The Pacific Northwest, in score and sound.
Mahonia Music is a music publisher and record label exploring what classical music sounds like when it's genuinely of this place, releasing work by Oregon and Pacific Northwest composers and performers, and treating regional identity as a question worth asking rather than answered.
The Mahonia Music Ethos
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Performance materials built for current practice
Tablet-ready layouts
Hybrid parts: full reduced score available alongside individual full-size parts
Repeats written out rather than indicated by signs, eliminating page-turn friction
Designed by active performers, not print conventions
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Editorial focus on Oregon and PNW creators
A clear, narrow remit. Mahonia is the publisher and label that takes the Pacific Northwest region as its central subject rather than one of many.
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Publishing and recordings under one roof
A composer or ensemble working with Mahonia benefits from recording, score preparation, and performance materials handled as a coherent project rather than split across vendors with different editorial priorities.
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Direct relationships, small scale
Director Nancy Ives and the label are reachable. Decisions are made by people who know the work and the artists, which matters for living composers whose pieces continue to develop.
Nancy Ives, Founder & Director
Nancy Ives is the founder and director of Mahonia Music. A composer, cellist, and longtime Portland resident, she created the label to explore a question she’s been turning over for most of her creative life: what does it mean for music to belong to a place, and what might classical music sound like when it's of the Pacific Northwest?
Nancy has been principal cellist of the Oregon Symphony for more than twenty-five years, a vantage point that has shaped both her musical instincts and her sense of the region's creative ecosystem. Her own compositions — including Celilo Falls, premiered by the Oregon Symphony in 2025; the violin concerto Immortal Beloved; and chamber works including Quaking Giant and Together Apart — have been performed across the United States and Europe, and her work consistently engages with environmental systems, Indigenous collaboration, and the cultural and ecological character of the West.
Mahonia Music grew from that artistic preoccupation and from a practical observation: Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are home to composers and performers whose work deserves the same serious platform classical music gives to its national and international names. Nancy intends the label to be small, focused, and deliberately built. The catalogue begins with her own projects and will expand outward over time, guided by the same central question and the same standard.
Nancy holds a DMA from the Manhattan School of Music and lives in Portland, Oregon.
“Nancy Ives… has built a career of such spectacular diversity that no summation will do her achievements justice”