 My name is Pat Oscannell. The long version is Patricia Maureen Oscannell and if you want all four names it's Patricia Maureen Anastasia Oscannell. It turns out I have another name. I was adopted so my original name was Moira Reynolds. But be that as it may I had just started to tell you about coming up here in 1980 and since you gave reference to obviously in our discussion beforehand the women's movement I just want to mention that I've been involved in the women's movement since long before I came up to Ashland. So that's just sort of there to tuck in your back pocket. And when I got here in 1980 it was after completing a degree in music at UC Riverside. And after getting involved in music fairly young I started as a professional church organist when I was 13. So I had gotten into early music very early started out as a church organist and got started in my training so by the time I was in high school I pretty much knew that medieval and Renaissance music was what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough that I lived in Riverside California and at UC Riverside there was a really strong program there called Collegium Musicum which is there to teach people either how to be a conduit between a modern instrument that they already play into an early instrument or just to teach them to learn to play early instruments. And so that's kind of where I got my start there and studied under a wonderful director Dr. Fred Gable who's luckily still going in great health and does a lot of editions of music by Michael Pretorius a famous Renaissance composer. So I kind of got a really good start out in that so it was very lucky for me that at such a young age and I think I was 23 when Todd Barton received my resume and audition tape that he hired me and so you know in reference to the women's movement I also want to praise Todd he had a history of hiring women for the green shows as performers which was really wonderful I was so honored to be hired it was definitely the I kind of auditioned almost just as sort of a test a trial run I had worked at one Shakespeare Festival and this one was the pinnacle within the U.S. of programs like it for music and so I kind of thought well I should at least get some experience auditioning you know so I was actually surprised when I was hired and Todd was also the one who allowed me to move forward 10 years later when I was advanced into the directorial position he was the one who really facilitated that so a big shout out to Todd Barton who is very much a equal opportunity sort of sort of guy and I loved working under him although he was really my director for only one year but so I came to Ashland the first 10 years I was just absorbed in being a green show musician and doing everything that we did we made a certain number of recordings there wasn't a lot of emphasis on that at that time and we accompanied a group of historic dancers and we did our shows you know it was set in this format which you probably encountered 2020 or 2000 when you got here which was three shows each one was supposed to be tied to some degree to one of the outdoor plays as time went on the interpretation of how that was going to be meted out kind of changed you know over time but when I got there it was early music all the way not just early music but it was English Renaissance music it was very much music of the time of Shakespeare of music of Shakespeare and his contemporaries English music and we did the three dance forms we did you know English country dance we did courtly dance such as you might find in Italy or France and we did the Morris dancing you know with the sticks and the bells and all that kind of stuff and so we really had an opportunity which was amazing to work with live dancers every night that was great then ten years go by and we you know series of music directors come and go and I have the opportunity and I go away for a year I establish a group called the Terra Nova consort which does some touring and then I come back the following year as the music director bringing the Terra Nova consort into residence at the Shakespeare Festival we were the band that provided music then for the next 17 years for the dancers and also for ourselves because the shows you may recall before dance kaleidoscope arrived yeah because they I think came a little bit after that that lost my train of thought how could that possibly have happened before dance kaleidoscope arrived well we had historic dancing only and then when they came it all shifted to modern dance and the whole emphasis change and everything changed about what we did the dancers were I wouldn't say fired because it really was a season to season job at that point but our wonderful Judy Kennedy our wonderful dance reconstruction has to been with us for so many years she was sort of moved out of the picture and strangely and still to this day you know a subject of some wonderment on my part the Terra Nova consort was was retained the dancers were moved aside and then a Martha Graham trained dance ensemble from Indianapolis you know with at the head the choreographer David Ho Choi who used to be one one of Martha Graham's principal dancers you can find a lot of footage of him in those days he was an amazing extraordinary dancer but he's one of the few people who who can choreograph in that style and be an official you know Martha dancer Martha Graham dancer that so that was 10 years of really collaborating with somebody like that and we would go back to Indianapolis and do shows with them but that was also during the time when the Terra Nova consort was really starting to gain its foot we started to do things outside of Ashland we began by collaborating with a world-class musician who lived in Seattle at that time unfortunately she has passed a wonderful woman named Margaret Tindemans who was a Dutch early string player and we collaborated with her and started co-producing concerts in Seattle and that kind of got us started sort of envisioning our band beyond just Ashland we won a few contests and blah blah blah we ended up making two well we made 17 albums over the period of time I'm talking about one per year but the last two were the ones that I explained were had a more broad release they were picked up by