Wichita Symphony to hold world premiere of new concerto inspired by birds

As Wichita Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Holly Mulcahy and composer Daniel Perttu began to collaborate on a violin concerto for her, she recalled a recording she had of an eagle’s cry she heard when she was in Wyoming.

“That just struck me as so musical,” she recalled. “And I was like, well, let’s use that idea and call it ‘Stealing from Birds,’ and let’s just steal their songs. Dan went with it, and together we went down a rabbit hole of different bird songs and what would work best with the violin, and what would be the most fun.”

Little did Mulcahy know that she and her collaborator were, ahem, birds of a feather.

“I thought, oh, this is perfect, because I’m a nature enthusiast, and I always have been,” Perttu said from his office at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa. “I’ve also been a bird enthusiast, actually. It was totally coincidental. I’ve actually always loved birds. When I was a kid, I did Cornell labs of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch,” a survey of birds from various locales in North America.

“Talk about a nerdy thing to do, isn’t it?” he added with a laugh. “When I’m in the woods, I’m frequently listening to the different bird songs, and I had my favorites for this concerto, like the wood thrush, which has such a beautiful melodious sound to it.”

“Stealing from Birds” makes its world premiere during the WSO concert next weekend, in a performance that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Firebird Suite” and Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman Overture.”

Once Mulcahy and Perttu’s intentions were made public, suggestions took flight. An avid birder who sings in the WSO chorus immediately suggested the canyon wren, which made it in the concerto.

Other suggestions didn’t fit in with preconceived notions.

“When Holly shared the bald eagle with me, I thought, wow, this is a really neat call, but it’s not what I thought a bald eagle sounded like, because I thought the bald eagle was supposed to be like, in the westerns, but it’s not. It’s nothing like that.”

“I think that’s the beauty of this concerto, as we learn together on various things, we’re discovering that this is going to be a gateway for people to discover birding, but it’s also going to be a gateway for people to discover the orchestra,” Mulcahy added during the Zoom interview from her Chicago home. “So, it’s kind of combining these two worlds and filling voids with both of them.”

Fifteen different birds – and a wolf – are represented in the concerto.

“The thing is, if you overdo the birds then you lose them,” Perttu said. “So, if the number sounds a little smaller, it’s because we both wanted to, in developing this narrative, create something that could actually feature the birds. The bald eagle is really featured in the middle chapter of this piece, and the canyon wren has its own special thing. If I just sort of threw them all in like a big stew, you wouldn’t be able to know what’s what.”

Rather than movements, “Stealing from Birds” is divided into chapters to resemble a birding book, he added.

The first chapter is “A Dawn’s Chorus,” “which is new to me, I’d never known these 4 a.m. wake-up calls with mockingbirds waking you up, and you want to make them stop,” Mulcahy said. “When dawn happens, they just sort of start chirping, and so Dan incorporated that into what dawn sounds like.”

Renowned bird expert Kenn Kaufman was consulted “to get a developmental feeling,” Mulcahy said.

“Dan wanted to put an owl, a great horned owl, so we wanted to geek out on this and know that this would fit,” she said. “So, at that time in dawn, the owl will have just finished its hunting, so it still might be making that call that everybody knows.”

With the second chapter, “A Canyon’s Whisper,” Mulcahy said, “we went really into the geology aspect of the full ecological system. It opens with an antiphonal bass drum on either side of the stage to kind of get that canyon echo. And then we incorporated the only mammal in the entire concerto, the Mexican gray wolf.

“Because in the ecosystem where the canyon wren was, which is the impetus of this movement, we wanted the wolf, we wanted the canyon we’re in, we wanted the sound of the canyon, we wanted the Bullock’s oriole, we’ve got a rock wren in there, we’ve got vultures,” she said. “So it’s this whole Southwest canyon vibe to really get people hopefully curious about, you know, more than just the birds, but who’s sharing the ecosystem.”

The third chapter, featuring the bald eagle call, “opens with a real majestic, kind of, almost patriotic reverence,” Mulcahy said. “It’s a melody of how we assume bald eagles are, and then it starts with this chortling, and we learned what chortling was through Kenn Kaufman.

“And Dan kind of turns it, not necessarily into a fugue, but into this motif that gets tossed around the orchestra, and then all of that gets ripped away, where these two birds are just talking to each other (through) the violin and the oboe,” she added.

The next chapter features a crow and a raven.

“Since you can’t make crow sounds on the violin, or raven sounds, Dan brilliantly captures how they walk,” Mulcahy said. “So they kind of walk in a dun-dun-dun, you know, a 6-8 kind of oblong time. But he also got the attitude, the sarcasm, the grudge that they hold. And also, the really sweet, all in four minutes.”

The final chapter, “Confluence,” returns to the opening “Dawn’s Chorus.”

“That rhythm, that bump-a-dum-bum-a-dum-bum-a-dum from the whited-throated sparrow then becomes this sort of driving rhythm for the rest of the chapter, and it really gains a lot of momentum from that rhythm. And the rhythm’s all from the bird call,” Perttu said.

The finale also includes the Northern Cardinal, which was part of his education in creating the concerto.

“I’ve had to get really specific with these bird names,” Perttu said. “I’m doing the research, I discovered there’s more than one cardinal. Everyone talks about a cardinal, but there’s actually a bunch of them. Or chickadees? No, you have to say the black-capped chickadee. … I had to be careful in the program notes, too, because it’s like, oh my God, if I get this wrong, we’re gonna get some birders in there.”

Each chapter is preceded onstage with Perttu playing recordings of the true sounds of each bird featured.

“It does not sound exactly the same, because the timbre’s a little different on the violin, or the tone quality is a little different,” he said. “But you can hear the rhythm, and you can hear the pitches. Hopefully, that’ll give people a little foothold right before each chapter.”

Technology gave Perttu the option of adding sampling of the bird’s sounds into the piece, but “decidedly didn’t want to do that,” he said. “I wanted to turn the bird sounds into a human musical language.”

Using birds in classical recording is a centuries-old tradition, Perttu and Mulcahy both said, with Mozart getting inspiration from his pet starling, Beethoven using a cuckoo in his Sixth Symphony and Mahler, Brahms and Germanic composers all getting inspiration from above.

“This is not new, but we are leaning into the fact that we are lifting these birdsongs and taking them from them,” Mulcahy said. “I don’t know of any piece, at least in the historical repertoire, that uses as many as we did in a very vivid, intentional way.”

WICHITA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

When: 3 p.m. Sunday, March 15

Where: Century II concert hall

Tickets: $10-$85, from wichitasymphony.org, 316-267-7658 or the Century II box office