Today's Birthdays

Luigi Arditti (1822-1903)
Hans Rosbaud (1895-1962)
Licia Albanese (1913-2014)
George Dreyfus (1928)
Ann Howard Jones (1936)
Alan Menken (1949)
Nigel Hess (1953)
Eve Beglarian (1958)

and

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Tom Robbins (1936)
S. E. Hinton (1948)

Review of Music@Menlo concert in San Francisco Classical Voice

I attended Music@Menlo the past few days - as part of an MCANA Writers Institute. At the last moment, the editors of San Francisco Classical Voice asked me to write a review of the all-Mendelssohn concert that took place on Sunday evening. Here's my review of that event.

Review of Chamber Music Northwest concert - Banks, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky in OAW

Oregon Arts Watch has published my review of a Chamber Music Northwest concert that took place at Kaul Auditorium on July 13th. The co-commissioned piece by Banks added to the excitment of the event.

Today's Birthdays

Jean Rivier (1896-1987)
Isaac Stern (1920-2001)
Anton Kuerti (1938)
Cat Stevens (1948)
Margaret Ahrens (1950)

and

Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Tess Gallagher (1943)
Garry Trudeau (1948)

Today's Birthdays

Gaston Carraud (1864-1920)
Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921)
Gunnar de Frumerie (1908-1987)
Vilém Tauský (1910-2004)
Michael Gielen (1927-2019)
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Hukwe Zawose (1938-2003)
Carlos Santana (1947)
Bob Priest (1951)

and
Pavel Kohout
Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Pavel Kohout (1928)
Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Fearlessness in the Face of Tyranny: George Takei and Kenji Bunch's Lost Freedom: A Memory Headlines Chamber Music Northwest's New@Night July 8

 

I love the Alberta Rose Theatre, especially now that they have new seats; sitting in the old ones felt like penance for some half-remembered sin. It’s got the darkened ambience of an old Portland dive bar but has too much class to qualify as such; you can get delicious vegetarian empanadas and a glass of Oregon pinot to take to your seat. There’s always a special feeling of excitement for me upon arrival; I know that I’m here to see something cool and new, and Wednesday July 8 was no exception. I was there for Chamber Music Northwest’s New@Night series, part of the 2026 Summer Festival featuring a headlining work by the legendary George Takei and Portland great Kenji Bunch: Lost Freedom: A Memory. It was structured around Takei’s memory of growing up for part of his youth in the euphemistically named Rowehr War Relocation Center in Arkansas, more commonly known as a concentration camp for Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War.

New@Night is fascinating because all selections are curated by the performers. It opened with Bunch on viola and Alexander Hersh on cello, playing Paul Wiancko’s American Haiku. The composer wrote it in part as “an unpacking of my musical influences as well as an exploration of the connection between my compositional voice and my Japanese American heritage.” Hersh told the story of how, among other projects, Wiancko was composing string parts for punk bands in his USC dorm while composing this work.  It comprised three movements that flowed one into the other (Far Away, Transit, and Home).

Kenji Bunch and Alexander Hersh. Photo © Julia Varga.

It opened with big, sawing chords from Bunch and Hersh, all weeping glissandi and quivering harmonics. This was followed by simultaneous funky arco themes on the viola and pizzicato themes on the cello, and the slides were mewling and non-musical at times. The horsehair was flying from Hersh’s bow as they moved into folksy and accessible fiddling tunes, and Hersh played some very tricky motives that included open-string, left-hand pizzicato interwoven very tightly with rapid, bouncy bowing, and it ended with a quiet multi-stopped coda from both players.

Hersh is a natural storyteller with his words and cello, intense and engaging in both media.  He related delightful anecdotes about the composer of the next piece, Italian cello madman Giovanni Sollima, who has performed underwater and on a cello made of ice, according to Ethan Allred’s program notes. Hersh related that at the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles, Sollima had a “bright red cello case, like a Ferrari,” and “he knew what it meant to be cool,” and all the younger players at the festival wanted to be just like him. Sollima’s work Lamentatio, Hersh explained, was like “Gregorian chant meets Metallica,” and pushes the boundaries of what a cello piece can be.

Alexander Hersh. Photo © Julia Varga.

It opened with Hersh singing, repeating variations of syllables “Oy-ya-you” and so forth, as the performer double-stopped and sang a rather mournful tune. Hard-hitting saltando was followed by rapid bowing and extended techniques like plucking the strings below the bridge while finger-tapping a melody as Hersh grunted and growled, and again finger-tapping while simultaneously bouncing the bow. The music was intense and mercurial, difficult and fascinating. That’s the beauty of a program like this; not only did it give me a chance to hear musical works that I’ve never heard before, but even more than that, a chance to hear music that is in itself unlike anything I have heard before. As I would imagine it is for the performer, this is mother’s milk for a listener who constantly seeks new sonic frontiers to explore.

Gloria Chien, Stephen Banks. Photo © Julia Varga.

A very different experience came next: composer and saxophonist Steven Banks was present to perform a set of his own compositions: Surrender and Through My Mother’s Eyes. He spoke about his first composition, and how the word ‘surrender’ kept coming to his mind over and over again. Gloria Chien accompanied him on piano, hammering away below a plaintive, wandering melody from Banks. He was able to bring strikingly different colors to the same register on his instrument, at first bright and piercing, then mellow, warm and reedy.

Erin Keefe. Photo © Julia Varga.

Next, violinist Erin Keefe played Through My Mother’s Eyes. Banks had explained how it was based upon a lullaby his mother used to sing to him, and was meant to portray, among other things, his own reluctance to settle down for bedtime as a youngster. It opened with harmonic squealing in a high register, like the high-pitched voice of a complaining child. For a brief moment Keefe played a rich, singing melody, like the voice of the mother, and then soothing chords finished out the piece.

* * *

George Takei has held a special place in my heart since I was a kid. I always loved his character on Star Trek, Lt. Hikaru Sulu. In addition to being the Starship Enterprise’s helmsman, he was a dashing swordsman and a stand-up guy, unflappable in the face of danger or conflict, and possessed of a wry sense of humor. Star Trek was hugely important in my chaotic and strange childhood; it provided a place of solace, of refuge from danger, and yet the Trek universe was familiar in that it, too, was strange and violent; no mere child’s play there.  When I was a bit older, as a young queer man trying to figure out how to accept myself and to find my place in the world, George (as we Trekkers call him fondly) took on a new meaning for me—he was a fellow traveler, a shining example, showing  me that queer men could achieve great things and be widely loved and renowned for their abilities, all while being their true, authentic selves. I had the chance to hear him with the Oregon Symphony a few years back, narrating Copland’s Lincoln Portrait in his rich, resonant baritone, and seeing his magnificent performance live was truly a childhood dream come true for me.

So, I jumped at the chance to write about the work he collaborated on with a composer whose music and philosophy I greatly admire, Portlander Kenji Bunch. For Bunch’s part, after the enthusiastic reception of his beautiful, phantomic, solo viola work Minidoka, which was inspired by a visit to the internment camp of that name, he was put in touch with Takei and they worked closely together, with Takei provided the narrative based on his youth in the internment camps during WWII, and Bunch composing incidental music to that narrative, which became Lost Freedom: A Memory.

It opened with Monica Ohuchi on piano, accompanying dissonant violin chords from Jennifer Frautschi and Claire Wells. The vibraphone sang sweetly under Sergio Carreño’s mallets as narrator Christópheren Nomura (Takei’s hand-picked recommendation for this performance) sat in quiet contemplation. Dulcet and sibilant, it was, strangely enough, a tune of joy and innocence. An audio file of Takei’s voice played, in which he spoke about the “suspicion, fear, outright hatred” to which he and his family were subjected. Though he was only five years old at the time, he had vivid memories of these experiences. He spoke about how Japanese Americans were spat upon, assaulted, had their homes and businesses vandalized.  He mentions the date February 19, 1942, the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the act that incarcerated virtually all Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. Though it wasn’t outright stated, it felt to me like this was mentioned because, in addition to the other more well-known date from Roosevelt’s famous presidential address regarding December 7, 1941, this February 19 was also a day which should forever live in infamy.

“I was five years old…this is what happened to my family,” Nomura began. Pizzicato cello from Jonah Ellsworth was accompanied by random-seeming percussion, and then a pounding on the bass drum, like soldiers hammering on a door. “We were terrified,” the narrator went on. It was explained how the whole family was forced to live in a horse stall at the Santa Anita racetrack, where you could still smell the manure.  In a strange turn that belied the seriousness of the work and hearkened back to the innocent feel at its opening, the narrator revealed that to “five-year-old me, it was exciting!”—but then he went on to relate his parents’ pain, anguish and devastation.

A piano ballad accompanied the narration about being transferred to the concentration camp in Arkansas, as young Takei wondered why all the grownups were crying. An elegy developed in the strings, including Bunch on the viola, and the piano ballad changed to a syncopated accompaniment. Young Takei went on to speak about the camp being “a magical place—a fantastical scene—trees growing on top of the water” as he described the swampy environs. The music morphed into a folksy hoe-down as the narrator talked about the magical transformation of the “tiny black fish” he caught with his bare hands, watching them sprout legs and turn into frogs in a glass jar.

Jennifer Frautischi, Monica Ohuchi, Claire Wells, Kenji Bunch, Jonah Ellsworth,
 Christòpheren Nomura, Sergio Carreño. Photo © Julia Varga.

