Aurora Colony music revived and digitized

AURORA -- It's not often that composers use blackberry juice to write music.

But back in the second half of the 1800s, it was the ink of choice for musicians of the Aurora Colony, a communal Christian settlement south of Portland. Imagine what they would think about having their fruitful compositions digitized.

Digitizing is precisely what the Aurora Colony Historical Society is doing after discovering three boxes of sheet music in 2000, bringing its collection to about 200 scores.

The discovery made the Aurora Colony collection the largest of 19th-century band music in Oregon, according to Andrew Willette, a music instructor at Portland State University who is working to make digital copies of the sheet music.

"It is not enough for a museum to merely possess an artifact like this. Possessing is nothing -- anybody can do that," said Gail Robinson, project director for the Oregon Music Project. "We had to find a way to make it available to people."

After receiving four grants, totaling $41,500, the Oregon Music Project is set to mail out free compact discs containing three scores each, including sound clips, to about 230 school and community bands throughout the state before the end of the month.

The music was a great historical discovery, according to Robinson and historical society curator Patrick Harris, who both said the brass band and other musical groups were key aspects of the Aurora Colony culture.

Founded in Oregon in 1856 by William Keil, the colony was a relatively independent community.

"They shared labor and property, and most people would not have dealt with the colonists on a one-to-one basis other than the exchanges they would have had with the band or the music, or if they stopped at the hotel," Harris said.

The one hotel in the colony was a popular weekend destination for Portland-area residents, Robinson said.

The music represents a core aspect of the colony's culture and legacy in the state, where the brass band was a favorite.

"Every year they entered the band contest in the state fair, and as soon as the other bands heard, they dropped out," Robinson said.

The sheet music that survived, some of which Harris said likely dates back to the colony's earliest days, suffered some water damage.

Once they were found, the compositions were cleaned, organized and put in acid-free containers. Then the digitization began.

The process is done by using an electronic keyboard to enter the music into a notation software program called Finale, Willette said.

Few complete scores survived over the years. Instead, Willette said he works with the part books of individual players to reconstruct a complete score.

He said it takes about 80 hours to perfect one score. So far he has digitized 25 scores.

After going through the music, Willette said, he cross-checks scores with the Library of Congress to try to verify whether they were original ones composed by Aurora Colony members. Of the 200 scores he is working with, he said, he estimates that 10 percent were locally composed.

Today, the Aurora Colony Band -- a community band directed by John Keil Richards, a retired Oregon Symphony tuba player and a former associate dean at Lewis & Clark College -- plays the old music with restored 19th-century instruments. "When we first put some of the music together, the musicians that I chose were all symphony musicians, and they were just absolutely dumbfounded by the complexity of the music," Richards said. "It's very, very well done."

It could be 10 years before the existing collection of music is completely digitized. And that doesn't include recent discoveries of pieces that "keep coming out of the woodwork," Robinson said, laughing.

"We're hoping that the music will become a better-known piece of Oregon history," Harris said.

Katlyn Carter: 503-294-5914; katlyncarter@news.oregonian.com