When we say Portland School, we’re not talking about a building with a bell schedule and a cafeteria. We’re talking about a phenomenon — an artistic weather system. A school of art is what happens when enough minds share a place, a set of questions, a set of values, and a sense of permission. It’s a loose constellation, not a uniform. It’s the feeling that a bunch of people are pulling on the same rope, even if they’re pulling it in wildly different directions.

So what is the Portland School, really?

Historically, “schools” get defined by geography: the Second Viennese School, the New York School, the Russian Five. Sometimes they’re defined by an institution, a teacher, or a manifesto. But more often than not, they’re defined later — by historians looking back and saying, “Ah. That’s what was happening.”

Portland’s version feels alive enough that we get to ask the question in real time. Is it geography? Is it a shared aesthetic? Is it a shared stubbornness — this particular Pacific Northwest compulsion to make things with our hands, to build a scene instead of waiting for one to arrive? Is it the collaborative DNA of a city where composers, performers, filmmakers, dancers, writers, and visual artists cross-pollinate like it’s the most normal thing in the world?

Or maybe it’s simply that, over the last several years, a remarkable number of composers have moved here. Some came for the landscape, some for community, some for opportunity, some for love, some for the promise that you can still live a creative life without needing to sell your soul (or your sleep). However they arrived, the result is undeniable: there is something in the water right now. A unique ecosystem for new music — one that’s equal parts craft, curiosity, play, rigor, risk, and heart.

That’s what Portland School II is about.

Pyxis Quartet is thrilled to be presenting this concert as part of 45^th Parallel’s season — an organization that, at its core, believes in one big, radical idea: that the most adventurous music-making isn’t a luxury item. It’s a community resource. And right now, our community is teeming with creative voices.

This program is a snapshot of that ecosystem: composers at different stages of their lives, writing in different languages, chasing different ghosts. But taken together, they tell a story about Portland right now — about who’s here, what they’re making, and why it matters.
 
 
Alejandro Belgique: Divertimento

Let’s start with joy.

There’s an electricity that comes from encountering a young composer whose voice is already emerging with clarity and confidence — someone who’s not just trying on styles, but actually saying something. Alejandro Belgique is 15 years old. Read that again. Fifteen. And his Divertimento has that wonderful, disarming mix of playfulness and intention: the sense that the piece is smiling, but it’s also paying attention.

Divertimento as a term has a long history—music designed to delight, to entertain, to move lightly on its feet. That doesn’t mean it’s lightweight. In the best examples, it’s craftsmanship in a party jacket. Alejandro’s piece carries that spirit: a young composer stepping into the room with energy, taste, and a real ear. The Portland School doesn’t just mean established artists; it also means a culture where emerging voices are not only welcomed, but celebrated. We get to hear talent when it’s fresh and fearless — and that’s a gift.
 
 
James Shields: Of Observation and Experience IV (World Premiere)

Some composers write from the outside in. James Shields writes from the inside out.

James is a clarinetist — an embodied musician, the kind who knows how breath, resistance, vibration, and time work at a cellular level. And on this concert, he’s not only the composer; he’s also the featured performer, joining us on bass clarinet for the world premiere of Of Observation and Experience IV.

I love the title because it feels like a mission statement for new music — and for art in general. Observation: paying attention. Experience: being alive in the world. Those are the two necessary ingredients. The “IV” suggests a continuing inquiry, a series of experiments, a composer returning to a question that refuses to stop being interesting.

Bass clarinet is a whole universe: dark velvet, sudden brightness, an instrument that can whisper, growl, sing, and laugh in the same breath. In a piece like this, it’s not just a color — it’s a character. And in the hands of the composer-performer, it becomes something even more intimate: not a tool, but a voice. Expect a journey where listening is the main event.

“Scored for Bass Clarinet and String Quartet, Of Observation and Experience IV is based on a bit of pre-existing material that I have struggled to find a place for. In the work at hand, this lumbering, stride-bass-like melodic material is turned into a four verse song with an introduction and coda. The works' main sections evoke religious rituals, lullabies, and working songs, as the seed material is transformed through modulation and textural variation. While the introduction and conclusion of the work are ominous and even detached, the heart of the work is searching and sentimental.

I’m honored to have written this work for musicians that I know well and work with often. Their individual personalities were on my mind when composing for each instrument, and I look forward to bringing the work to life with 45^th Parallel.”
 
 
Mark Orton: MicroSuite

Then there’s Mark Orton — a composer whose music many of you have already heard, whether you realize it or not. Mark is a critically acclaimed film composer, and one of the things I admire most about great film composers is their ability to say a lot with a little. They understand timing. They understand gesture. They understand how to make a single harmonic turn feel like a camera cut.

His MicroSuite is exactly what it sounds like: clever, compact, and sharply made. Like a set of miniatures that each lands its punchline (or its punch in the gut) and then gets out of the way. There’s an art to economy, and Mark has it. In a program full of premieres and big ideas, MicroSuite is a reminder that brevity can be its own kind of brilliance.

“The Joy Project was something put together by San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet during the pandemic. The idea was to commission short, uplifting works to initially be played at free outdoor pop-up concerts around the Bay Area to bring hope and connection — and to push back against the dark.

