds it, and we’re off on an athletic dash that comes across as Haydn with a major dose of attitude.