Music Unites Artists

Ecomusicology

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music unites artist In Sync with Nature

WITH MORE OUTDOOR PERFORMANCES ON HER ROSTER, MUSIC UNITES ARTIST TRICIA BONNER FINDS NATURE TO BE A FORMIDABLE CREATIVE PARTNER.

Words by Jennifer Delgadillo • Photo by David Bonner

Tricia Bonner was practicing composer Jamie Christopher Webber’s Birdsong Fantasia in her kitchen with the windows open when she noticed something interesting. “I was working on this piece for hours and hours because it was incredibly difficult,” says the Indianapolis violinist and Music Unites Artist for Classical Music Indy. “I would actually have birds come to the window and start chattering like, ‘What are you doing?’ at me.”

Bonner interpreted Webber’s work as part of Waterloo Region Contemporary Music Sessions, a weeklong series where each musician is paired with a composer. She attended as part of the violin and piano duo Ascending, co-founded in 2014 with pianist Caitlin Frasure. Webber’s work opened her eyes to a whole new musical language. “The tonal language of this piece is microtonal, so instead of our western ‘do re mi fa sol la ti do’ scale, it includes all the fractions of pitches in between each one,” she says.

Since then, Bonner’s music career has been informed by more experiences in nature. During the pandemic, she accepted many gigs where outdoor spaces were transformed into performance halls, including Classical Music Indy’s #VirtualRandomActsofMusic and the Music in Nature series at Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park.

These new environments were already being explored by contemporary composers inspired by the sounds of various ecosystems and their connections to the nuanced capabilities of music instruments. For audiences struggling with a new reality, these avant garde compositions came to mean something newly hopeful. “I was invited to perform for one of those programs, a piece by composer Hanna Benn,” Bonner says. “It was called Birds Calling, and it’s scored for soprano voice, violin and cello.”

After Classical Music Indy launched #VirtualRandomActsofMusic during the pandemic, the video component proved to be a successful way of engaging music lovers through local talent and musicians who later recorded high-quality videos of the compositions. Hanna Benn’s Birds Calling was recorded at Fort Harrison State Park with Chloe Boelter on vocals, Leilah Smith on cello and Tricia Bonner on violin. The video performances are rooted in the traditions audiences already know and love, but they also resonate with a fresh sonic palette of running water and the gentle flutterings of leaves and bees.

Embracing nature in a musical composition is not only about symbiosis, but also about surprise and site-specific moments that cannot be replicated. “The soprano line doesn’t have lyrics. She is just using her voice like an instrument, and we’re out — literally in nature — performing and recording this piece. And you have all of the sounds: birds singing along with us, rain falling and distant thunder rumbling in the background,” Bonner says.

Surrounded by nature, Bonner felt her relationship to the performance space transform. Outside the concert hall, in a natural environment, she paid attention to other elements like the wind in her face and the sun in her eyes. “You’ve got all of these other stimulants you don’t have in a concert hall, and all of these factors do play into how you’re interpreting the music,” she says.

In the premiere performance of Birds Calling, the program also included A Portrait for Solo Violin, a solo piece written by Canadian composer Keenan Reimer-Watts and performed by Bonner. ReimerWatts wrote the piece specifically to be performed outdoors whenever possible. The composition is designed with violin phrases interspersed with long pauses (fermata of silence) to allow for the musician’s individual voice and other sounds happening in nature.

In one live performance, a cicada filled the silence with its own music. “Every performance of A Portrait for Solo Violin is going to be different depending on where you’re playing and what little creatures are making sounds around you,” Bonner says. ■

Watch Bonner, Boelter, and Smith perform Birds Calling online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-EqxNxUEhg Ecomusicology

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