Today's Birthdays

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)
Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963)
Marvin David Levy (1932-2015)
Anthony Payne (1936-2021)
Gundula Janowitz (1937)
Richard Einhorn (1952)
Angel Lam (1978)

and

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933)
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Isabel Allende (1942)

Today's Birthdays

Francis Scott Key (1779-1843)
Hans Rott (1858-1884)
Morris Stoloff (1898-1980)
William Steinberg (1899-1978)
Jerome Moross (1913-1983)
Lionel Bart (1930-1999)
Nico Castel (1931-2015)
Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931)
Jordi Savall (1941)
André Gagnon (1942)
Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)

and

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Ernst Jandl (1925-2000)
Madison Smartt Bell (1957)

Kai Frueh's Bird Concert: Intimacy and understanding borne of a lifetime filled with the love of birds.

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, one down which I had never driven. Oregon State Highway 223 runs between Dallas and Wren along the foot of the Coast Range, and 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.)

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.

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.” 

Black Skimmer, TX. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

The screen behind Kai lit up with some truly excellent video of many species of birds on sandy beaches as the piano-poet accompanied them. Common Terns harassed Black Skimmers (a crazy bird that skims the water for fish with a lower mandible almost half-again-as-long as the upper) as dense-yet-sweet cluster chords thrummed away on the piano. Cute and fuzzy Piping Plover chicks were interspersed therein; by watching the performer I could tell that he was paying close attention to the video, no doubt so as to properly time the correct motif with the proper birds. A new theme of hammered chords, all high in the register, exploded when the first American Oystercatcher appeared. Mysterious tinkling accompanied a slow-motion shot of a pair of terns walking with a fish held tightly in beaks. A forceful single-note plinking accompanied a baby tern wolfing down something disgusting that was no doubt delicious; this moody piece, by turns serious and humorous, sweet and ominous, was a surprising yet completely fitting way to render this snapshot of the lives of birds on the shore.  A singing Northern Yellow Warbler closed out this work with a brief, curiously gentle tinkling coda.

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.)

Kai Frueh

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.

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

Today's Birthdays

Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739)
Robert Planquette (1848-1903)
Ada Clement (1878-1952)
Norman Del Mar (1919-1994)
Walter Arlen (1920-1924)
Steuart Bedford (1939-2021)
Reinhard Goebel (1952)
Randall Davidson (1953)

and

Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother Jones" (1837-1930)
Primo Levi (1919-1987)
Kim Addonizio (1954)
J. K. Rowling (1965)

Today's Birthdays

Gerald Moore (1899-1987)
Meredith Davies (1922-2005)
Moshe Atzmon (1931)
Buddy Guy (1936)
Paul Anka (1941)
Teresa Cahill (1944)
Alexina Louie (1949)
Christopher Warren-Green (1955)

and

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
Henry Moore (1898-1986)
William Gass (1924-2017)

Talking with Jessica Lee in Oregon Arts Watch

My conversation with stellar violinist Jessica Lee about her work at Music@Menlo has been published in Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Sigmund Romberg (1887-1951)
Frank Loesser (1910-1969)
Charles Farncombe (1919-2006)
Avet Terterian (1929-1994)
Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021)
Peter Schreier (1935-2019)
Bernd Weikl (1942)
Olga Borodina (1963)

and

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
Paul Taylor (1930-2018)
T.J. Stiles (1964)

Today's Birthdays

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678)
Rued Langgaard (1893-1952)
Rudy Vallée (1901-1986)
Kenneth Alwyn (1925-2020)
Riccardo Muti (1941)

and

Ludwig A Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Beatrix Potter (1866-1843)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)
John Ashbery (1927-2017)

Today's Birthdays

Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829)
Enrique Granados (1867-1916)
Ernő Dohnanyi (1877-1960)
Harl McDonald (1899-1955)
Igor Markevitch (1912-1983)
Mario del Monaco (1915-1982)
Leonard Rose (1918-1984)
Carol Vaness (1952)

and

Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996)
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007)
Norman Lear (1922-2023)
Bharati Mukherjee (1940)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1966, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Torn Curtain" opens in New York — without the film score that Bernard Herrmann had composed for it. The famous director fired Herrmann during the score's first recording sessions when Hitchcock discovered Herrmann had composed a "symphonic" score and not the "pop" score that Hitchcock had specifically requested.

Today's Birthdays

John Field (1782-1837)
Franz Xaver Mozart (1791-1844)
Francesco Cilea (1866-1950)
Serge Koussevitsky (1874-1951)
Ernest Schelling (1876-1939)
Georges Favre (1905-1993)
Tadeusz Baird (1928-1981)
Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012)
Anthony Gilbert (1934-2023)
Roger Smalley (1943-2015)
Mick Jagger (1943)
Kevin Volans (1949)
Angela Hewitt (1958)

and

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Jean Shepherd (1921-1999)
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

Today's Birthdays

Alfredo Casella (1883-1947)
Adolph "Bud" Herseth (1921-2013)
Maureen Forrester (1930-2010)

and

Eric Hoffer (1898-1983)
Elias Canetti (1905-1994)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1788 that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered into his catalog the completion of one of his most beloved works, Symphony Number 40 in G Minor (sometimes called “The Great G Minor Symphony”). It was written in the final years of Mozart’s life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

Today's Birthdays

Adolphe Charles Adam (1803-1856)
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)
Robert Farnon (1917-2005)
Ruggiero Ricci (1918-2012)
Guiseppe de Stefano (1921-2008)
Wilfred Josephs (1927-1997)
Peter Serkin (1947)
Philippe Hurel (1955)

and

Jonathan Newton (1725-1807)
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Frank Wedekind (1864-1918)
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
John D. McDonald (1916-1986)

Today's Birthdays

Franz Berwald (1796-1868)
Johann Vesque von Püttlingen (1803-1883)
Edouard Colonne (1838-1910)
Francesco Cilea (1866-1950)
Ben Weber (1916-1979)
Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)
Bernard Roberts (1933-2013)
Maria João Pires (1944)
Susan Graham (1960)

and

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Vikram Chandra (1961)

and from the former Writer's Almana:

It was on this day in 1829 that William Burt received a patent for the "typographer." It was a typewriter that looked more like a record player. It had a swinging arm that picked up ink and then printed a letter, and then the paper was manually adjusted to make space for the next letter.

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)