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.

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 I created called Woodland Soundscape using my field recordings, a commissioned piece by Julia Chira, 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.