“Horse Notations is one of the Oregon East Symphony projects I'm most proud of helping produce. It was a conceptual stretch for both the musicians involved and the audience. Its public reception - overflow audiences and standing ovations for its two performances - confirms a suspicion that I've long held: that rural musicians and audiences can embrace challenging music presented in the right context.

Horses are of spiritual significance to the Umatilla, Walla Walla and (especially the) Cayuse peoples, not to mention central to the cowboy pageantry of Pendleton. For Northeastern Oregon, that programmatic consideration was the perfect avenue to explore adventurous notions of timbre, rhythm, communication, and playing technique.”

- James Dean Kindle, OES 2020-