See/Hear

Micah Fletcher

On May 26, 2017, three passengers on Portland's MAX train approached Jeremy Christian, a white nationalist who was verbally assaulting two Muslim women. The knife-wielding Christian brutally assaulted and killed Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Rick Best, and critically injuring Micah Fletcher. This attack set off shock waves across the country, perpetrated by an attacker who later claimed to be “agitated by the political polarization in the country.” Mr. Fletcher has received wide acclaim for his poetry, which describes his harrowing journey to recover from this assault.

Nicholas Yandell

I’m Nicholas Yandell, a Portland-based composer, born July 24th, 1982 in Boise, Idaho. I received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Music Composition at Five Towns College in Long Island (NY) and while obtaining my degrees at this jazz-based music school, I also wrote film scores, played in electronic, post-rock, and emo bands, and eventually fell madly in love with, and pursued classical composition. Today, with this amalgamation of all these musical streams, and a passionate desire to express the joys, challenges, and anxieties of 21st century life, I seek to take you, listeners, on memorable and often cathartic musical journeys. Prepare yourselves and thanks for listening!

I was passionate about the words of Crisis Actor the moment I first heard Micah read them and I immediately knew two things about this project: First: the reading of this text needed to be integrated into the performance of the composition, and second, as the composer, I needed to approach this project in the way of a musical translator. I sketched out the structure of the poem as the basis for the composition, and from the jagged rhythms, the aggressive energy, and the dark imagery of Micah’s words, I found inspiration for the core themes and textures. Once I was further along in the process, I spent a lot of time half-yelling the poem over amplified MIDI drafts of the composition in my car, making sure that what I had composed supported the overall flow of the poem as it would be read. Ultimately, with this project, my goal as a composer was to lay a musical foundation to enhance the performance of these brutal, poignant words, so that hopefully this work will convey to the listener a little more about what it’s like to be Micah in the aftermath of this tragedy.