Review: Music of the Birds

 Guest Review by Charles Rose

On March 15, flute wonder Amelia Lukas and pianist Yoko Greeney performed at the Japanese Garden. The program, Music of the Birds, included six pieces about our avian neighbors, four by Portland-based composers and two by Japanese composers. 

Music from both sides of the Pacific have an aesthetic kinship as well. West coast composers like John Cage, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison took inspiration from gagaku and gamelan music, for instance. Composers here and there both take much inspiration from the natural world. And outside the realm of classical music, musicians in Japan have developed their own unique spins on rock, punk, hip-hop and jazz. 

The concert was a celebration of Portland’s long-standing sister city relationship with Sapporo, Japan. 2024 was the 65th anniversary of this relationship. Sapporo is located on the northern island of Hokkaido, and is home to an annual snow festival and the Sapporo brewery. 

The celebration of the sister city relationship extended into the choice of pieces, representing some of Portland’s great local composers and some of Japan’s bright voices as well. The Portland-based composers should be familiar to the audience: Kenji Bunch, Deena Grossman, Lisa Marsh and Kirsten Volness. Dai Fukijara is the more internationally-known of the two Japanese composers, and has an international presence. The other, Kazuko Sugiyama, is a young composer based in Sapporo, who doesn’t seem to have much attention internationally – Greeney had to reach out to the composer directly for a scan of the hand-written score. The Lukas-Greeney duo is planning to take this concert program on a tour of Japan in the fall, and I hope Sugiyama has an opportunity to hear the two’s fantastic rendition of Grey Heron. 

The concert came just in time for the gradual turning towards spring to begin. Small flowers were blooming, though the cherry blossoms had not bloomed quite yet. Walking through the Japanese Garden, one can see bamboo, Japanese maples and tea trees intermingling with mosses, ferns and Douglas Firs native to Oregon. The rock garden outside the pavilion forms a sense of calm, as the rocks were carefully arranged to provide ample positive and negative space. The Sapporo Pagoda Lantern outside the Garden’s strolling pond was a gift from our sister city. 

Birds have inspired musicians for as long as there have been musicians. Composers have used bird song in their music, from the cuckoo calls in Beethoven’s 6th to Messaien’s massive piano cycle, Catalogue d'oiseaux. There’s much to take inspiration from, not just their songs: their movement in flight acts as a potent symbol for independence and freedom. 

The concert opened with Vesper Flights by Kenji Bunch. The title comes from the best-selling book by Helen Macdonald – and this performance inspired me to finally pick up the book from the library after eyeing it at Powell’s for a long time. In the pre-performance discussion of the piece, Lukas declared the swift “Portland’s bird.” The music opened with impressionistic, steady lydian harmonies in the piano while the flute glided above loosely tethered to the beat. These sections were concentrated with faster, more steady passages, but the flute part remained effusive. There were elements of imitation bouncing back and forth between the instruments, which was a nice touch. Vesper Flights may be one of the best chamber pieces I’ve heard from Bunch. 

Next came Snowy Egret by Deena Grossman. In this bass flute rendition of the piece, Lukas got a chance to revel in the shakuhachi-like character of the instrument. Her performance emphasized the bends, slow, pulsating vibrato and breathy tone characteristic of the shakuhachi. Grossman’s husband plays the shakuhachi and studied the instrument in Japan for a time – which served as the inspiration for the piece. The tone was hefty but never lumbering, and the music was characteristically in line with much of Grossman’s output.

Kazuko Sugiyama’s Gray Heron (Airone nel ghiaccio) opens with high, fragile harmonics. Lukas rapidly shifted between extended techniques, and Greeney’s piano performance held things together. In contrast with what we heard before, Gray Heron was a lot faster, suffused with busier textures and inquisitive non-tonal harmonies – a nice contrast to the more modal harmonies of the first two pieces. The music was colorful and elusive, and reminded me of the evocative textures and harmonies of Messaien or Henri Dutilleux. 

Albatross by Lisa Marsh was a short piece that acted as an interlude of sorts. The music featured fast scale runs all across the range of the flute, and a minor-key melody slinking up and down that danced around a more steady sixteenth-note pulse. Unlike the other pieces that were more rubato and rhythmically free, Albatross had a more assertive rhythmic flow, in line with the titular bird’s exceptional internal compass that helps it always find a way home. 

Spring and Asura by Dai Fujikura is one of the composer’s more recent works, debuting in 2018. Weightless, busy textures built up with melodies in between phrases. There were ample augmented chords, and Greeney let the dissonant resonances of these chords hang in the air. The ending saw Greeney playing so firmly on the piano’s highest keys that the pitch was completely lost, subsumed by the percussive thud of the hammer striking the strings.

One of the highlights was the premiere of Kirsten Volness’ Shima Enaga. The namesake and avian inspiration comes from a species of long tailed tit native to Hokkaido. Volness also drew upon the birds she saw growing up in the snowy Midwest. She described the birds as “agile and flitty.” The two instruments shared sonic space with an electronic tape part featuring bass drums, bells and shakers, clicky wood blocks, organ clusters and synth arpeggios. All three parts traded the spotlight between them, and fit together really well. The overall impression was icy. It felt like Shima Enaga was not an evocation of the birds in flight, but rather the world the birds inhabit. Each quasi-movement flowed well together and moved along at a pleasant pace.

After the concert, members of the Japanese Garden staff and the Bird Alliance of Oregon (formerly Portland Audubon) joined us for a brief discussion of their work and the importance of birds to our ecosystems. I’m happy to see musicians collaborating with local non-profits. These concerts can doubly act as entertainment and information sessions for the good work being done by the organizations. If these concerts stir up donor and volunteer interest for these groups, that would be another step forward in helping music serve our community. 

---

Charles Rose is a  composer, writer, teacher, and audio engineer