Kai’s Bird Concert
This is a 1 ¼-hour immersive bird-themed concert I designed as part of my senior experience at Lawrence University. It combines my two biggest passions, music and birds, which have been large parts of my life for over 10 years. In this concert I explored many different ways composers have used birds as inspiration for piano compositions, and I premiered three new bird-themed pieces (indicated by asterisks below) as part of the program. The concert was designed around a 7.1 surround sound system in Lawrence’s Harper Hall which was used to play field recordings, immersing the audience in a reconstructed natural soundscape. To create this I spent hours mapping field recordings, many of which I personally recorded, onto the different speakers with Ableton Live. I also worked with a lighting designer to create a more unique lighting. I am currently working on adapting the program for future performances.
Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps, I. “Liturgie de cristal”
“Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.”
The beginnings of a dawn chorus, one of my favorite parts of spring, seemed like the perfect way to open this program. I have loved the Quartet for the End of Time for a long time and I was finally able to put the group together to play this stunning piece my senior year. I really wanted to include part of it on my program because Messiaen used transcribed bird songs in this composition. I imagined what it would be like if we were to play the first movement at four in the morning with Eurasian Blackbirds and Common Nightingales singing around us as the sun rose. I used field recordings by Arjun Dutta and Cedric Mroczko which were sourced from Xeno-Canto (https://xeno-canto.org) under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) Creative Commons license.
Thomas Meinzen: Headland*
“Headland is an ode to the rugged Oregon coast, a land of mist and rocks, wild creatures and towering Sitka spruce. This song incorporates and engages with recordings of some of the region’s inhabitants, from the Red Crossbill and Ruffed Grouse to the endangered Marbled Murrelet—a seabird which flies fifty miles inland to nest high in the canopy of old growth trees. Headland was written while in residency at the Sitka Center in the Cascade Head Biosphere Reserve, a place where the sky stoops low among the trees and the ocean reaches high to dance among the rocks. In this piece, the violin and piano evoke first the stillness of mossy forest. They mingle with the pre-dawn calls of murrelets, and later echo the playful banter of plovers. Melodies rise and fall with the thrusting of waves, shimmer as did the sea one clear afternoon, and recall the knife-edge drama of survival at the edge of the world—and, for some, of existence. Headland memorializes a wild place not yet lost—and calls us to protect and steward such places, wherever they are. This piece incorporates the work of many field recordists, including Kai Frueh, Andrew Spencer, Bill Pyle, Andy Martin, Scott Olmstead, Bruce Lagerquist, Anthony Gliozzo, Paul Marvin, Richard Webster, and Thomas Meinzen, with gratitude for their work to capture and share the voices of the world around us. Field recordings were sourced from Xeno-Canto (https://xeno-canto.org) under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) Creative Commons license.”
My brother, Ben, and I have worked with Thomas for over five years, and when he offered to write us a new piece about birds, I was super excited. Thomas, Ben, and I all grew up in Oregon, and we first met through the birding community before our longstanding collaboration began. This piece posed some new challenges for Ben and me as it required us to trigger recordings at certain points in the piece and we weren’t sure how to do this, but we rigged a method using VLC media player and our page turning pedals to trigger the recordings, which worked really well. We also workshopped the piece with Thomas to work out some of the challenges of the piece. It’s the first track on our EP Skyward.
Orson Abram: Twitcher
“Twitcher, for solo piano and fixed media, was created remotely over the course of several months with the pianist Kai Frueh. The fixed-media track, played through a Bluetooth transducer inside the piano, uses bird sounds to resonate the piano strings. As an avid birder, Kai has a vast collection of bird field recordings from the East Coast and Midwest regions collected over the years. Especially as many species of birds become rarer, I was compelled to create a work that highlights these calls and contrasts them with a live performance component. I compiled and collaged hours of Kai’s field recordings to create a narrative arc from solely bird sounds while simultaneously organizing the recordings by species. The piece, beginning with the distinctive calls of ravens and blackbirds, becomes more frenetic as these invisible birds create a dialogue with the piano and themselves before dying off into ambiance. Throughout the process of creating a piece in which the fixed media is played through the instrument, much of the compositional process was spent experimenting with the transducer in the piano. I found that placing the transducer in the plate holes maximized resonance. In the score, I direct the pianist/performer to aim for a balance between scarcity and spontaneity to accompany the birds without dominating the sonic space they occupy. Although the conflict between birds and the pianist should be emphasized, the birdcalls are always at the forefront.”
I’m lucky to have been able to work with Orson Abram on this piece. I first premiered it at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music back in March of 2024 and felt compelled to include it in this program because of how it uniquely blends the sounds of birds with the piano through the small Bluetooth transducer placed on the piano’s soundboard. The piece differs from others on the program because it utilizes a text score, a set of instructions for the performer to follow, which allows for more freedom and spontaneity in performance than a traditional score.
Brad Balliett: Nickerson Beach*
“Nickerson Beach is a tone poem for solo piano depicting a bright, breezy morning in late June on the south shore of Long Island, an important nesting location for many migratory birds. Against a backdrop of transparent sunshine and a kaleidoscope of bright, blue waves, the cries of teeming nesting birds can be heard: gulls, terns, oystercatchers, skimmers, plovers, and songbirds.
Every summer, I make a voyage to Nickerson Beach to witness the array of shorebirds in their nuptial plumage going about the business of breeding season: incubating eggs, tending their young, and fighting off rivals and predators. Even more spectacular for me than the sight of these fascinating behaviors is the luxurious and deafening soundscape that accompanies thousands of gulls, terns, and shorebirds screaming their way through this critical season. It is both beautiful and desperate, aspects that I hope are reflected in the music.