Dorian which was an audiophile label that went under eventually but it was a Canadian label at that time a very high-standing if you were an audiophile and it was all about the sound being perfect and you know the way they had us we recorded our two albums with them in Troy New York and the Troy music hall which is like Carnegie Hall only better better acoustics and so back in the day if you looked at your record albums many many many many albums were record recorded in Troy music hall so that was that was really cool it was haunted stories of hauntings but anyway so that that was that period was for me the Taranova concert was sort of my brainchild and so everything that happened during that era was the result of a lot of you know kind of concentrated effort and energy to produce the group and have it move beyond Ashland so eventually we were picked up by Abbey music management and we started touring worldwide we hit some big music festivals and we got some amazing reviews and it was just a real pinnacle for us of every all of that unfortunately all of that was happening at the same time that the Shakespeare Festival's interest in things historical was waning and so there what had been incredible support for us and everything we'd done up to that point just dropped out and it became more about you know their current thing which was David Ho Choy and modern dance and and all of that and so it was I have to admit it was a little bit of a stretch for me to try to fit within all of that to try to still have the early music component be something important and visceral and happening right now and exciting in a context of well what we really want is brand new music written for modern dancers so I would consider that to be sort of a time when the Taranova concert such as we were that started to wane and you know as life is you know you hit a pinnacle you can't just be there the rest of your life you have things have to go up and down so that was the contour of that after I left Shakespeare and that was in 2007 was my last season there when I was on full contract I took a few years off I did my Edith Piaf show which hopefully you can maybe take a look at the review of that and that had started out as a green show but I turned it into a bit more of a cabaret sort of style show and and did it at a local theater the Camelot and projects like that you know did a little bit of jazz with Bill Leonard and you know a few other people and just kind of started a rock band with cold cover art that did progressive rock I needed to get away from early music a little bit just to kind of freshen the palette I guess you'd say and then in 2000 so that was 2007 then in 2016 I decided it took me a while to figure out what I was going to do but I realized what I needed to do with early music was to start a nonprofit that it wasn't a for-profit endeavor and it had never been really it always had been under the auspices of a Shakespeare festival or California Pleasure fairs or whatever and that on my own it was kind of hard to figure out how to make all that work but started Musica Matrix which is my nonprofit which is in suspended animation right now because of COVID-19 trying to figure out how maybe to retool it but that's a whole other story and started that in 2016 just started producing concerts founded probably about 10 different ensembles that I either play in or direct and then provided you know a production support all kinds of support for people who wanted opportunities to play and provide them with an audience and all that kind of stuff so I have a board and everything but you know it's one of it's a small nonprofit I tend to be sort of chief cook and bottle washer it keeps me very busy but of course you know COVID-19 has changed a lot of that so I'm in a resting period and hence gardening all kinds of other things I've completed a book I'm started on the second book so but getting back to I know the crux of all of this is really the women's movement so I want to just kind of go back in history a minute to say that I said early on that when I got here I was already involved in the women's movement I would say I've been a feminist since word go I don't think I probably was a feminist before I really knew what that word meant and then I read about it and went oh that's what I am so in that spirit I was also a songwriter and a lot of my songs were about women's lives and I wrote over 50 songs so when I first came up here the women's community such as it was at that time they they saw me they knew I worked at the Shakespeare Festival but they more related to me through my song writing and being a singer-songwriter so that that's a whole other facet of what I did and it started to kind of in a way if you look just at that it sort of disappeared I guess as my job at Shakespeare got bigger and bigger and as Taranova became more all-consuming and everything and also as I was able to express myself more through Taranova as a director because when you direct early music a lot of the skills are also arranging music and I discovered that that was a real passion that arranging music was something I really loved and got more into and was able to kind of flesh that out more with the Taranova concert so I guess you know kind of creatively that was sort of disappearing this other thing was happening but I continued writing songs I've written songs in various styles over the years since that time because another style of music that I do and I'll shut up in just one second is a traditional Irish music of the British Isles in Ireland particularly of Ireland 87 just by the way was the year that I I went to Ireland for the very first time and was able to kind of connect with roots and all that kind of stuff and it was I remember that period being very vibrant as far as the women's community I don't know what I don't if I don't know if I got less in touch with it over time or if it just felt like there was a period when it was like scary to say you were a feminist you know maybe it was a little of both it went from a kind of a point of pride and a point of something that really brought people together and various things that we did like take back the night marches and things like that you know that felt so important and so