Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Hello.
(Audience) Hi.
Oh, good, a responsive audience. That makes me a lot less nervous.
It is a tremendous honor to be speaking with you today.
My name is Chris, and I'm a composer.
Normally,
I'm in the business of writing music for film, television and theme parks,
but I'm speaking with you today
because I recently finished my first symphony.
(Applause)
Oh!
(Applause)
Thank you.
I didn't know that was an applause line.
I appreciate that.
Two years ago, the Central Oregon Symphony Association
kindly invited me to write a new piece of music.
And the subject of this new composition
was to be the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
If you're not familiar with Malheur,
it sits at the feet of the Steens Mountain
in southern Oregon,
has nearly 200,000 acres of plains and wetlands
and is home to more than 300 species of bird.
But if you've been following the news in recent years,
you may remember Malheur in a complicated light.
In a period of just 41 days of confrontations at the refuge,
the name Malheur has become synonymous with political division and controversy.
But for my friends Jay and Teresa Bowerman,
here in Bend,
these events sparked an idea.
They approached the Central Oregon Symphony
and said,
"Why couldn't we commission a new piece of music
to redirect the public's attention
to all of the wonderful things about Malheur?
Get away from the politics
and just celebrate this magnificent place."
And even more, this piece had a mandate
to promote healing and finding common ground.
So once we were off and running with the project,
we took our first trip out to the refuge to find the heart of the story.
We met with various representatives from the Paiute Tribe,
with geologists, biologists
and lots of very enthusiastic birders.
(Laughter)
And we discovered not just one story about Malheur
but a tale in five distinctive chapters.
Each chapter became a different piece of music
within the symphony,
and each moves forward in time.
For instance, the first movement is "Dawning Light."
It's about the very beginning of time at the refuge.
It's about the geologic formation of the Malheur Basin
and the first signs of wildlife to arrive.
The second movement, "Sacred Basin,"
is about the first people to arrive to this place,
and that would be the Paiute Tribe,
and they've been here for more than 10,000 years.
Movement three is "Thunder."
And it's a summary of all the darker chapters
of Malheur's history.
Movement four is about probably the most famous aspect of the refuge,
which is the bird life.
We'll get back to the curlew scherzo
a little later.
"Awakening" is the final chapter in this story,
but the backstory to this piece has yet to be written in our time.
This movement symbolizes our departure from the past
and celebrates a rich and exciting future for the refuge
and other cherished places like it.
We also wanted to incorporate visual media into the composition
as well as a multipoint wraparound surround system
for the audience,
where I can project prerecorded audio from the refuge
to play alongside the orchestra through the performance.
At this point, it seems like we have everything we need,
in story, in concept and in purpose.
But technically, the canvas is still blank.
There was only the small matter left
of writing the actual music that's going to be in the symphony.
(Laughter)
And so I scrambled to find this list of ingredients to help get me started.
I was looking for anything.
It could be a melodic motif, rhythmic elements,
colorful instrument pairings.
Anything to start mixing into this compositional bowl
and hope, over time, it would bake into something palatable.
And I turned to the most obvious source of inspiration:
Malheur's birds.
I began looking up
who were the most famous and notable birds at the refuge
and started transcribing their songs by hand.
And as I started looking at these melodies,
I realized there was lots of usable little bits
that turned into melodic motifs.
And I would develop those melodic motifs into slightly larger melodies.
And then I noticed rhythm patterns in the bird speech
that became the rhythmic foundation for the piece.
And pretty soon, I realized I had everything I needed to begin the symphony.
And during this process,
I would go back into my imagination,
and I would be standing back at the refuge,
looking out over the grass,
listening to the birds speak.
But instead of hearing the birds speaking back to me,
I began to hear orchestral instruments singing these little motifs back.
For instance,
maybe somewhere over here in the grass, a clarinet would speak.
(Clarinet sound)
And over here, a flute might reply.
(Flute sound)
And overhead,
some aggressive little piccolos insert themselves into the conversation.
(Piccolo sound)
And now, to go down below the grass,
maybe some - down in the mud somewhere -
some guttural birds or some frogs begin to speak down here.
(Bass clarinet)
And I imagine, off in the distance,
a couple of birds having a rapid-fire argument about something silly,
maybe a worm - I don't know.
(Laughter)
And I'll never forget my first sighting of a trumpeter swan out at the refuge.
And I thought we definitely need to feature one of them in this piece -
(French horn sound)
with a French horn, of course.
(Laughter)
And at this point, I started running out of woodwind instruments
to reflect all these different birds,
and so I turned to the string section.
At the front of every symphony orchestra, there's a big sea of string instruments,
and so I divided them into lots of little subsections
and had them play really rapid-fire figures
to sort of mimic the chaotic staccato
of thousands upon thousands of birds trying to talk over each other.
