Prelude: Birds, and A Journey
When I headed over the Coast Range with my ultimate
destination being the Seven Capes Bird Alliance’s Lincoln City Osprey Days where Kai Frueh (rhymes with 'Fly Free') would be performing his aptly named 'Bird Concert,' I
of course took a predictable detour to see birds along the way. I also have a
touch of wanderlust, so I decided to take a (relative) back road, Oregon State
Highway 223 between Dallas and Wren (because why would I not go to a town called Wren?) Also
known as the King’s Valley Highway, this struck me as a sad misnomer, winding
as it did amongst tall hills long bereft of crown, topped either by woeful,
bald pate clearcuts or the unnaturally thick clutter of the tree farms that
have replaced the vast majority of ancient woodlands along the Coast Range.
Still, it had its moments of beauty here and there, as all roads in Oregon do. I saw a Turkey Vulture soaring, and a roadside Raven, and heard Swainson’s Thrush and Black-capped Chickadees sing at Beazell Memorial Forest. This could have served as a memorial to the forest, but still. Birds find a way.
When I got over the hump the bright sun turned into dense
fog (surprise surprise); almost as soon as I crested the Coast Range a thick peasouper set in. I’d timed it so that I
would arrive at Yaquina Bay in Newport just after low tide; as the tide comes
in, it pushes the gulls and shorebirds closer to land for easier viewing, and
the incoming tide draws in more seabirds as well. I was sure I wouldn’t be able
to see anything but it turned out to be a curious fog; it seemed to bottom out
at an altitude of a couple hundred feet: I could barely see a car-length ahead
of me atop the Yaquina Bay Bridge, but it was clear as a bell when I got down
to sea level; I could see the entire bay perfectly, the thick gray fog a subtly
rolling ceiling just overhead.
Later I spotted Kai in the parking lot right as I pulled into the Lincoln City Cultural Center. He came up to the car munching a pre-performance snack, and when I told him I was taking a few minutes to relax before the concert since I’d just rolled straight in from a long day of travel and birding, he nodded. “Yep, that’s how it goes. You get any year birds?” he asked, referring to any new birds that I hadn’t seen yet this year. “There were a couple of Bonaparte’s Gulls, and like six Hudsonian Whimbrel at Yaquina Bay,” I said, and he seemed interested. (Amongst a lot of other birding the following day, including leading a bird walk for the Osprey Days, Kai went out and spotted that pair of Bonies, along with 47 Whimbrel at the same spot.)
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| Immature California (L) and Heerman's Gulls Newport, OR July 10 2026 Photo: Lorin Wilkerson |
The Lincoln City Cultural Center, as I realized when I
pulled in, is separated from Devil’s lake by a only small woody patch; Devil’s Lake is where I first became a birder,
so this area holds a special, almost sacred place in my heart. As Kai went in to prep for the concert I sat
with the windows open, a chorus of gull calls filling the air. I love
gulls—they’re so comfortable around humans. Earlier I’d sat amongst a mixed
flock of them at the South Jetty in Newport, photographing Western, California,
Glaucous-winged, hybrid Olympics and even a smoky brown juvenile
Heerman’s. However much I love the solitude, being on the road can be lonely, but somehow
I always feel at home among gulls, bold and shifty, always looking to get over and
always just owning the place wherever they happen to be.
I made my way past the immense octopus on my way in; giant sea creatures seem to be a theme for me lately in my concert-going; this octopus fit right in with the Goblin Shark I’d seen earlier this year at New Wave Opera’s performance of Deep Water. Once inside I finally got to meet Dawn Villascuesa, president of Seven Capes Bird Alliance and an uber-volunteer for the Oregon Birding Association for many years; she was the night’s MC, and I’d long wanted to thank her personally for all her service to the OBA.
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| Giant Octopus. Lincoln City, OR. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson |
Kai’s Bird Concert
The hall was packed
almost full as Kai took the stage; there was a large screen behind him as he
sat at the grand piano. [NOTE: Kai talked in depth about all these compositionsin our interview on July 5; you can read it here.] He opened with Amy
Beach’s 1921 composition Hermit Thrush at Morn Op 72. No. 2. This
bird is well-known to Oregonians; its beautiful, ethereal fluting, which
spirals upward into silence, graces much of the state in the spring. Beach’s
waltz-like treatment of the song, bursting with extensive, lush ornamentation,
starts simply: a held note and then a twittering and building into a brief
glorious explosion of intensity worthy of Chopin. Kai’s intimate knowledge of
bird vocalizations showed; the ornaments could have been tossed away like so
much fluff, but instead he painted a human being’s representation of this
glorious bird’s song as fully as it can be rendered on a human instrument.
Nickerson Beach by Brad Balliett (2025) is, in the composer’s own words, “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.”
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| Black Skimmer, TX. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson |
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| American Oystercatcher. Photo: Kai Frueh |
The first of two works by Oregon composer, conservationistand motorless birder Thomas Meinzen was up next.. Remnants is an ode of sorts to the “fractured grassland and prairie ecosystems which are disappearing at a rapid rate across North America,” said Frueh, mentioning that these birds and ecosystems are a special love of his. Free-flowing and sibilant, Frueh’s interpretation was sentimental, and one could feel that love, from both composer and performer—a vibrant love, yet one tinged with sadness. But hope was there, as well as joy, in the form of big, fearless crescendi as Meadowlarks sang, sounding as though they were in the very room.
