FallSong 2025 - Portland FolkMusic Society

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FallSong Festival
October 24-26 2025

The FallSong Festival is Portland FolkMusic Society’s annual on-line worldwide event, taking place this year from 1 PM, Friday October 24, through 5 PM Sunday October 26, 2025 (all times Pacific).

FallSong is a place to enjoy the best folk music from many different traditions. FallSong consists of song circles, workshops and mini-concerts presented by the participants.You will find a link to the draft schedule below. Keep scrolling down...

Here's a special treat for FallSong participants

Friend of FallSong Casey'Casebeer will present a workshop on “What’s New On Zoom”. Zoom keeps evolving, and it's important to know about changes and new features. Casey will tell you about a few things that have changed recently in Zoom, and the rest of the time will be devoted to your Q&A.

Note that this will be TUESDAY BEFORE FALLSONG, 6:30 pm Pacific Time on Tuesday October 21.

Registration is NOT required for this event; however it is intended primarily for FallSong participants.

Click here to join Casey's event.

All Participant Gatherings

On the FallSong Schedule - coming out in draft VERY SOON - you'll see three All Participant Gatherings. Most of FallSong is about singing, most often in break out rooms, but we also take a bit of the schedule so we can all be together in the same Zoom place and look at things that we hope will be interesting and important to you.

There are three All Participant Gatherings, one each day:
Friday, 12:45 - 12:55 - A two minute land-acknowledgement video and just a few minutes for discussion
Saturday, 10:00 - 10:25 - Lessons from Joe Hickerson's Life. Many of you knew Joe, who passed away at 89 on August 17. We'll have a short film that will try to capture the unique qualities of Joe, and then people who were touched by his life can (quickly) share what they have taken away from knowing him.
Sunday, 16:00 The Singing Revolution. Not enough of us know how amazingly important singing was for the three Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, whose refusal to kowtow to the Soviet Union led them to independence without a shot being fired. Authoritarian regimes really don't like people singing, because song brings us together. Dictators like to divide and rule and turn groups of people against other groups. We'll have a presentation about the Singing Revolution, and then a chance to talk about lessons for today.

We hope you will come participate at all of these!

Draft FallSong Schedule

Click to see the most current version of the schedule. This will automatically update whenever there is a modification to the schedule.

The schedule lists the events, times, rooms, the Event Leaders, and the Session Assistants. This is still an early version of the schedule. Inevitably, there will be some changes.

We will have a draft version of the FallSong program available here very soon. It will contain descriptions of the events, and bios of event leaders.

There are still a very few empty slots for song circles and workshops. If you wish there was a song circle of Broadway tunes or Broadside ballads, or whatever, why not lead it yourself. Click to send a message (right away please!) to FallSong@PortlandFolkMusic.org Thanks!

Volunteer

We need volunteer session assistants to provide technical backup to the event leaders. The job consists of numbering participants if needed, muting when appropriate, and generally being available to help both leader and participants with technical issues that may arise.

If you have done this job at FallSong or on-line Singtime or other events in the past, and would be willing to contribute an hour of your time during the festival, and be trained in procedures, please let us know when you register. If you can be a session assistant, please register as soon as possible and no later than October 13.

If you have questions, please let us know. We'll get back to you. Thanks!

Contribute... or Join PFS!

FallSong is free. Sort of.

We love offering FallSong to the community and who would charge for an event that is mostly run by the participants anyway? However, PFS has ongoing expenses - zoom fees, insurance, website and webhosting and list management, printing and mailing, our annual Strawberry Social - and so on. If you can pitch in a bit, we'll be grateful.

And if you are not a PFS member, one good way to support FallSong is by joining PFS, Members get some reduced prices on the events we charge for, they get the excellent (we think!) Local Lore newsletter six times a year, and they can vote and even run for office. Plus, they get the satisfaction of supporting the music we all love.

Whatever you do, thanks!

Click here to contribute. Find out about joining PFS (non-members only)

Registration

Click here to register for FallSong

Clicking will take you to another page, and we will ask you a few questions as part of the registration process. It only takes a minute.

It will ask you if you want to lead an event. The schedule is full, but we also don't want to turn anyone away, so please do fill in the blanks about leading events. We might add more rooms, someone may have to drop out. We'll get back to you soon if you say you'd like to lead something. Be optimistic, but please note that the odds of being able to lead something go down steadily the closer we get to FallSong so please act now.