Sonic Sanctuary

On Tuesday, November 3, House of Scordatura will perform Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 at The Old Church Concert Hall, noon to 6pm. Six hours, no intermission. Come and go as you like. All proceeds go to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition (PIRC).

Why We Do This

An excellent question… not sufficiently answered with “because it’s there,” although that’s definitely part of it. I’ve always been drawn to impossible projects, from Rothko Chapel to Frozen Music, and the epic Feldman 2nd Quartet is simply something that I’d like to see happen. Frankly, this is always the question that we have to answer with House of Scordatura: Is this a show that we’d really like to see, that checks the boxes for community resonance and artistic value, and in this case the answer is a resounding yes.

I do not believe art fixes anything by itself. I do believe it makes room. It gathers people, holds them in one place for a while, and turns their attention toward something outside their own heads. It is also why we’ve attached this project to an organization doing the harder work. Making something beautiful and then handing the proceeds to people who are protecting their neighbors is how we at HoS seek to do our part to make this the kind of world in which we want to live.

November 3rd is the midterm election, and the ballot is a long one. Nationally, every seat in the U.S. House is up, along with a third of the Senate and thirty-six governorships. Control of Congress is settled that night. In Oregon we are electing a governor and a U.S. senator, all six of our congressional seats, the entire state House and half the state Senate. More than eleven hundred offices statewide, down to municipal judgeships.

For the communities PIRC works with, the outcomes on that ballot are not abstract. They determine who enforces what, and how.

November 3rd will be loud. Not in the hall, but everywhere else. Phones, notifications, projections, people who are certain and people who are frightened. The volume of that day is not something any of us can turn down.

What we can do is open a door and provide sonic sanctuary from the noise, at least for a while.

A Departure, Not a Pivot

Most people who know House of Scordatura know us from our Hollywood Theatre projects, Turkish Rambo. Gamera vs. Zigra. Both sold out. Those nights were loud and funny, built around live scores for films that were never meant to have one, played to a room that came ready to holler at the screen.

Sonic Sanctuary is the opposite in nearly every respect. Six hours, almost entirely quiet, no film, no plot, no punchlines.

I do not think of these as two different organizations. House of Scordatura has enough rooms for all of it, from the sublimity of Feldman to the ridiculousness of a sixty-foot flying turtle. What the rooms have in common is that the music happens live, in front of people, in a space where the audience is part of what is going on. Whether that produces reverence or laughter is a question of which room you are standing in.

The live cinema work continues. There is more of it coming, I promise. Keep an eye out for our new Animated Oregon film, “Habitat” by animator Zak Margolis and composer Nancy Ives. The debut of that visionary piece will be November 24th on the 45th Parallel concert. 

The Long Song

Feldman finished String Quartet No. 2 in 1983, four years before he died. It runs about six hours and is meant to be played straight through.

It is quiet for nearly all of that time. Small figures return over and over with slight changes in rhythm and color, and the changes come so gradually that you stop tracking them and start simply being inside them. Feldman said that up to about an hour a listener follows the form of a piece, and that past ninety minutes form gives way to scale. Six hours is not a long concert. It is a different kind of thing entirely.

What it Takes to Play it

I want to be honest about the physical side of this, because it is the part that gets romanticized and it should not be.

Six hours is longer than most people spend doing anything without stopping. The instrument stays up. The right arm keeps moving. Almost everything is soft, which means there is no loud playing to release the tension and no volume to hide behind. A bow drawn that slowly at that dynamic is one of the hardest things a string player is asked to do, and the piece asks for it continuously, for an entire afternoon, with intonation that has to stay clean the whole way. There is no adrenaline to ride. Adrenaline is for pieces that build.

The concentration is the harder half. The material repeats with tiny variations, and losing your place is easy and consequential. Four people have to stay locked together through thousands of quiet measures while listeners walk in and out around them.

Complete performances are rare for exactly these reasons. Most quartets never attempt it.

The Quartet

Marilyn de Oliveira, Shintaro Taneda, and Maia Hoffman are the reason I am not worried about it.

They are superb players, and more to the point they are the right players for this particular piece. Feldman does not reward brilliance. He rewards patience, control at the bottom of the dynamic range, and a willingness to give up the usual rewards of performing. Everyone in this quartet can do that and none of them needs the spotlight.

Nobody had to be talked into this. I explained the piece, the length, and the beneficiary, and everyone said yes for the same reason. That unanimity matters more than it might sound. Six hours is too long to sustain on obligation. It only works if all four of us want to be in that room on that day, and we do.

Why PIRC

The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition brings together member organizations across Oregon to defend the rights of immigrants and refugees. Legal support, know-your-rights education, rapid response, advocacy. The work is not abstract and it is not getting easier.

Sanctuary means two things here. One is a room where you can sit undisturbed for an afternoon. The other is what PIRC provides, and it is the one that matters more. We are borrowing the word from them, and the money follows the word.

Making Room

Two other organizations decided this was worth doing, and the project does not exist without them.

The Old Church Concert Hall is donating the venue. That is not a symbolic gesture. Six hours on a Tuesday is an entire day of a working hall's calendar given away in the middle of a season, and halls do not have days to spare. Constance Bracewell and her staff read a proposal for a quiet six-hour piece benefiting immigrant rights on Election Day and said yes without hedging. Because the space is donated, the money you put in the box goes to PIRC instead of to overhead. The Old Church has been standing on that corner for well over a century, and it has spent most of that time being useful to whoever needed the room.

RBC Wealth Management is sponsoring the performance. Sponsors usually get exposure to an audience that is buying something. Here there is nothing to buy, and the proceeds leave the building on their way to somebody else. They backed it anyway.

This is the part of Portland I would defend to anyone. Institutions here still lend each other rooms. A concert hall gives up a day, a bank underwrites music it will not profit from, a coalition receives the money, and four musicians play. Nobody in that chain had to participate, and all of them did, because the shared assumption is that a city takes care of the people in it.

That is a value, and it is worth naming when it shows up.

Attending

There is no wrong way to be there. Stop in for ten minutes after you drop your ballot. Stay the whole afternoon. Close your eyes. Bring someone and say nothing to them. Seating is open, movement is expected, and nothing you do will disturb the performance.

The music will run between five and a half and six hours, which is normal for this piece.

Details

What: Sonic Sanctuary. Morton Feldman, String Quartet No. 2, performed complete.
When: Tuesday, November 3, 2026, noon to 6pm.
Where: The Old Church Concert Hall, 1422 SW 11th Ave, Portland.
Admission: $25 suggested donation, benefiting the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition.
Performers: The House of Scordatura String Quartet: Marilyn de Oliveira, Shintaro Taneda, Maia Hoffman, and Ron Blessinger.