Nomura went on, talking about the “loyalty questionnaire,” and one baffling question, seemingly designed to impress as many of the young men as possible into the armed forces of the country that had unlawfully imprisoned them. A solo cello sang as the idiocy of this question was brought to the fore: it simultaneously presumed that they all were loyal to the Japanese emperor and yet asked them to serve in the military. Takei stated it was an “ignorant, illiterate, idiotic question,” and those who refused to answer ‘Yes’ (because they had never been loyal to the emperor in the first place) were sent to a “segregation camp for disloyals.”  Takei and his family were sent to Tule Lake, one such camp, where there was “suspicion, radicalism, and outraged riots.”

 He went on to note that, despite the fact that their families were imprisoned unlawfully in inhumane conditions back home, the 442^nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in the European theatre and was composed almost entirely of second generation Japanese Americans (Nisei), became the most highly decorated military unit in U.S. history. (Note: this is easily verified, and among the honors awarded to the more than 18,000 men who served were 21 Medals of Honor (the nation's highest military award), 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 371 Silver Stars, over 4,000 Bronze Stars, more than 4,000 Purple Hearts (earning the attached 100^th Infantry Battalion the nickname the "Purple Heart Battalion"), and many Legions’ d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, awarded to all surviving members in 2012.)

Nomura began reading off the names of each of the concentration camps as well as the numbers of people of Japanese ancestry who had been interned at each location, the vast majority of whom were American citizens. Over 120,000 all told, and it was read accompanied by alarming explosions from an ominous bass drum, later rolled with hard mallets like a funeral march in the background. When it was all over, these innocent, imprisoned citizens were given a one-way ticket to anywhere, and $25 each to rebuild their lives in a “hostile, racist America.”

It ended with a simple, sad sighing from the strings, the vibraphone whispering behind. Takei’s oft-repeated reference to this as “the darkest breakdown of our democracy” was accompanied by an elegant score, a noble closing statement from the piano to match his powerful words.

In this our United States of America’s 250^th anniversary, where government agents once again pound on people’s doors in the dark of night to disappear them into a system where they have no rights, it’s important that we do not forget our shortcomings as a nation, to pretend they do not exist while reveling in our triumphs. American works like this one from Takei and Bunch are a vital reminder that we must be vigilant, and stand fast against such atrocities; it’s this kind of fearlessness in the face of tyranny that makes America great.

Today's Birthdays

Boyd Neel (1905-1981)
Louis Kentner (1905-1987)
Klaus Egge (1906-1979)
Peggy Stuart-Coolidge (1913-1981)
Robert Mann (1920-2018)
Gerd Albrecht (1935-2014)
Nicholas Danby (1935-1937)
Dominic Muldowney (1952)
David Robertson (1958)
Carlo Rizzi (1960)
Mark Wigglesworth (1964)
Evelyn Glennie (1965)
Russell Braun (1965)

and

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747)
Pauline Viardot (1821-1910)
Julius Fučík (1872-1916)
Kurt Masur (1927-2015)
Screamin' Jay Hawkins (1929-2000)
R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021)
Ricky Skaggs (1954)
Tobias Picker (1954)
Jonathan Dove (1959)

and

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Harry Levin (1912-1994)
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)
Elizabeth Gilbert (1969)

Today's Birthdays

Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
Sir Donald F. Tovey (1875-1940)
Eleanor Steber (1914-1990)
Vince Guaraldi (1928-1976)
Peter Schickele (1935-2024)
Michael Roll (1946)
Dawn Upshaw (1960)

and

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970)
Ernest Percival Rhys (1859–1946)
Erle Stanley Gardner (1899-1970)

Today's Birthdays

Antoine François Marmontel (1816-1898)
Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931)
Fritz Mahler (1901-1973)
Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2003)
Bella Davidovich (1928)
Bryden Thomson (1928-1991)
Pinchas Zukerman (1948)
Richard Margison (1954)
Joanna MacGregor (1959)
James MacMillan (1959)
Helmut Oehring (1961)

and

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
Roald Amundsen (1872-1928)
Ginger Rogers (1911-1995)
Tony Kushner (1956)

Today's Birthdays

Ronald Binge (1910-1979)
Jack Beeson (1921-2010)
Julian Bream (1933-2020)
Sir Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022)
Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010)
Linda Ronstadt (1946)
John Casken (1949)
Deborah Borda (1949)
Gérard Lesne (1956)

and

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)
Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Arianna Huffington (1950)

Today's Brthdays

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
Piero Bellugi (1924-2012)
Eric Stokes (1930-1999)
Unsuk Chin (1961)

and

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Owen Wister (1860-1938)
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978)
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991)
Irving Stone (1903-1989)
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991)
Arthur Laurents (1917-2011)