And the base of strings sounded something like this.
(Strings music)
Now, I imagine the concert opening with what you're hearing right now.
[Dawning Light]
(Wind)
This is some wind through the grass we recorded out at Malheur,
and the first signs of bird life arriving on the scene.
And a familiar cast of characters we just listened to,
beginning to dialogue back and forth with the prerecorded birds at the refuge.
And I imagine through here
the conductor just freely pointing around the woodwind section,
cuing whoever he likes, whenever he feels like it.
(Ambient music)
Now, here's our whole cast of characters together.
And I wanted to create the sense the refuge was full of life.
And with that trumpeter swan,
I feel like the symphony has officially begun.
(Applause)
Oh, thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
Thank you.
That's mighty kind of you. Appreciate it.
Now, I'd like to walk us through movement four, the curlew scherzo.
Curlew, as in, well, that guy.
That's the long-billed curlew.
Scherzo, as in the movement of a symphony that has some humorous qualities to it.
And I fell in love with a curlew right away in this project
because I discovered something fascinating about it.
It has a series of calls that happen to be in the key of D harmonic minor.
And for all you music nerds, I believe it's right above me.
But for everybody just listening,
D harmonic minor sounds a bit like this.
(D harmonic scale)
And the interesting color you hear in that scale
is because the sixth step of that scale is lowered a half step,
and the seventh step is raised a half step.
And it gives us these four colorful notes up on the top.
(Piano notes)
Right? So keep that in mind when you hear this next bit.
This is what I'm calling "curlew call #1."
Rather than explaining it, I'll let the curlew introduce it.
(Curlew call)
I don't know about you,
but what I just heard sounded something like this.
(Piano notes)
Let's isolate this down a little further.
There's our magic four notes again, and here's that curlew call.
(Curlew call)
Now, here's that exact bit of audio with what I just played on the piano.
(Curlew call and piano notes)
So note-for-note, that's more or less what the curlew was singing.
And that was really nice
because it's beginning to do my job for me.
(Laughter)
It just composed a beautiful melody,
and it was very useful to this composition
because here's how I used it in the strings and woodwinds.
(Music)
(Applause)
All right. Thank you.
(Applause)
Next I'd like to play for you what I'm calling "curlew call #2."
It goes something like this.
(Curlew call)
Now, what I'm hearing sounded like this.
(Piano notes)
I also noticed that from time to time,
the curlew will bounce off that bottom note a few extra times
rather than just moving up.
(Piano notes)
Sometimes when it really gets going, it will skip off that bottom note
(Piano notes)
and it will add a couple extra notes.
(Piano notes)
And so I call that one "the operatic"
because every time I hear it,
all I can think is
"The curlew's in the opera, badump, badump, badump, badump."
(Laughter)
Maybe a better composer
would handle that material a little more elegantly than me,
but that's all I can hear every time I hear the curlews sing that.
And here's how I used it in the piece.
(Music)
Now, here's how I used it in the strings,
and then halfway through this bit,
a melody comes into the upper strings only using notes from curlew call #1.
(Music)
There's two.
(Music continues)
And one.
(Music continues)
All right, so, also -
(Applause)
Oh, thank you, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Also I started noticing
that if you hold all the notes down in each of those bits of the curlew call,
(Piano notes)
it creates a very useful set of chord progressions.
Again, this bird is doing all the lifting for me.
And so those chords became the harmonic foundation for this piece.
And I express them
through this very staccato-ey rhythm pattern
that is included in almost every measure of the entire composition
so that no matter where you are
or if the mood changes or if the melody changes,
if that rhythm continues just repeating under the surface,
a listener will never forget which piece they're still listening to.
That's why composers call them "a unifying element."
And here's how I used that chord progression as a unifying element.
(Music: Chris Thomas, Malheur's Symphony)
So, I think you can see where I'm going with this.
So we're going to bring out that compositional bowl again,
mix all these pieces we just listened to all together and see what happens.
So what I'm going to play for you is the very ending of the curlew scherzo.
(Music: Malheur's Symphony)
(Applause and cheers)
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
It's very kind.
Well, through this musical adventure,
it was important to me that through this whole process,
the music remained free of all cynicism.
In our current age of political posturing and divisive rhetoric,
I believe it's important to rise above the pitfalls of partisanship
to create something of meaning or beauty.
The creative process has no room for judgment or censure
but only joy and enthusiasm.
True art appeals to our common humanity.
It has the power to heal and connect us,
to move us from focusing on our differences
toward what we have in common.
And I can think of no more common and universal human sentiment
than the awe and reverence wilderness inspires.
In celebrating the beauty of Malheur,
I hope my music helps us transcend the banal,
connecting to the sublime part of ourselves,
even if only for the length of a symphony.
Thank you.
(Applause)