Portland, OR: November 11-14, 2015 - A Soldier's Mother's Lullaby (NCCO)

Well, I certainly took my sweet time getting this post written.  First time anyone's said to me they were looking forward to a blog post and I take like a month to get it posted.  I barely remember the sequence of events.  Luckily, I take photos.  That's the secret to my success.  I just look at the pictures and figure it out.  Anyway.  Onward!

The National Collegiate Choral Organization, or NCCO, is relatively new on the scene of choir conferences, having had its inaugural event in 2005 and only occurring every other year since.  Unlike ACDA back in February, I was at this event not as an attendant but as a participant - the Cardinal Singers were selected to be among the half dozen or so groups that performed throughout the long weekend we were there.

I believe Portland was chosen, at least in part, because Ethan Sperry, director at Portland State, was one of the founding members of NCCO.  He, incidentally, had visited Louisville about a month or two beforehand, and also, incidentally, had commissioned a piece several years ago that Cardinal was, at the time, performing on our next concert, so he was quite happy to step in and conduct us during rehearsal just for funsies.

Also, I got to miss some school for this, so that's fun.  Of course, almost all of my classes are directly involved in choir, so there was only like, one that I had to explain to the professor.  Anyway, we left Wednesday morning in three groups: the llamas, the goats, and the sheep.  These names were chosen, I think, as a one-time joke; nevertheless they stuck.  The three groups were just the three different flights into Portland.  That's it.

The goats - that included me - were first to arrive and had to manage getting to the hotel all by our widdle selves.  Just to make things exciting, one of our members decided to forget his wallet on the plane, and a contingent had to be left behind to reclaim it.  Story is that the wallet was found with four minutes to spare.  Any later and it would have been in Los Angeles.  Well done there.

This is a thing in the airport:

We got from airport to hotel by way of train.  The train ride was actually pretty cool.  Got to see a few nice views, including this, crossing the river:

Made it to the hotel without incident.  As we were checking in, I noticed a familiar face over at the other end of the counter.  I turned to someone else in our group and mutter-whispered to them: "that's Dominick DiOrio."  Very exciting to almost no one reading this, probably, but at the time we were rehearsing one of his pieces for New Music Festival, so most of our group knew his name.  We said hello as he walked by, and he asked if we were the choir from Louisville.  We said yes.  I asked if he was coming to New Music Festival to hear us sing his piece - not unreasonable, since he's at Indiana - but he said no.  He had some conference in Hawaii.  Psh.

Got word from the sheep that they'd be in late enough that we should go ahead and have dinner.  First, we decided to try to find the church we'd be performing at the next day to see if we could rehearse in it that night.  Unfortunately, there was a Black Lives Matter conference being held there.  Y'know, that last sentence out of context makes me sound like a pretty terrible person.

Anywho, some shots from our walk round town:

Ate at a place called Pizza Schmizza.  Also had some beer at a place called Pizza Schmizza.  It was a good place.

The sheep arrived and got dinner too, and all of us convened in a ballroom at the hotel to rehearse.  Well, everyone except the llamas.  Their plane got way delayed.  They ended up getting to the hotel at about 3:00AM.  But anyway.

You may remember that name Ēriks Ešenvalds from the ACDA entry.  He's one of the most commissioned and performed choral composers today and we, lucky group that we are, got to premiere a piece of his at this conference called A Soldier's Mother's Lullaby.  There still isn't an excellent recording of it that I know about, but as soon as there is, it will be inserted here.  It's rull good son.  It'll change ya life.

While going through our music and discussing the day to come, Dr. Hatteberg pulled out his phone to check for a text from Ēriks, who we were hoping to meet up with so he could hear how we were doing on his piece.  Unfortunately it didn't look like that evening was going to work, but Hatteberg kept checking his phone anyway.  As he was discussing details for our performance and gesticulating with the phone in his hand, Dylon interrupted him and asked, "Dr. Hatteberg...are you calling somebody?"

He stopped mid-sentence and looked at his phone.  "...I guess I'm calling Latvia."

He talked to Ešenvalds briefly about rehearsing the next day.  He held it together for the call, but started cracking up as soon as he hung up.  "I just butt-dialed one of the top choral composers in the world."

The next morning, we went to the opening ceremony and first performances at the church we'd been unable to get into the night before.  It was pretty neat aesthetically, but not the best space for performing.  Not enough reverb.

After the morning session was a lunch break.  Hatteberg was certain Ešenvalds was in the church somewhere, so we set out to find him.  At last, I spotted him over by the door and walked over.  "Kent Hatteberg is looking for you," I said, forgetting to even introduce myself.  He gave me a puzzled look.  "I just talked to him."

Oh...well.  Don't I feel dumb.  So I complimented his piece and went on my way.

For lunch, we partook of the local delicacy: food trucks.

It legitimately is one of the things Portland is known for.  A whole city block surrounded with these shacks and trailers, most serving one or another variety of Asian food, for some reason.  I found what I think might have been the only pizza truck and got some barbecue chicken thing.  It was only then that I realized I'd had pizza the night before.  Ah well.  We ate in this little square:

After lunch, we returned to the church to at last have our rehearsal with Ešenvalds.  He seemed to like it.  He even took a picture with us holding his hand in a way that suggests approval of the University of Louisville: 

We pretty much had the rest of the day free until the evening's concert.  I and several others wanted to see the city, so we set out to do so.  First stop: Voodoo Doughnuts.  One of those things I'd been told I had to try.  This was one of the two I got:

The other one didn't last long enough to be photographed.

Walking through the rain, we then trekked to Powell's Books, one of the most famous bookstores in the country.  Maybe the most famous.  Maybe in the world.  I don't have stats to back that up though.

With time to get back, change, and get to the church again, that was about it for our sightseeing.  The concert that night was really incredible.  This was my first time performing at a conference with the Cardinal Singers, and it's an experience that'll stay with me for quite some time.  Especially the Ešenvalds piece.  My goodness.  I can usually get through performances no problem, but I had trouble holding it together during the duet portion at the end.  Again...I'm champing at the bit for that recording.

We waited for our turn to go under the church in the basement, which is where this infamous picture comes from:

And here's one from our actual performance:

One of the nice things about going on trips in large groups is that there are so many people to steal pictures from when you get home.

Anyway, after the concert it was time to celebrate.  Somehow we ended up right back at Pizza Schmizza.  I hear it was dollar beer night somewhere else, but I paid full price.  I also paid the price the next morning, but that's a different story.

With the concert done, we had the rest of the trip to just enjoy the conference.  Well, sort of.  Friday morning we went to a session that was supposed to be a conversation with Simon Carrington and John Eliot Gardiner, which is a big deal, but we ended up in the overflow room, so we just watched half of a Skype conversation with Simon Carrington and John Eliot Gardiner.  Not as cool.  Then, since we were going to immediately have our New Music Festival Concert upon returning to Louisville, we spent the next 90 minutes or so rehearsing the pieces for that.  Fun!  But, hey, that's the trade-off.  And we needed it.

After that, we were free to go about our day once more, but for the most part we just wanted to eat and sleep.  That night was another concert, one that we were set to participate in as a quasi-flash mob.  Ethan Sperry, mentioned above, was one of the conductors for the concert, and wanted us to sing with his group on that Ešenvalds piece he had conducted when he visited Louisville, so the plan was to just walk up when that piece came up on the program and join on in.  When we did this, the guy next to me said, "we just got this today."

"Oh," I said, "we have it memorized."  Whoops.

But it went just fine.  Simon Carrington's group then went as well.  Also, this concert was at a different venue, one much more reverberant and...well...church-looking.

There was a contingent interested in more revelry that night but I just couldn't.  We had to wake up at 3am to make our flight, and I needed to still be in good voice two days later for that next concert.  To sleep I went.

The next morning - early, early morning - we got a bus instead of taking the train since, y'know, they aren't running at 4:00.  We had a long day of flying ahead of us, then within 24 hours of returning to Louisville, another concert.  The choir train, unlike the Portland train, she never stops running.

As the plane leapt into the sky, the first of the morning sun blazed into view over the horizon: