At Teton Raptor Center, Birds Are Encouraged To Chime In During Concerts

WILSON — In the middle of a contemporary music performance at the Murie Ranch this summer, something extraordinary happened. As the violin reached into its higher, more dissonant passages — what some might call screechy — a bird began to sing along, matching pitch with uncanny precision.

"There was a really special moment," said Emma Kail, executive director of the Grand Teton Music Festival (GTMF). "You heard a bird that matched pitch and was in some way kind of tuning in, participating."

The wild bird seemed to respond to the music by harmonizing with the violin, creating an impromptu duet between human and avian performers.

This encounter perfectly captured one of the festival's ambitions for its "On the Road" programs, which venture beyond traditional concert halls into the natural world and different corners of the Jackson community. 

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Wilson, another such collaboration took flight inside the restored 1940s Moseley-Hardeman Barn at the Teton Raptor Center. 

The soaring Gothic arches that once stored hay echoed with birdsong-inspired compositions as the festival transformed this meeting space at the raptor rehabilitation center into an intimate concert hall where the worlds of chamber music and wildlife converged.

Wings Spread

As concertgoers filed into the raptor center, they were greeted by Jessica Lewis, a raptor care technician. Perched on her wrist was a Swainson's hawk named Parva, which serves as one of the center's avian ambassadors.

The bird was rendered permanently blind in one eye by a car strike and embodies the event's themes of freedom, captivity and finding harmony. Before her injury, Parva would join other Swainson's hawks in an annual migration to South America. Now she greets new arrivals when they fly into Jackson.

"She goes to the airport every Thursday," said Lewis. "She goes to Jenny Lake Lodge, she goes to Jackson Lodge. She has been kind of socialized here. So, she is very, very confident.

"She was given another shot to be an ambassador. And she's been with us for about four years now. She showed us that she's a really great fit for it."

Now audiences come to Parva and the center, eager to hear an avian-inspired program of chamber music.

The driving force behind the GTMF creative outreach is education curator Meaghan Heinrich.

An elementary music teacher from Milwaukee who spends her summers in Jackson, Heinrich has transformed the festival's community outreach over five years, growing from a single touring program to more than 16 performances each summer.

"I want to find ways to make the audience feel like they are part of the music," Heinrich said, her hybrid banjo-ukulele nearby.

These "On the Road" programs create a soundtrack for the lives of different groups and organizations around Jackson, with Heinrich acting as the crowd-inspiring conductor.

“You have probably already picked up on some bird sounds in the music,” Heinrich told the audience during Saturday afternoon’s performance. "What you just heard was by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who was obsessed with bird calls. He would actually transcribe them, by recording them, listening to them, writing them down musically."

Heinrich also described how the music mirrors bird behavior.

"As I listened to this particular movement, I hear three things that remind me of birds,” she said. “Sometimes we see birds migrating, flying in that V formation where they're all going in exactly the same direction with the same current, and you think, how can they possibly be so perfectly together? Like when our instruments play in unison and octaves at the beginning of the piece."

Dark To Light

The heart of the raptor center program was Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time."

Heinrich shared the piece's extraordinary origin story. Messiaen wrote it while a prisoner of war in German captivity, and it was first performed by fellow prisoners at Stalag VIII-A in Poland.

The work's unusual instrumentation — clarinet, violin and cello — was determined by the instruments available among Messiaen's fellow prisoners. The audience was left to listen for the bird-like sounds woven into the music. 

Then Heinrich encouraged the audience members to close their eyes and listen to violinist Miika Gregg play Mark O'Connor's "Appalachian Waltz” as if it were a bird call capable of producing multi-layered songs all at once. 

“You'll think that maybe there are two violins playing in here,” she said. “That's just one. It's just one.”

On Gregg's left arm is a tattoo depicting a sacred bird from Finnish folklore, a creature that carries one's soul as protector and guide.

“In mythology, it’s a bird that carries your soul to you, stays with you as a protector and guide, and then carries it away when you pass on,” said Gregg, showing off his tattoo after the performance. 

"That's why they asked me to do this gig," he joked.

Nature Joins In

The performance was inside behind windows affixed with stickers to prevent bird strikes, which means the audience could not hear the birds outside.

When these musicians perform outside, they said the birds reliably chime in. 

Clarinetist Stephanie Key shared one experience.

"The audience was just transfixed,” she said. “The birds got quiet when I started playing and then they started playing again and again. It was very cool."

For audience member Jerry Seymour, who drove from Driggs, Idaho, the recent Saturday performance was a revelation.

"People who know classical music realize that bird and animal sounds have been a part of classical compositions since the 13th century,” said Seymour, a regular festival subscriber. "The acoustics are marvelous.

“I heard sounds that I hadn't heard put together quite the same way. The musicians were wonderful, I loved the commentary, poems. It was just a really entrancing program."

When asked how he would convince a friend to attend a future performance, Seymour said, "This is just a continuation of that whole element of music that reproduces the world around us. The actual physical world and the animals."

He paused, then added with a smile, "We're going to come to more of these. This is terrific."

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.