I had the opportunity to visit Nickerson Beach with this piece’s dedicatee, Kai Frueh, on a beautiful morning such as the one depicted in this piece. I’m grateful to compose for a musician that understands the allure and natural musicality of the natural world.”
I have been lucky to have been able to work with Brad for a couple years, first premiering his Sparrow, Kinglet, Wren back in 2023. We first met at the Decoda Chamber Music Festival in 2022 and immediately connected over a shared love of birds –since then we have birded together on numerous occasions. When Brad offered to write a piece for my senior experience, I was super excited to have it be about my most memorable day birding with Brad, when we birded Long Island and visited Nickerson Beach, where we saw thousands of breeding birds. I was able to compile and display video footage filmed by Brad of the birds featured in Nickerson Beach for its premiere.
Kai Frueh: A Woodland Soundscape (improvisation)
“In the last year, I have been exploring improvisation a lot more in my performance practice, performing three concerts with Improvisation Group of Lawrence University (IGLU). I wanted to put together my own improvisatory work for this concert. I’ve been listening a lot to the American musician, composer, author, and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg’s music as well as reading some of his work which explores the intersection of improvisation and the natural world. This work has been very influential on me and I wanted to explore something similar. Unfortunately, the piano is difficult to take outside and perform in a natural soundscape, but with Harper Hall’s recent installation of a surround sound system, I have been able to bring bird sounds into the concert hall to experiment performing with a soundscape in this space.”
Mikhail Glinka / Mily Balakirev: The Lark
Skylarks have a beautiful song, and when I first heard Balakirev’s arrangement of Glinka’s The Lark, all the runs reminded me of the continuous songs of Eurasian Skylarks. I thought it would be cool to contextualize the composer’s evocation of lark songs alongside actual recordings to bring the piece to life more realistically. I used field recordings by Jacobo Ramil Millarengo, and Gonzalo Peña Sánchez which were sourced from Xeno-Canto (https://xeno-canto.org) under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) Creative Commons license.
Julia Tchira: Upland Sandpiper – Batitú*
“This piece was commissioned by Kai Frueh with funding from George ‘51 and Marjorie ‘44 Chandler Endowment.
This piece is based on the song of the Upland Sandpiper, a migratory bird of our America. This particular bird was selected by Kai and me because we wanted to work with a bird that connects hemispheres and also that we can enjoy in both the United States and Argentina.
This work is part of my project “Listening to Extinction,” a musical project that involves compositions based on birds as well as programs of conscious listening.
In this opportunity I was fortunate to work in a collaborative way with Kai, so this was an incredible experience for me, and one that I consider also expanded the piece.”
After first hearing Julia’s music, I knew I wanted to work with her on a new piece. When we were trying to decide what species we wanted to focus on, we landed on the Upland Sandpiper because it migrates from its breeding grounds in Wisconsin and across the Midwest and great plains to its wintering grounds in Argentina. Like many birds, Upland Sandpipers are in decline, and we hope that this project will create more interest in these birds and their conservation. A special thanks to Lawrence University’s George ‘51 and Marjorie ‘44 Chandler Endowment for making this collaboration possible.
Amy Beach: Hermit Thrush at Eve, op. 72, no. 1
I thought Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve would be the perfect way to close the program. Amy Beach wrote this piece while at the MacDowell Colony artist’s residency in New Hampshire in the summer of 1921. It was inspired by a Hermit Thrush that sang outside her window, and she includes exact transcriptions of these songs played down one octave throughout the piece. I first played this piece on my sophomore recital and really enjoyed bringing it back and creating an immersive experience with Hermit Thrush recordings from Oregon which were recorded by Ken Chamberlain and Arch McCallum (used with permission from the artists).
Still want more bird music?
Here is some more. . .
Brad Balliett: Sparrow, Kinglet Wren
“Sparrow, Kinglet, Wren is a tone poem depicting the dominant bird songs heard on an April morning in a small section of Highland Park in Rochester, New York, as well as music illustrating the light conditions and temperature. Bird songs indicated below are loose and stylized transcriptions of recordings made in the park, slowed 4-8x. The piece is lightly palindromic, with the Wren song as a centerpiece. The Fox Sparrow is the most ‘serious’ speaker. Alternate titles for the piece might be ‘Fox Sparrow’ or ‘Highland Park’. The birds found in the piece are the Fox Sparrow, Ruby-crowned Kinglet and House Wren.”
Thomas Meinzen: Redstart Revel
“Redstart Revel is a duet for violin and piano written for Kai and Ben Frueh in 2020. The piece evokes the energetic movement of the American redstart, a songbird which darts and sallies through the understory of green summer woods, fanning its beautiful bicolored tail to spook insects out of hiding. I wanted this piece to capture the delight I felt as I revelled in my first redstart, a wayward individual flitting about the Fields Oasis in southern Oregon one May morning years ago. The smooth rising and falling arpeggiation in the piano evokes the movement of water, which redstarts often reside near, and the piano and violin trade and embellish one another’s melodies much as redstarts do as they sing from neighboring territories. Whether or not you are familiar with redstarts, I hope this piece evokes for you the optimism of summertime and the joy of woodlands abounding in flowers, vines, and birdsong.”
Amy Beach Hermit Thrush At Morn, op. 72, no. 2
Hermit Thrush At Morn is the second piece in Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush op. 72 which was composed while at the MacDowell Colony artist’s residency in New Hampshire in the summer of 1921. It features transcribed Hermit Thrush songs transposed down an octave.