Last week, 45^th Parallel Universe celebrated our 10th Friday-night performance of the Portland Social Distance Ensemble (PSDE). This Friday, July 17th, the project presses on, with a performance featuring works for clarinet and string trio, including PSDE’s first world premiere to be carried out in our new virtual performance space. Additionally, we are thrilled have musicians from across the continent on the team for this concert. Cellist Laura Metcalf joins us from New York City, where she is the founder and Co-Artistic Director of Gather NYC, as well as a member of the acclaimed string quintet Sybarite 5. Violist Keith Hamm will beam in from his hometown of Rosebud, Alberta, not far from where he performs his “day job” as the Principal Violist of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. I count myself lucky to be stuck at home during the COVID-age with a phenomenal musician, violinist Emily Cole, my partner in life and music.

It’s amazing to think back to our first PSDE rehearsals in April… From those late-night, technologically-challenged, and often alcohol-fueled test runs, we have come a long way. In the dizzying first few weeks of the pandemic, it was hard to find a sector of society that wasn’t facing radical challenges, and the learning curve was steep for classical musicians. Adapting to the reality that digital technology might be our primary mode of reaching audiences for many weeks, months, or perhaps even years, was both difficult and exciting. A good sense of humor was crucial in this period of time, as was patience, and I’m thankful to Ron Blessinger, Danny Rosenberg, and many other colleagues who maintained a positive outlook even amidst setbacks and frayed nerves.  

This coming Friday’s program is the product of two parts COVID-project and one part an outgrowth of my prior interest in the clarinet quartets of Finnish clarinetist-composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775 - 1838). The following description is of a type that is as useful and efficient as it is stupid and banal, so please indulge me in saying that he can be thought of as the Finnish Mozart, or better yet, the Finnish Haydn. His 2nd Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio in C minor is a thrilling and satisfying work, in my opinion. It’s full of drama, well scored, and tightly constructed. Maybe most importantly, it has a beautiful slow movement, a sort of lullaby in a gently rocking 6/8 time.  

In the past few months I’ve taken a “deep-dive” into J.S. Bach’s cantatas, a large body of amazing music that I am embarrassed to admit I was barely acquainted with prior to the pandemic. I made a dozen or more multi-track arrangements of the juiciest arias I could find from these works, transcribing the original baroque orchestral instrumentation for various combinations of clarinets. It’s remarkable how music from the early 1700’s can suddenly sound like popular music from the 1950’s when translated to a relatively homogenous-sounding ensemble of only clarinets, an instrument that didn’t really exist during Bach’s time. Emily and I recorded the haunting Aria from Cantata No. 179 in our bathroom at home (hey, the acoustics are great in there!), and folks online seemed to enjoy it enough. Building on that success, we’ll perform the aria again, this time arranged for violin, viola, cello, and basset horn, a relatively rare member of the clarinet family that falls between a bass clarinet and a regular Bb clarinet.

Closing the program is a new work for clarinet and string quartet that I wrote between April and June. As an on-again/off-again wannabe composer, I thought early on in the pandemic: “If I can’t write something now, then when am I going to make time for it?” For some reason I thought it was a good idea to write something with a steady stream of fast 16th notes running unbroken throughout the work, which makes for twelve minutes of pure chamber music craziness. Some might wonder if I wrote the piece with the challenges of remote digital performance in mind, to which the answer is a resounding “No!” Quartet No. 1 or Cataclysmic Hyper-virtuosity in Perpetual Motion, as the title might suggest, is a continuously virtuosic thicket of cross-rhythms, dense harmonies, wide melodic leaps, and over-wrought emotional utterances that will test the limits of what good taste would deem wise to perform in such conditions. The piece is dedicated to Keith’s new daughter Charlotte, who, like all babies born recently, enters the world at an uncertain and fraught time. In the middle of the piece, the violist intones a sort of disembodied chant, which is based on a common plainsong and features the same number of syllables/notes as Psalm 23. The imagery would be so obvious to be cringe-worthy, but with the obscuring elements of dense counterpoint and crunchy harmony, I think I’ve covered my tracks sufficiently.

I’ll admit that I am partial to the model of regular, once-weekly chamber music performances: one of my greatest personal and professional privileges has been working with the Albuquerque-based series Chatter, formerly known as “The Church of Beethoven.” I secretly hope that, if and when things return to “normal” in the performing world, 45^th Parallel will continue with a short weekly concert of some sort. There are just too many ideas coming from the talented and thoughtful musicians in our ranks to be put to good use without a high volume of programming “real-estate.” Until then, I’m thankful for this platform, which will continue to give us a space to perform between now and that unknown date when the music will return to Portland’s concert halls.

James T. Shields
Principal Clarinet, Oregon Symphony

Associate Artistic Director, Chatter