Today's Birthdays

Sir Reginald Goodall (1905-1990)
Carlo Bergonzi (1924-2014)
Jeanne Loriod (1928-2001)
Per Nørgård (1932-2025)
Albert Ayler (1936-1970)
Jennifer Smith (1945)

and

John Clare (1793-1864)
Isaak Babel (1894-1941)

Today's Birthdays

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)
George Butterworth (1885-1916)
Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962)
Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)
Van Cliburn (1934-2013)
Richard Stolzman (1942)
Roger Vignoles (1943)

and

Julius Caesar (100 BC - 44 BC)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
George Eastman (1854-1932)
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Today's Birthdays

Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896)
Liza Lehmann (1862-1918)
Nicolai Gedda (1925-2017)
Herbert Blomstedt (1927)
Hermann Prey (1929-1998)
Francis Bayer (1938-2004)
Patrice Caratini (1946) Liona Boyd (1949)
Suzanne Vega (1960)
Aisslinn Nosky (1978)

and

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
E. B. White (1899-1985)
Harold Bloom (1930-2019)
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1798, in the nation's capital of Philadelphia, President John Adams signed an Act of Congress establishing the United States Marine Band. (The original "32 drummers and fifers" assisted in recruiting and entertained residents.)

Reviews of Oregon Bach Festival concerts published in Classical Voice North America

My reviews of two OBF concerts are now posted in Classical Voice North America here. I hope that you enjoy reading them.

Today's Birthdays

Henri Weiniawski (1835-1880)
Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Ljuba Welitsch (1913-1996)
Ian Wallace (1919-2009)
Josephine Veasey (1930-2022)
Jerry Herman (1931-2019)
Arlo Guthrie (1947)
Graham Johnson (1950)
Béla Fleck (1958)

and

John Calvin (1509-1564)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Alice Munro (1931-2024)

Pianist and Birder Kai Frueh talks in depth about his immersive Bird Concert coming up in Lincoln City on July 10

    I got a chance to do some birding and talk about music with Kai Frueh, who is presenting the final concert in his Bird Concert Tour this Friday night, July 10 at the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 7pm.  We met in Corvallis and drove to the nearby William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, where we birded several spots, took some photos and recordings, and spoke in-depth about the program.  He also helped me get 5 Benton County lifers. (For those of you who aren't birders, a 'lifer' is a bird that one has never before seen or heard in one's life. So a 'county lifer' is a bird one has never before seen or heard in a particular county. Yes, it's a thing.)

Kai recording birds. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Right, so yeah, cool. Looks like it's recording. It's Kai Frueh here  at... Where are we at now? [Editor’s Note: His name rhymes with “Fly Free.”  Also, All birds referenced in this interview are linked to at eBird, where you can view photos and listen to their vocalizations by clicking on the big green "Listen" button.]

KF:  [We're at] Prairie Overlook at William L Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Excellent. And we're looking for…whatever's here. Listening as much as anything, which is what a lot of birders love to do.

NWR: Yeah, that's what we do, right? So I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is…birds, birds and music. It sort of seems like a no-brainer for birding musicians, you've been very in tune with both birds and music since you were really young.

KF: I've been playing piano since I was seven. Um, I started after my brother-- my brother [Ben] started violin at four. He begged for like a year before he started playing, and then at some point I was like “Well, I guess I'll pick up piano.”  My brother is younger than me, so I ended up starting [my piano study] kind of close to the same time. I was homeschooled and always outside a lot, and then I had a good friend Isaac Denzer who started birding around eleven or so, I want to say. And then I picked it up at about age twelve.  That’s eleven years now. So it’s been a while.

NWR: Where are you studying now?

KF: I'm studying at Bowling Green State University. I'm doing my masters there; I did my undergrad at Lawrence University.

                NWR: So what's your master's degree in?

KF: It's piano performance; both my degrees are piano performance. Going very…kind of simple; it allows me to do more of what I want.

[Ed. Note Kai kept repeatedly hearing Western Kingbird, a bird I wanted for my Benton County life list; I listened for it as well. He looked around for me.]

KF: Oh, here you are. Nice. It's a good spot for them [Kingbirds]. Yeah. I think they breed out here. Why don't we walk out here just so we can get a little bit more? Get you a cool bird.

NWR: That'd be great. It’s always nice being out here, no matter what. Oh, I think I heard one now. Something out there. [Ed. Note: Break to look for birds.]

NWR: So, we were just talking about the sacrifices one makes for music, and what was that with the Great Gray Owl?