Like an expert fromager pairing fancy cheeses and wines, Frueh chose some of his own recordings of Garden Warbler and EurasianBlackcap to go with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux. Frueh demonstrated a nice touch for the Baroque, his clean, singing left-hand deftly executing tricky mordents, integrating them into the texture, and his attack was fearless and smooth as he launched into a long section featuring a dizzying array of ornamentation.At the opening of Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes Frueh
paused for a moment, making sure that the audience heard the introductory
birdsong before beginning. His respect for the birds permeated the program—this
was not a gimmick of some kind. He displayed a sensitive light touch, yet with
firm control; his repeated left-hand crossovers to gently kiss a single note
were heady and moving.
Batitú, by Argentinian composer Julia Tchira was
an arresting, engrossing work. According to Frueh, “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.” This deep listening is
about being in tune with all sounds around us, not just the ones we want to hear;
performer and audience were instructed to incorporate the extant sound world
into their experience.
The hum of the
air conditioner and the scratch of my pen on the page, the squeak of a chair
and the rustling of fabric on an uncrossing leg accompanied a gentle, rocking
tremolando high on the keyboard. The long, fraught silences in the work were filled
with meaning. Listening with this viewpoint in mind, even that most-dreaded of sounds
at any concert…the loud crinkling of a cellophane cough drop wrapper that
someone always manages to unwrap during the quietest moment of any given concert, dragging
it out in a useless attempt to be less intrusive, thereby prolonging the torture
instead of just getting it over with all at once, yes, that sound too was
present in this concert, but in an effort not to judge sounds, to instead
incorporate it into the experience, it lost its aggravating quality
(Well…almost. I did my best.)
Tonally the
work was very accessible; gentle, ascending chordal motives were followed by a
crisp descending 2-handed scale. There was a distant boom at what felt like a
shifting meter, and though there were no recordings used as part of the work,
birds were still there: the barely audible song of a White-crowned Sparrow that
had been singing non-stop since I arrived in the parking lot was still present,
and the gulls were still crying. Angular melodic leaps sprinkled with
acciaccature, a tremolo basso and more tender chord works, and then the work
ended with a fading repeated note, and a long silence…but it wasn’t really
silence now, was it?
Kai’s brother
Ben Frueh joined on violin for the performance of Meinzen’s second composition
of the evening, Headland [see embedded video below], which is about the Oregon Coast. The
recording opened with that most ancient of sounds, the low susurrus of surf,
and accompanying it the long call of a gull. Wrentits sang their bouncy ball
song, where they were joined by the live White-crowned
Sparrow, singing loudly now outside the performance hall. A skipping and
sighing violin was accompanied by peripatetic piano which morphed into a joyful
dance, evoking in me any number of playful images…sea lions
gamboling in the surf and waves splashing life into a rocky tidepool, briny
water washing the bright tentacles of multi-colored sea anemone back and forth. Then the music
slowly turned back to mysterioso at the startling shriek of a Raven. A
Bald Eagle, and the tick-tick-ticking of Red Crossbills overlay a sentimental
duet as the brothers traded phrases. More folksy fiddling and block chord
movement as the dance returned, but it turned more serious as the eagle cried once more and the violin slowly slid into the surf.
The program
closed with Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve, our phantomic whistler
returning once again. Its strange, graceful modality was a perfect coda, and
Frueh infused it with joy, playing Beach’s transcriptions of this amazing
bird’s song with an intimacy and understanding that could only be borne of a
lifetime filled with a love of birds.
Epilogue: Remnants of a Grassland
I saw more year birds the following day as I moved north up the coast and toward home; a Red-necked Grebe floated among the swells as a flight of Black Oystercatchers chattered over the pounding surf at the Devil’s Punchbowl near Newport; a pair of punk-rock Tufted Puffins were joined by well over a thousand of their alcid brethren, Common Murres, atop iconic Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach.
However, as glorious as this weekend of birds and music on
the coast was, as I write this I can’t help but think of Meinzen’s work Remnants, and share its sentiment of profound loss. Vast swaths of these precious,
ever-dwindling grassland ecosystems are currently being destroyed by fire in
Central and Eastern Oregon, undergoing an apocalyptic
devastation that we have wrought upon these places, a devastation which gets
worse and worse as the years go by. I spent quite a bit of time in these habitats earlier this year, in the sagebrush steppe of Harney County and the semi-desert canyon slope grasslands of Wheeler, and I wake up saddened each day as they continue to burn. I’d like to tell myself that, in the big picture there’s hope, that
there’s time to turn things around as the “caretaker” species of this planet,
but something tells me the jig is up. I sure hope I’m wrong. I’ll do what I can, as so many others will, but I’ll also make time to lose myself in the joys of music, of birds, and of the tremendous,
staggering beauty of the wild spaces that Oregon and the world have to
offer. Maybe we’ll yet surprise ourselves.
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| Grasslands in the John Day River Valley, N. Wheeler Co. OR. June 20, 2026 The entire area in this photo is ablaze as of 7/31/26. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson |
