A million years ago, when the present author was first writing about Fear No Music for Oregon ArtsWatch, one of their Locally Sourced Sounds concerts prompted this reverie:
I have now gone to so many Fear No Music concerts at The Old Church in Southwest Portland and met so many of the same performers, composers, teachers, and classmates (some of these fields overlap) that now it really does feel just like going to church, except that the music is mostly better (as is the company) and the wine comes in adult-sized glasses. The subject of the sermon at the new music ensemble’s February 13 concert, Locally Sourced Sounds, drew an attentive congregation of new music disciples and devotees.
The first acolyte I always spot at these shows is Jeff Winslow, composer, ArtsWatcher, and Cascadian, with his bushy white beard and his attentive, friendly eyes. Percussion guru Joel Bluestone was there too, still part of the FNM family even after retiring from the group last year. Composer, violist, and FNM artistic director Kenji Bunch was tending the famous wine bar, dispensing generous pours of Lompoc IPA—that is, when he wasn’t on stage turning pages for FNM’s executive director (and Bunch’s wife), pianist Monica Ohuchi.
This was in February 2017, which now seems like a totally different world. Among other things, I would no longer sneer at the traditionally Christian music you hear in traditionally Christian churches (thank you, Oregon Bach Festival, for reigniting that old love). Moreover, at eight years sober I would no longer be drinking the wine or the Lompoc IPA (thank you, God of All Things, for inventing coffee). But this idea of a “Church of Music” is still a central concern, as you can see at any recent FNM concert. Here they are last year:
We are discussing all this today because Fear No Music has another of these Locally Sourced Sounds concerts coming up this very month, on September 26, this time at Reed College’s Eliot Chapel. Following on their recent all-local season (start reading about that here), FNM is kicking off 2025-26 with a Locally Sourced Marathon: Three-plus hours of “concert readings” featuring no less than thirty-two Oregonian composers.
No joke! Here’s the full list:
McCabe Grove, Bill Whitley, I’lana Cotton, Jan Mittelstaedt, Kent Darnielle, Ajit Phadke, Skye Neal, Addison Kearbey, Betty Wishaart, Liz Nedela, Lance Brown, Lisa Ann Marsh, Metta Mayes, Michael Drayton, Brian Magill, Dianne Davies, Michael Johanson, Maxwell W. Evans-McGlothin, Tao Li, Betty Booher, Gary Lloyd Noland, Paul Henerlau, TJ Thompson, Elaina Stuppler, James Lee, Rossá Crean, Thomas Proctor, William Ashworth, Sal Wallin, Lucie Zalesakova, Cody Wright, and Theresa Koon.
That’s quite the array! Note familiar names from the Cascadia Composers roster: Davies, Marsh, Mittelstaedt, Nedela, Noland. You’ve heard Michael Johanson’s music at Makrokomos Project shindigs, and if you do anything musical at Lewis & Clark College you’ve probably seen him around Evans Music Center or up at Agnes Flanagan Chapel. Skye Neal and Elaina Stuppler are both longtime students in FNM’s Young Composers Project (there are six YCP composers on this program), and both have made waves here and abroad. Theresa Koon collaborates regularly with Resonance Ensemble. I’lana Cotton has composed for Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley Symphony. And so on.
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We could go on, but why spoil the surprise? Go check them out for yourself!
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Fear No Music presents “Looking Around: Locally Sourced Sounds Reading Marathon” at 5:30 pm on Friday, September 26, at Reed College’s Eliot Chapel. Advance tickets (suggested donation) and more information are available right here.
The English word “church” derives – if you look back far enough, past the Germanic “Kirche” and Proto-Germanic “kirika” – from the Greek word “kyrion” (which simply means “Lord,” as all know who’ve sung “Kyrie Eleison” in church or elsewhere). But the more common Greek word for “church” was always “ekklesia,” which gives us the words “ecclesiastical” and “ecumenical” and is derived from the Greek word “oikos,” which means “house” and also gives us “ecology” and “economics” (the phrase “home economics” is linguistically redundant). Look back even farther and you see “oikos” deriving from the Proto-Indo-European “weik,” which means “clan” and gives us such words as “village.”
Church, home, village, clan, community – these are all the same idea. A mathematician might call them “isomorphic.” Eliot Chapel is no more a functioning “church” than The Old Church is (it doesn’t even have a working organ), but as a home for FNM’s church of music it has been serving just as well as TOC – perhaps better, if relative audience sizes are to be believed. We could blame the much-ballyhooed “decline” of Downtown Portland for this, which is as good an explanation as any, but what’s really interesting is how FNM has moved from a “church” to a “chapel” without breaking stride. Not for nothing do we still use churches – when we’re not using them for regular religious services like weddings and worship – to host musical events and group therapy meetings. As Carl Jung had inscribed above his front door, “Whether summoned or not, God will be present.”