KF:  Oh, yeah. So, this was—I would have to go back and look when it was actually seen—but it was probably somewhere between seven and nine years ago. There was a Great Gray Owl in the county, not 20 minutes from my house. [Editor’s Note: Birders everywhere always go nuts for Great Grays, as we affectionately call them. They’re generally rare and hard to find and generally agreed to be one of the coolest and most majestic birds on the planet.]  But I had a rehearsal, and I think a small performance or something that day, and so I couldn't make it that day to look for the owl. I looked the next day, but I missed it. I also missed my lifer Sharp-tailed Sandpiper because I had an orchestra rehearsal. Still don't have that bird. My brother [Ed.Note: Violinist Ben Frueh] and a couple of our friends got to go see it, but I was at the rehearsal. I probably could have figured out a way to duck out early, but I just didn't. Those are probably the two biggest misses I've had because of music.

Western Kingbird. Photo by Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Since you've been doing both birds and music since you were very young; was there some point where they always seemed to be connected somehow? Or was there a point where you started to draw that connection?

KF: I don't think they were obviously connected to me for a while. I was thinking about how birding helps, or how young birders tend to be musicians, but I didn't really connect it to my artistic practice until college. What partially got me thinking about it was during COVID, my brother and I did a series of outdoor concerts. We were playing outside at birders' places because that's who we knew. We played in Rich Hoyer’s backyard, and I remember some Lesser Goldfinches just went crazy during one of the pieces.

Then we were playing at Marilyn Miller's place in Bend, and a birder told me afterwards how helpful it was for her to focus out in nature instead of in a concert hall. In a hall, she had a hard time focusing, but out in nature, all these birds become part of the piece. That started me thinking about how I could play in a more natural soundscape. Obviously, a piano is not ideal for that, but then I went to Lawrence and heard the first pieces that were really inspired by birds: the Amy Beach Hermit Thrush pieces from 1921 [Ed Note: A video of Kai performing all compositions referenced in this interview can be accessed at the link above]. She heard them outside her window at the MacDowell Artist Residency and transcribed them. You'll get to hear those at the concert.

One of the faculty at Lawrence played those two pieces, and I knew I needed to play them. Then I met Brad Balliett, a New York-based composer and birder who is obsessed with Messiaen. We hit it off, and I premiered a piano piece Brad had written inspired by birds. That set me off. I decided I was going to do a bird concert eventually. Ideally, I would bring a piano out into nature, but the cost is unrealistic right now. For my senior experience, I thought about bringing the piano out into the bird song, but then I realized it was easier to bring the bird song to the stage using the big speakers at Lawrence. So, I continued to explore and commission bird-inspired music and work on the sound…

[E.N: As happens, we got distracted by birds]

KF: Oh, look, the Kingbird's coming in. Right there. I think a second one is coming in.

NWR: That's a great look. This is the first time I've seen them here in Benton County. We've got three Western Kingbirds now chattering and squeaking away.

KF: Maybe I'll grab my recording device. [E.N.: Here is a link to Kai's recording of one of the Western Kingbirds we heard that day.]

NWR: Sure. We'll get back to this.

[E.N., We started talking about Kai’s passion for recording birds, then remembered we needed to record that conversation.]

KF: Right, I've done a lot of that too. Let's see, where were we? Recording birds. So, I use a shotgun mic to record birds. I'm gonna hopefully invest in a parabolic at some point, but that's quite a bit of money, and I want to make sure I know what I'm getting into because they're less portable.

I use a lot of my recordings for live performances. You'll hear them in the concert on Friday. I use them in two ways. For some pieces, like the Amy Beach pieces—she didn't specify they be played with recordings, but she also didn't live at a time where that was possible. She probably would have thought it was awesome. So, I play those pieces with recordings of Hermit Thrush; I pair them that way.

I’m also doing a piece by Ravel. He doesn't specify which species, so I've taken some artistic license and paired it with some birds that I recorded in Europe last summer. Thomas Meinzen has been writing pieces for us, and he uses the recordings. I'm hoping to work on other collaborations for artistic endeavors. But I also do it partially as a "nerdy" thing; I keep a recording life list. It’s over 300 species now.

NWR: Oh, wow, that's great.

 KF: I've been keeping a photographic life list for years, and that one is well over 600. My life list is like 660 at the moment.  So, most of the birds I've seen, I've photographed. There are about 35 species I have on my life list that I haven’t managed to record.

NWR: Are all the recordings that you use in your concert recordings that you've made yourself?

KF: My goal is eventually "yes." There are a couple of recordings I've used, like the Hermit Thrush, where I didn't have my own. I’ve been trying to make some, but it's been super hard. Something about their song just doesn't pick up well on my mic. So, I've licensed some from some birders I know. And then for one of Thomas’s pieces, we're using some other recordings by some Oregon birders. But everything else is mine. My goal is to have all [of the recordings used for his performances] be mine eventually. I also make recordings for my list, and I am very interested in the quality of the recordings. I think a lot about that.

Black Phoebe. Photo by Kai Frueh 7/5/26.

NWR: So, when did you first have the idea to put together the type of program that you're performing now?  And to that point, what is the program like?

KF: While I was in college, I started thinking about creating a "bird concert." For my sophomore recital, I played two bird-themed pieces, but then I set it aside for a while to focus on other contemporary music. For my "senior experience" capstone, I finally decided to do the full bird concert.

NWR: So, this has been kind of developing in your head over the years.

KF: Yeah.  For that sophomore recital, I performed a piece Brad [Balliett] wrote for me; he's the New York composer, along with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morn.

Then for my senior recital, I decided I was going all bird; I was going to finally do my bird concert. I opened with the first movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which is about a Nightingale and Eurasian Blackbird waking up. I also premiered Headland, which Thomas Meinzen wrote for Ben and me at the Sitka Sedge artist residency at Sitka Sedge, which is north of Lincoln City if you knowwhere that is. [NOTE: per Thomas, his residency was at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, not Sitka Sedge.]

NWR: I got my lifer NorthernParula there.

KF: Oh wow. So [Thomas] wrote Headland for us. Then I premiered a new piece by Brad Balliett that he wrote for me about birding at Nickerson Beach on Long Island in 2025.

I also played a piece called Twitcher by my friend Orson Abram. That piece uses a lot of my bird recordings and a transducer on the piano soundboard so the piano acts as a speaker for the birds. It uses a bunch of extended techniques. It's actually a text score, so it's very different than a lot of the other pieces.  

The first iteration also included an improvised piece Icreated called Woodland Soundscape using my field recordings, a commissioned piece by Julia Tchira, an Argentinian composer, about Upland Sandpipers. And then I played Balakirev’s arrangement of Glinka’s The Lark, that one’s kind of fun, and I ended with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve.

I pulled out all the stops for that concert because that year they had put surround sound into the concert hall. So, I programmed everything with surround sound; you’d be sitting in the hall and there'd be birds calling from different points for most of the recital. And I had video projection right behind me, and I had special lighting design. I wanted to go all out for my senior experience. And that was a lot of fun. That was kind of how I ended my time at Lawrence.

And then I began thinking I wanted to start bringing the program to birders, because I think birders would really enjoy it; It’s kind of like the target audience, though I think everyone can enjoy it. And so, I started reaching out to a bunch of Bird Alliances and got four concerts. I started out in Bowling Green, Ohio. Then I did the one in Portland with Bird Alliance of Oregon. I did one here in Corvallis with Mid-Willamette Bird Alliance, and then I'm going to Lincoln City, which is the one you're coming to, for Seven Capes Bird Alliance.

[Ed Note: I’ve condensed the conversation about program structure while keeping Kai’s anecdotes and analyses as follows:]

Opening: Amy Beach – Hermit Thrush at Morn (1921). I’m using the Beach pieces to bookend the recital.

Brad Balliett – Nickerson Beach which was written for me in 2025. Brad and I went out to Long Island for a music festival, and I said “"Hey, Brad, I want to go birding?” So, we met at like 5 a.m. at Jamaica Station and went out to Nickerson Beach.  Nickerson Beach is this beach where there's this giant Common Tern colony. There's lots of Black Skimmers, and I got my lifer Boat-tailed Grackle there, and they have Piping Plovers and American Oystercatchers that breed there. We had a Ruddy Turnstone, just a bunch of really fun birds like the Eastern Willet. This [performance] includes video Brad filmed through a scope on his iPhone. The birds in the video correspond to the birds Brad represents in the score. [E.N. For any of you who have ever tried to film or take photos through a scope on a smart phone and come away with abysmal results (like me, every time I’ve tried it), Kai assures me this is great footage. This gives me hope.]

Common Tern. Photo by Kai Frueh.

Thomas Meinzen – Remnants, a new piece premiered this past May.  This piece is about prairie and grassland ecosystems; something I'm really passionate about. I really like that ecosystem, and I feel like they're oftentimes overlooked from a conservation perspective. And that piece uses a system where I use Ableton [live sound processing system] to run all my sound, and I have one of the page turning pedals that controls it. And so at different points in the piece I will hit the pedal to trigger the sound.

I kind of wanted to share a little bit of the historic aspect of birds in music. And so I look at French composers because they used a lot of birds, so I'm doing [Jean-Phillippe] Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux, which um was written, uh—shoot, I don't remember the exact date. I think it's 1726. Um, so like three hundred—no, it's 1724. That's right, because it wasn't exactly three hundred years ago. [E.N. Kai’s mental process worked; he figured it out. 1724. It is most often translated as ‘The Call of the Birds,’ but alternate possible translations are ‘the conference’ or ‘the gathering’ of the birds.]

 The piece uses rocking intervals, of a fourth, and then then trills to kind of mimic birds twittering.  Composters frequently used trills, rocking intervals, repeated notes, and ornamentation to represent birds. So there's some aspects of that.  I perform that piece with recordings of Garden Warbler and Eurasian Blackcap, which are both common species throughout Europe. [E.N. Here is a link to Kai's recording of Eurasian Blackcap.] I kind of just had to take some artistic license because Rameau didn't specify which species. So I was like, okay, these are found throughout Europe, so he may have heard these. This will be fun.

Ravel – Oiseaux Tristes (1905).  It is part of his Miroirs Suite. It represents different bird species; he uses a lot of repeated notes and ornaments to represent the birds. I’ve been taking some artistic liberties and pairing it with recordings I made of Eurasian Wren, Eurasian Blackbird, and European Robin. “Oiseaux tristes” translates to "Sad Birds," and I think that those bird songs are a bit more melancholy, so it’s a good pairing.

Then, of course, I play the piece by Olivier Messiaen: The Lark, which is the sixth movement of his suite Petite Esquisse d'Oiseaux (1985). It’s short. I’m fascinated by Messiaen as a person. When I talk to musicians, they always react strongly to him. I wanted to represent that, but there is a lot of debate regarding the accuracy of his transcriptions [of bird vocalizations] and his whole process; I’ve done a lot of research into that.

He is an influential figure, but his transcriptions are complicated. Some are more accurate than others. Sometimes he tried to capture aspects of the birds other than just their songs, but he always spoke about how accurate they were, and he would then make quite inaccurate and confusing statements about birds, which is where the discourse becomes problematic. For example, in Des Canyons aux Étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), he has a movement about the White-browed Robin—an Australian bird—in a piece about America. He also made a comment about how the Western Tanager was only found in Bryce Canyon, I was like ‘Dude, they’re everywhere in the West.’

He was influenced by musique concrète and serialism, and he wrote all these…it’s a very different sound world. He would oftentimes expand intervals [found in birdsong] because they didn't fit the Western scale, so he would do all this interval expansion and extrapolation and he’s like ‘Oh, the proportions are the same, so therefore it’s accurate.” But he never documented how much he proportionately enlarged things. Musicologists have also noted that while rhythm was important to him, his written rhythms weren't always scientifically accurate to the birds. Still, he transcribed over, I think, 350 species of birds, which is quite an accomplishment, regardless of the accuracy.

It’s important to include him, but also to remember he wasn't the "first" bird composer. Amy Beach was transcribing live Hermit Thrushes in 1921. I even have a bird book from 1921 that uses Western musical notation for transcriptions. And Messiaen did go outside and spend a lot of time with ornithologists; he was very thoughtful in many ways, but then…yeah. It’s not a complete picture. Anyway, that’s a long sidetrack. I have a lot of opinions, a lot of thoughts about it.

NWR: [laughing] I can tell.

KF: Ok, and then going back to the program, I’m playing Upland Sandpiper--Batitú (2025), a piece by Julia Tchira, which was written for me last year. It’s about Upland Sandpipers, one of my favorite birds.  This piece imagines the migration of Upland Sandpiper from Wisconsin, where I was studying at the time, to Argentina where she’s from, and back to the U.S. and in this way it kind of connected us. The piece draws on "deep listening," a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. It’s about being aware of every sound in the environment—this is the only piece played without recordings or multimedia; it features moments of silence to make the listener aware of the acoustic environment.

My brother Ben will join me for Thomas Meinzen’s Headland. That piece was written for us at Sitka Sedge and is on our latest EP. We’ve adjusted some of the recordings from the last time we played it; we’re using all recordings made in Oregon by Oregon birders. It celebrates the Oregon Coast and opens with Marbled Murrelet calls.

We end the program in a similar spot to where we started, with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve (1921). It bookends the performance nicely. This is a "living concert;” the repertoire might shift next time I play it. Next time I’m going to probably commission a new piece for the program. I’m planning on doing something interactive, but…yeah. Let’s see.

So that’s the program.

Barn Swallow. Photo by Kai Frueh.

Today's Birthdays

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Dame Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
David Diamond (1915-2005)
David Zinman (1936)
Paul Chihara (1938)
John Mark Ainsley (1963)

and

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)
Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961)
Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)
David Hockney (1937-2026)
Dean Koontz (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)
George Antheil (1900-1959)
Billy Eckstine (1914-1993)
Susan Chilcott (1963-2003)
Raffi Cavoukian (1948)
Zhou Long (1953)

and

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c 1656)
Philip Johnson (1906-2005)
J. F. Powers (1917-1999)
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004)
Janet Malcolm (1934-2021)
Anna Quindlen (1953)

Today's Birthdays

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
Cor de Groot (1914-1993)
Doc Severinsen (1927)
Joe Zawinul (1932-2007)
Ringo Starr (1940)
Michaela Petri (1958)

and

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
David McCullough (1933-2022)

And from The Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Gustav Mahler (1860), born in Kalischt, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. His father was an Austrian Jewish tavern-keeper, and Mahler experienced racial tensions from his birth: he was a minority both as a Jew and as a German-speaking Austrian among Czechs, and later, when he moved to Germany, he was a minority as a Bohemian. His father was a self-made man, very fiery, and he abused Mahler’s mother, who was rather delicate and from a higher social class. Mahler was a tense and nervous child, traits he retained into adulthood. He had heart trouble, which he had inherited from his mother, but he also had a fair measure of his father’s vitality and determination, and was active and athletic.