in the moment and then it just drifted and part of it was like I said it was probably me because I was pulling away from the community not because I wanted to but because my job was taking up more and more of my time like any job you know well not like any job but maybe like being a teacher or something like that where you think okay it's a full-time job and you work Monday through Friday but then there's all the work you do after the fact and what I was trying to do was to push our group and kick our butt into a into a world-class status and there was a lot involved with doing that you know entering contests and you know playing many different places trying to find good representation God we went through like five different agents before we found one who would actually do anything for us and then of course every time you get with a different agency it takes approximately two to three years to extricate yourself even if they've done nothing for you a lot of that so but as far as the women's movement yeah I mean I remember going up to Lake of the Woods I remember there were we had some gatherings up there I know I played up there one of my main venues was a place called the Beanery which used to be and now this is really going back in what is the place where they make the cakes and pies it was at a town it was a Italian restaurant for a while and everything but that little place where they actually make the bakery that was the Beanery not even that part off to the side that goes around the corner just that one little small room not the building they bought they built next door which became the Beanery which would have been nice to work there it was big this was very small and we would have live music sometimes and I would play there at night and so I built up a little you know following mostly women and I think I played there once a week or something like that I also worked at the Beanery for one season because when I first started working at Shakespeare we were paid on kind of like a scholarship sort of basis so a it wasn't a lot of money be it was a shorter season that eventually my season was nine months long it was originally four months long and so you couldn't accrue more than three years worth of those kind of salaries monies according to the federal government you had to take a break from it and start again so I worked for three years then I took a year off moved to Gold Hill continued writing songs with the knowledge I was going to be back the following year that they'd already told me at Shakespeare I was rehired but I just had to leave for one year and so you know so when so it was the it was really the the federal monies aspect that caused me to have to go away but I went away came back and that was all around that same period it comes down to two different aspects the first one was the timbers of the instruments right so I already my folks my mother was a trained singer and so I heard a lot of different styles of music at home I'd already heard orchestral music and I'd heard a lot of different kinds of music but these instruments sounded different like there was sort of something that was called a violin but it didn't sound like the violins I had ever heard there was a sort of flutey thing called the recorder well I had this pure sound that was different than the flute and then there were reed instruments I'd never heard of like you know captured reed instruments like crumb horns and things like that who heard who has heard of that right so it just kind of captured my my imagination the timbers and the second part was the modes because the scales that we have now in modern times are fairly simplistic there's like you have a major scale you have a minor scale you could have an augmented chord you can have a diminished chord but they didn't think in terms of chords they thought in terms of modes so instead of like two scales they had like 12 modes you know and as a keyboard player it was easier easy for me to envision it because it really goes white key to white key white key to white key white key to white key and then all of the where the half steps are gets jumbled around for each scale producing some very exotic sounding scales and these were these are the basic building blocks of me of Western music this is what all of our music is based on it got simpler and the rhythms oh my gosh the rhythms so complex so many different levels of rhythm going on that the notational systems had to actually be you know had to be created to support that many different kinds of rhythms and all of that got simplified over time as well so sorry I keep somehow how do I do it I don't know how does she do it so the modes were a big huge part of it and like I said starting out on the organ I was able to quickly sort of figure out that I love the early stuff and my teacher was willing to go along with me he got me into books to who then Bach and you know some of the early composers and didn't insist I played all the like there's a lot of you may not know this or you may know this there's a whole bunch of romantic style romantic period music written for the organ like tons of it don't like it it's not it's just not my thing so he was very he was good for me because he taught me what I needed to know but he also allowed me to kind of find my little pocket of interest so that's probably what started it out as soon as I got interested in it and I started to collaborate with the collegiate music program that I told you about and that was while I was still in high school I had a buddy who also went into early music professionally as it happens and we would walk over from the high school to the university campus and we'd sit outside the collegium music indoor and we'd we'd listen to that and so and now I've lost my train of you had a question I've rambled and so that's when I first really heard them live and so then you start to see what they look like and you start to connect with the people playing them you find out a little bit of information and then when we actually began playing with the group of course we learned a lot more about them we found that these instruments are there's more people playing them now than there were in the Renaissance period we found that there's more builders of the recorder