Anyways, as I got on the phone with Kenji last week to talk about FNM’s previous and upcoming seasons, the religious and communal aspects of music-making were very much in the air. We ended up talking about the whole season, which is still in development, and about last season, and how the world has changed since we last spoke in September of last year (for that matter, the world has changed in the twelve days since we spoke this year, but at some point you just have to stop the tape and hit publish).
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Oregon ArtsWatch: Let’s start with last season. How did it go?
Kenji Bunch: If I can toot my own horn, it was successful beyond what we imagined. Or I guess I should say it was successful in ways we didn’t anticipate.
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Our idea was to present an entire season of what we call Locally Sourced Sounds, what had been in the past one concert in our series devoted to music by composers working locally. And what we didn’t really anticipate was the incredible feeling of community that started to happen at these concerts. But of course it made sense – the composers came and they all brought their folks and it was just really neat to have them meet and talk with each other and connect people with each other. It felt like we were really building community. And in the end, isn’t that what we’re trying to do here?
KB: In recent seasons we’ve been rather vocal about our advocacy of social justice notions, and it’s not that we’re in any way backing away from that, but it may be another way to advocate is to try to really lean into the community and do what we can to help. And our first concert of this season is kind of a more radical version of that. Are we not at our core a service organization? We’re here to help the community. We have to be, right? If we’re a nonprofit arts organization, shouldn’t we be doing what we can to serve our community? And that helps us too, helps us find meaning in our work. And it’s just something we can offer. So we opened it up to anybody living in the neighborhood who writes music and wants to hear it. And our plan is to fit as much as we can in one night without, you know, killing our musicians.
It’s not a polished performance of this work, it’s a concert reading. So, you know, somewhere in between just sight reading and doing a fully rehearsed performance. But that way we can get through as much music as possible.
And I should mention, this was Monica’s idea. Monica Ohuchi, our executive director, conveniently my wife. It was just a really neat notion she had. And at the time she brought it up, I was actually doing a bunch of score reviews for an orchestral reading project. And it made so much sense. You know, something like that is a real currency. If you’re a composer, you’ve got to have that recorded version of your work, not by the robots, but by real players. That can open a lot of doors for composers. And in this kind of gatekeep-y position, it’s my job to dismantle that and let people in and have their stuff recorded.
OAW: So you got, what was it, 66 submissions for the marathon? Are you going to be reading all of those?
KB: No, we can’t do all of them. We only have string quartet, piano and clarinet. And we have to be mindful of our musicians, most of whom play in the symphony and are doing hours of playing a day. And so we’re clocking in at a little more than three hours of music. We hate to leave anybody out. There’s a chance we might do another installment of this in the spring, seeing how this one goes.
OAW: So how did you narrow it down?
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KB: Just to be fair and also manage the amount of music we have, we decided that people whose work we’ve programmed in the last year or two, we will set them aside for now and focus on the composers whose music we’ve never played or haven’t played in a long time. So that’s where we are with it, and we’re excited. We hope it’s going to be a real event, and again, a community kind of thing where people can connect with each other.
OAW: The idea of doing this again in the spring, what would that hinge on? What will it take for that to happen?
KB: Well, I want to check in with our players, because this is kind of a new idea for them, and to see how they felt about it, and would they be up for doing it again. I don’t want to commit them to too much of this until I have an idea of what it’s like. Just being mindful of their work.
OAW: Who are the players? I assume it’s like the usuals, the Fear No Music company players, right?
KB: Yeah, the usuals. We’ve got Jeff [Payne] and Monica switch hitting on piano, James Shields on clarinet, Keiko Araki and Emily Cole on violin, Nancy Ives on cello, and yours truly playing the viola.
OAW: Jumping back to last season – did you find a lot of the same people coming to those concerts? There’s a regular FNM crew anyway, right? But did you see a lot of new faces repeating over the season?
KB: Yeah, we did, which was really nice. And we do have that core faithful audience, which we’re so grateful for. And we felt like we may have added to that number with this past season. The last thing I want is for anyone to think that this isn’t for them, that it’s intentionally excluding anyone. No matter what you do, it’s not possible to include everyone all the time. But I hope we’re showing that we’re doing our best to spread the love.
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OAW: You mentioned the social justice aspect, which is so core to FNM’s mission. And we live in a different world speaking to each now in September 2025, compared to when we last spoke in September 2024. It’s been an awfully eventful year. How have things changed for you guys in terms of meeting the world that we live in now?
KB: Well, looking back to 2017, we were pretty vocal and combative, you might say. And we’re no less committed to some of those ideals, but it feels different, and sometimes it feels like just our very existence is a good way to push back. Just existing in the arts space today is an act of resistance. And what I mean by resistance doesn’t have to be about resisting certain personalities, but just resisting the slide into something other than what we’re all here for.