My mother’s middle name is Joy, so I found easy inspiration in creating what I think of as a reflection of her lifelong sense of play along with her unshakable positivity, clearest when watching her with her grandchildren, very much one of the kids despite her 80+ years.”

About The Portland School:

”I think what I love about Portland’s new music community is both its openness and its accessibility. It’s very west-coast in this regard: not relegated to the concert hall, with collaborations that are often cross-fertilized with members of the broader PNW music scene (songwriters, improvisers, sound designers). There’s a sense of place as well, with many works inspired by our fantastic natural surroundings.”
 
 
Nancy Ives: Quaking Giant (World Premiere)

Nancy Ives’ Quaking Giant is an evocation of Pando, the astonishing aspen clone in Utah—often described as one of the largest and oldest living organisms on Earth. If you’ve ever stood among aspens when the wind picks up, you know the sound: shimmering leaves, a nervous kind of light, a whole grove trembling as if it shares one enormous breath.

That’s the hook, of course — the image, the inspiration. But what makes Nancy’s music so compelling is how she translates imagery into musical logic. She doesn’t merely paint pictures; she builds living systems. Her writing understands how to make texture feel organic, how to make a sound world that behaves like a landscape.

And there’s something especially fitting about this piece being born here, in this moment. Portland is full of artists who think ecologically: not just in the environmental sense (though that’s part of it), but in the relational sense. How does one sound affect another? How does a community of voices create a single living form? Quaking Giant feels like a Portland piece because it thinks like Portland thinks: interconnected, alive, vibratory.

“Quaking Giant is my second piece about Pando, and likely not my last. After MYS premiered Pando in March 2024, Friends of Pando got in touch about their Artist in Residence program, which I eagerly applied for. I had written a ten-minute orchestra piece about the idea of an enormous, 9,000+ years old quaking aspen clone, but now I would get to visit and experience it for myself — and I was eager to find out what musical results would follow. Quaking Giant for string quartet is that result.

I’m grateful to Pyxis/45^th Parallel Universe for premiering the piece. Getting to have such amazing musicians and friends bring the score to life is not only a joy, but the crucial final piece of the creative puzzle for me — and also a real boon for Friends of Pando in their work stewarding the tree.”
 
 
David Schiff: Ducal Suite

And then we swing.

David Schiff’s Ducal Suite — arrangements of Duke Ellington’s music — brings another essential ingredient into the Portland School conversation: the willingness to blur lines. The idea that “new music” is not a fenced-in aesthetic, but a living practice. Ellington’s music is sophisticated, harmonically rich, endlessly inventive. Arranging it for our instrumentation isn’t about putting jazz in a museum; it’s about letting it move and breathe in a new body.

For this, we’ll be joined by the fabulous James Shields on clarinets — because if anyone can help a program pivot from contemporary chamber textures into Ellington’s world with style and authenticity, it’s James. This part of the concert is pure fun, yes — but it’s also a reminder that craft and groove are not opposites. They’re cousins.

“Ducal Suite started out as part of a three-day conference of the International Duke Ellington Study Group, a gathering of Ellington and Strayhorn scholars, experts and enthusiasts, which I organized at Reed College in November 2015. In addition to the scholarly presentations there was a concert with David Shifrin, Darrell Grant, Matt Cooper and Rebecca Kilgore, for which I arranged four of their songs as a Ducal Duo for clarinet (Shifrin) and piano (Grant). David Shifrin enjoyed playing it so much that he asked me to arrange it, as the Ducal Suite, for clarinet and string quartet. He first performed it with the Dover Quartet at CMNW in July, 2017.

When I was writing my book, The Ellington Century, I studied many of the original manuscripts for his music at the Smithsonian in Washington. Unlike his classical contemporaries, Ellington had his own orchestra (for fifty years!) and in his scores he identified the parts not by the names of instruments, but by the names of players, since every member of his band had a unique style and voice. In the 1920s and 30s his clarinetist was Barney Bigard, whose approach to the instrument sprang from the New Orleans style of Sidney Bechet. When Bigard left the band in 1942, Jimmy Hamilton took his place, performing in a more modern style close to that of Benny Goodman. The pieces Ellington composed for both clarinetists highlighted their different approaches.”
 
 
So…what makes a “school”?

If you need a thesis statement, here’s mine: a school of art is defined less by where people live and more by how they listen to each other.

Portland right now is a place where composers show up to each other’s concerts. Performers commission new work because they’re genuinely curious. Teenagers write real music and get taken seriously. Film composers sit alongside concert composers. Clarinetists write for bass clarinet and then step onstage to play it. Cellists write about aspens the size of cities. Duke Ellington dances into the room and everyone says, “Yes, of course. Pull up a chair.”

That’s not an accident. That’s culture. That’s ecology. That’s the water.

Portland School II is our way of holding up a glass and saying: taste this. This is what’s happening here. This is what it feels like when a city becomes a studio, when a scene becomes a community, when new music stops being a genre and starts being a verb. Come hear what Portland sounds like right now. We can’t wait to share it with you.

Portland School II
Featuring the Pyxis Quartet with James Shields
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
7:00-8:00 PM @ Polaris Hall

Ron Blessinger
Violinist, Pyxis Quartet and Oregon Symphony