now in the world than there were in the whole Renaissance period so it's it's kind of like the Highland bagpipes there's more playing those now than ever were at the height of the instrument in Scotland when it first you know kind of hit its heyday so you find out about them and you have an opportunity to handle them to play now this was why you see Riverside was such a great program for me because I came there and they had all these instruments you know they had a set of Renaissance style recorders they had a set of crumb horns they had a set of violas de gamba an instrument that I still play and teach you know they had everything they really had Fred Gable had taken years because the program had been going for 25 years or something before I got there and Fred had inherited and it had really burgeoned and turned it into something and had I obviously had some kind of budget to buy instruments so that was where I got sort of the hands-on learning about these instruments and realized that you know you could if you've got a list of the good builders and stuff you could easily order instruments and have them made for you and the first instrument that I had made that my father actually commissioned for me and I still have this instrument was a viola de gamba built by a man named Lynn Elder and his great contribution to early music and it was a great he's still alive I think but he doesn't live on the West Coast anymore a great contribution was he made instruments that students could afford to buy so this is the viola de gamba it's literally the vial of the legs there were a lot of other violas viola de braccio you know all kinds of different it was a generic term but it's held between the legs like a cello would be but it comes in different sizes like all the instruments you know you've seen the recorder and there's a little one a soprano and alto a tenor bass etc same with these same with the sack but which is the trombone all different sizes same with all the reed instruments so this is the treble the smallest one and it's held between the legs but bowed underhand so if you play a modern string or you've seen somebody playing violin or cello they be holding this with this grip I'm holding with this grip the strings are made out of gut it has frets on it like a guitar so in pretty much every way it's totally different from a cello but when people see it they think cello one day one night I played a show out on the green at OSF I was playing my tenor and at the end of the show this woman came up to me and she said oh how nice darling she said you play a training cello so I had to explain to her no this is not a training cello in fact it's not related to the cello it's related to the guitar but anyway just an example I think the instruments are beautiful you know they they spent a lot of time making them look beautiful because that was important to them they would hide any bits of metal they thought were unseemly or whatever so they're just a joy to look at as well but I have a very large collection of various instruments and this is one of my violas de gamba. Musica Matrix has really been my focus for the last several years I wouldn't say ten but you know six maybe and I've really been enjoying it I think we've brought a lot to the community however given that we were a performance-based operation basically producing concerts so that musicians who play those styles would have an opportunity to play that's kind of hard right now with what's going on with COVID-19 I'm I'm reticent to produce concerts where I'm not sure people are going to come they're not the kind of instruments that play well outside unless you're choosing specifically a loud instrument that is to be played outside but most of the instruments we're dealing with and that I'm dealing with are these indoor instruments very quiet so I'm guessing it's probably going to be the end of this year before I can even decide on whether we will produce concerts in 2021 that's my current kind of plan is I'll make that decision in December however what you know one thing that's you hate to talk about COVID-19 having any good aspects because it's just so horrific for so many people but I guess everything every cloud has some kind of silver lining and what it has afforded me is just some time to kind of realize how much of what a workload I had placed upon myself and that I needed some time off and also to think about maybe how music a matrix could possibly be retooled in the next couple of years in a way that would benefit the community I'm still thinking about that I need to talk to our web designer I have ideas right now about how we might give some forums on our website we have a nice website to local musicians to maybe post ads or talk about things they're doing or an idea that I had that I need to figure out if this is even feasible would be to show some concerts some live concerts that people are doing now and produce those concerts for them so they get quite an audience and so I need to talk to the web designer to see how that could possibly work but it took me probably I mean March 17th was for me because of working at the food bank that was our cutoff date before we revamped our whole system there that's how long it took me to be able to figure it out I was like I would like to think of a way to retool this and I I just kept thinking and nothing came to me and I just set it aside and in the setting aside of it my mind was still working on and I came up with some ideas so I guess that's just a way to say hey there's always some good thing that can come out of some bad thing and and I'm just so thrilled you know I guess the cap on this would be to say how thrilled I am that that a project like this is being undertaken I think so often the contributions of women are lost and forgotten no matter how important you are it can be easy to take that on and to think oh my gosh I'm just not whatever enough then you're thinking but wait a bit Madame Curie and you know all these famous women who you still have to kind of kick people in the butt to remind them that they existed and what they did and there's more and more women like that so I'm hopeful I'm hopeful that that's going to burgeon and continue to bring us you know more opportunities