And, you know, I think it’s no coincidence that the arts have been one of the first areas that have been attacked, dismantled, managed in unexpected ways. And that’s because it’s such an important reminder of our shared humanity and the fullness of the human experience. And we gotta just stay the course with that and keep doing work and not necessarily draw attention to ourselves for it, but just to keep doing it, right? We’ve been hit with funding issues, as everyone has. As a smaller nonprofit, it’s an advantage that we can be nimble and scrappy and look for other sources. And we’ll continue to do that. Which is not to say that we don’t need all the help we can get, but we do. But nothing’s gonna stop us.
OAW: Which brings us to the Young Composers Project and the matching donation this month. How did that come about, and how does that actually work?
KB: Well it’s a challenge grant. We have a very generous private benefactor who wants to inspire more giving by presenting a donation in this way, where if we can get more folks out there to match this amount than our donor will give us this large donation. It’s a way to support the arts and also encourage fellow patrons to be actively involved.
YCP is a cornerstone of our mission. I don’t think it’s possible to quantify what an outlet like this can be for kids to have this kind of mentorship by professional musicians and composers, and to be able to develop in this art form and write their original work and have their voices valued and heard as real artists. I think that there’s an impact there beyond just the notes on the page. So nothing is gonna keep us from this program being available for the community. But we definitely do need help to reconcile that shortfall with grants that haven’t been coming through for us.
OAW: These are weird times. It’s fascinating how everybody’s just kind of rising to the challenge.
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KB: Well, that’s all we know how to do, really. You know, what else am I going to do? And if we’re supposed to model resilience, we’ve got to start somewhere.
OAW: So let’s talk about some of the other concerts in this upcoming season. How did the Resonance Ensemble collaboration come about? I mean, we’re all friends in this world, but how did this specific collaboration happen?
KB: We are all friends, and specifically we have really aligned with Resonance a lot over the years. And it’s funny, sometimes our programming will hit the same marks just spontaneously. And we have so much respect for Kathy FitzGibbon and Shohei Kobayashi and all the folks over at Resonance and the work they’ve done. We’ve collaborated with them in the past as sort of their resident ensemble.
And so we were talking about, “hey, is there a way we can have a more meaningful collab?” And something that’s really fun about this is we’re going to present it at the newly renovated Benson High School, which is apparently just a stunning space. They’ve got a really good auditorium. And it’s a good location. I think it’s an exciting thing. This is going to be the first public event in that new space.
We’re working on a program, I don’t want to commit to exactly the program just yet because we’re finalizing that still, but it’s going to be some standalone Resonance things, a couple works that we’ll play, and then plenty of work that involves both groups together. So it just made a lot of sense where we’re in that same Venn diagram circle.
OAW: And then this is part of the Sound Likes Portland Festival that the Oregon Symphony is doing. What are your thoughts on that?
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KB: Well, I think it’s a really great project that they’ve taken the initiative to put together. I am grateful to David Danzmayr and Clement So, who’ve taken the lead with this. Every city’s orchestra provides lip service to being connected to the community, and I appreciate this meaningful initiative to actually do that, that it’s really valued. For any of us small music nonprofits, we exist because of the Oregon Symphony, right? I mean, those players wouldn’t be able to really be here if it wasn’t for that organization to provide full-time employment. So we’re all thriving with their continued health. And it’s really great to feel that, in addition to that, they’re trying to support and recognize all of our work in a meaningful way.
OAW: Last time we talked, we were talking about starting a record label and all these big ideas. Or just releasing the recordings FNM already has. Where are we at with all that?
KB: We are no less excited about that notion, and we have been collecting great material all year. We’ve been recording, Nicholas Emerson does an amazing job with that. And particularly this last season of work by local composers; to have all of that in the can is really great. So our idea is not to just stockpile this stuff and silo it, we want to get it out there accessible to the public. I think we have had to maybe table some of the progress on that, due to funding considerations, but we still have the goods and we’re going to figure it out somehow. And luckily, it’s always becoming more affordable to DIY something like that. So that’s our current plan.
OAW: In a pragmatic sense, what would help? What would it take? Or to put it differently, what can our readers do to help make this happen?
KB: Honestly, supporting us with whatever giving is possible helps. There’s just a lot of man hours that go into the editing process of selecting and editing work that we decide is up to the level that it would need to be for public release. Everyone in our administration is doing this as mostly a labor of love, and that’s still labor. So, you know, whatever support we can get to go towards making this happen is going to really go a long way.
OAW: So let’s talk about the rest of this season, the “Looking Inward, Spacing Out” concert and then “Looking Back” with the Morton Feldman – is that it for the season so far?
KB: Yeah. So, we’ve been playing in the Reed College Chapel, Eliott Chapel. We’ve had a really good turnout there in the last couple seasons. It’s been working out really well. One place Monica and I have talked about repeatedly wanting to explore is the atrium in the performing arts building at Reed. It’s just a big open space, multi-level, and it just seems to be ripe for some kind of event.