Mahler began his musical career at the age of four, first playing by ear the military marches and folk music he heard around his hometown, and soon composing pieces of his own on piano and accordion. He made his public piano debut at 10, and was accepted to the Vienna Conservatory at 15. When he left school, he became a conductor, and then artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera. He became famous throughout Europe as a conductor, but he was fanatical in his work habits, and expected his artists to be, as well. This didn’t win him any friends, and there were always factions calling for his dismissal. He spent his summers in the Austrian Alps, composing.

1907 was a difficult year for Mahler: he was forced to resign from the Vienna Opera; his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died; and he was diagnosed with fatal heart disease. Superstitious, he believed that he had had a premonition of these events when composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6 (1906), which ends with three climactic hammer blows representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled.” When he composed his ninth symphony, he refused to call it “Symphony No. 9” because he believed that, like Beethoven and Bruckner before him, his ninth symphony would be his last. He called it A Symphony for Tenor, Baritone, and Orchestra instead, and he appeared to have fooled fate, because he went on to compose another symphony. This one he called Symphony No. 9 (1910); he joked that he was safe, since it was really his 10th symphony, but No. 9 proved to be his last symphony after all, and he died in 1911. Most of his work was misunderstood during his lifetime, and his music was largely ignored — and sometimes banned — for more than 30 years after his death. A new generation of listeners discovered him after World War II, and today he is one of the most recorded and performed composers in classical music.

Today's Birthdays

Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920)
Hans Eisler (1898-1962)
Dame Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
Dorothy Kirsten (1910-1992)
Ernst Haefliger (1919-2007)
Bill Haley (1925-1981)
Maurice Hasson (1934)
Vladimir Ashkenazy (1937)
Stephen Hartke (1952)

and

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
Eleanor Clark (1913-1996)
Hilary Mantel (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Josef Holbrooke (1878-1958)
Wanda Landowska (1879-1958)
Jan Kubelík (1880-1940)
Gordon Jacob (1895-1984)
Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984)
George Rochberg (1918-2005)
János Starker (1924-2013)
Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993)
Matthias Bamert (1942)
Alexander Lazarev (1945)
Paul Daniel (1958)
Isabelle Poulenard (1961)

and

A. E. Douglass (1867-1962)
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Barbara Frischmuth (1941)
Craig Nova (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Louis-Claude Daquin (1694-1772)
Stephen Foster (1826-1864)
Roy Henderson (1899-2000)
Flor Peeters (1903-1986)
Mitch Miller (1911-2010)
Tibor Varga (1921-2003)
Cathy Berberian (1925-1983)

and

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)
Neil Simon (1927-2018)
Tracy Letts (1965)

Today's Birthdays

Theodore Presser (1848-1925)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
George M. Cohan (1878-1942)
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
Meyer Kupferman (1926-2003)
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004)
Brigitte Fassbaender (1939)

and

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
Dave Berry (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Henri Weiniawski (1835-1880)
Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Ljuba Welitsch (1913-1996)
Ian Wallace (1919-2009)
Josephine Veasey (1930-2022)
Jerry Herman (1931-2019)
Arlo Guthrie (1947)
Graham Johnson (1950)
Béla Fleck (1958)

and

John Calvin (1509-1564)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Alice Munro (1931-2024)

Today's Birthdays

Theodore Presser (1848-1925)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
George M. Cohan (1878-1942)
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
Meyer Kupferman (1926-2003)
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004)
Brigitte Fassbaender (1939)

and

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
Dave Berry (1947)

Review of New Wave Opera's Deep Water up at Oregon ArtsWatch

 My review of the world premiere of Portland composer and librettist Caroline Louise Miller's first full-length opera, Deep Water, is up at Oregon ArtsWatch.  A meditation on climate grief and queer love at the end of the world, this thought-provoking and beautiful piece is exactly the kind of cutting-edge stuff I've come to expect from New Wave Opera.  And there's a Goblin Shark.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993)
Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012)
Andrae Crouch (1942-2015)
Philip Brunelle (1943)
Mario Venzago (1948)
Sioned Williams (1953)
Nikolai Demidenko (1955)

and

George Sand (1804-1876)
Jean Stafford (1915-1979)
William Strunk Jr. (1969-1946)
Twyla Tharp (1941)