Imagining What is To Come | A Letter from Conductor Shohei Kobayashi

“The result, we hope, is an evening of music, paintings, photography, and film at Historic Alberta House that opens space for us to nuance and expand our understandings and memories of what happened here in Portland and to imagine what’s to come.”

Conductor Shohei Kobayashi | photo by Rachel Hadiashar

Guest conductor Shohei Kobayashi takes a moment to share their program notes from this weekend’s concert, Portland Protests.

Just a year or so ago when we began imagining this event, we learned that four previously unseen works by Portland-based artist Henk Pander would be on display at Historic Alberta House as part of the 7th Vanport Mosaic Festival.

Conductor Shohei Kobayashi | photo:Karen Pride

The oil paintings, inspired by Pander’s eyewitness accounts of the downtown protests sparked by viral videos of the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd, make subjects of the federal courthouse and the justice center—two high profile epicenters of Portland’s racial justice protests in 2020—2021. Upon seeing these buildings-turned-fortresses flanked by armed federal officers in tandem with the increasingly emboldened white nationalist presence around the city, Pander recalled his childhood living in Nazi-occupied Holland at the end of WWII. “This is what fascism looks like,” says Pander.

The first of the set, called Stain, features the federal courthouse with a prominent vertical smudge, “a stain on the American justice system.” The paintings, in addition to Pander’s works depicting scenes from the 1948 Vanport flood, really demand our attention, and it was clear that we would need to program the concert to be in dialogue with them.

Just a few existing pieces came to mind as effective counterpoint with the artwork.

To open the concert: Margaret Bonds’ 1968 St. Francis’ Prayer, only recently rediscovered in 2015 and published in 2020, a plea to be made instruments of peace, change agents in the world, written the January after the summer protests of 1967—right around the time Pander moved to the states. Sounds like Bonds imagining in vibrant harmony the world she wishes to see.

To view the paintings: selected movements from David Lang’s 2014 the national anthems, with a stitched-together text of lines extracted from the multiple national anthems, set with the composer’s characteristically transparent style. Sounds like and encourages critical distance.

To close the concert: Joel Thompson’s 2016 Hold Fast to Dreams, commissioned as a response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a choral recitative and aria combining two Langston Hughes texts contemplating the nature of dreams. Sounds like acceptance of a turbulent reality while still pressing on.

Guest composer Judy A. Rose and conductor Shohei Kobayashi | photo by Rachel Hadiashar

With these pieces and Pander’s artwork as the frame, we sought to fill out the concert with local perspectives. We commissioned three local poets – Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, A. Mimi Sei, Vin Shambry – to write texts for new choral works by three local composers – Judy A. Rose, Kimberly R. Osberg, Kenji Bunch. We collaborated with photographer Tojo Andrianarivo who spent several months in 2020 on the ground documenting protests in both Portland and Seattle to select images to project throughout the concert. We connected with filmmakers Julie Perini, Jodi Darby and Erin Yanke to share excerpts from their 2015 documentary Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon.

The result, we hope, is an evening of music, paintings, photography, and film at Historic Alberta House that opens space for us to nuance and expand our understandings and memories of what happened here in Portland and to imagine what’s to come.

Warmly,

Shohei Kobayashi
Conductor and Artistic Advisor
Resonance Ensemble

Tickets still available for both Saturday March 18 at 7:30 pm and Sunday March 19 at 3:00 pm. Click here for more information about Portland Protests and to buy yours today.