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And so we put together a program of work that kind of dismantles the stage/audience relationship and has the musicians surrounding the audience in different parts of the building. There’s all kinds of work that is set up well for that kind of event. and the challenge really – as is often the case with programming – is to figure out, out of the many options, what to choose.
We’re going to collaborate with the Reed Collegium Choir. Which will be really neat to, again, involve some vocal work.
OAW: Oh so you’ll be doing some antiphonal stuff.
KB: Yeah, there’s going to be some antiphonal stuff. We’re doing a Jukka Tiensuu piece that’s spaced out. Henry Brant’s Mass in Gregorian Chant for 20 flutists, that’s for 20 flutes, a really beautiful, really cool piece. We’ll do a Pauline Oliveros audience participation piece with Shohei. We’re gonna play a piece by Nancy that is for spaced out string trios. And Shohei had some cool ideas for what the choir is going to do.
OAW: So then the Morton Feldman, what will that concert be like?
KB: Monica and I will do a really short and sweet The Viola in My Life, it’s number three. That’s just viola and piano, it’s just a few minutes long. It just seemed like a nice way to kind of get the room ready, get us in that space.
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And then I thought it would be fun to have the string quartet play the Webern Five Movements for String Quartet, just as a little amuse-bouche. But also it’s significant because the orchestration of that work was what Feldman and Cage heard at Carnegie Hall before they met for the first time, and they both walked out in the lobby, and I can’t remember which one of them said to the other, but one of them said, “wasn’t that beautiful?” And the other said, “yes,” and they really hit it off.
So then the big event will be Piano and String Quartet, which is like an hour long, and one of his really most beautiful works. It’s classic Feldman, where he says the audience is conditioned for the 20-minute piece and we listen for form and we try to hear themes and hang on to them and see if they come back, and he finds all of that incredibly distracting. And he says, in order to get them to listen to just sound, it has to be this expansive thing. So that’s the idea that we’ll be able to get to the point where we’re just experiencing those sounds.
And this is the Feldman Centennial, of course, and he’s been a profound influence on my work and career, whether or not he really, one can really hear that in my writing. I’ve just long been an admirer and looking forward to getting to do this.
OAW: So asking Kenji the composer and violist, what was your first exposure to Morton Feldman? How did that strike you? What was your Webern Five Movements moment with his music?
KB: Well, I’d listened to a little bit in school, and I was aware of his work and music, and I always enjoyed everything I heard. I thought it was such a welcome relief from a lot of the, you know, much more dense music of that time.
But really, I didn’t get to really meet Feldman – I never met him in person – but got to know his music as part of the FLUX Quartet, the first quartet that premiered his second string quartet and actually recorded it. So I performed it a number of times and toured around the world playing that with the FLUX Quartet. And then we recorded it, which almost drove me mad. I mean, it’s the closest I’ve come to going crazy for sure.
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We were at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. They have a beautiful hall and we tried recording and there’s just way too much ambient noise. And so we thought, “okay, we’ll come back at night once school’s out and it quiets down.” We came back and it was working okay, but then this automated heating system kicked in and made all this noise. We realized the only time it was possible to override that system was between midnight and 6am. And so for three nights in a row, that’s what we did. We just, you know, turned our body clocks around and recorded from midnight to 6am. And we were like, delirious at the end of that.
So yeah, that was a really strange experience. But you know, it’s so nice to have that record of the piece and to be a part of something kind of special.
OAW: You know the standard last question. What would you ask Kenji Bunch today?
KB: Wow, I wasn’t – I should have been ready for that one. I guess I would ask Kenji Bunch, “do you really think that what you’re doing is making a difference?” And, you know, it’s a fair question. It’s a little bit of an obscure world. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people. “Well, it’s classical music on classical instruments, but we play music by living composers.” It’s a mouthful to try to explain it sometimes.
And I would answer that by saying, “absolutely, this matters and makes a tangible difference in some people’s lives.” Maybe it’s not an enormous impact within the community, but I think we have to all go local and think about what each of us can do in our immediate circle. And if we’re able to have at all an outsized impact for our group.
What if everyone else did that? You know, what if everyone else was punching above their weight?
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So it’s that ripple effect that we’re counting on. And sure, there are moments when it feels like you’re screaming into the void or that you’re met with disinterest or disdain, and I think it’s in those moments that we just lean in and give each other a high five and keep at it.
Music editor Matthew Neil Andrews is a writer and musician specializing in the intersection of The Weird and The Beautiful. He cut his teeth in the newsroom of the Portland State Vanguard, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Subito, the student-run journal of PSU’s School of Music & Theater. He and his music can be reached at monogeite.bandcamp.com.
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