“Learn how to see,” said Leonardo da Vinci. “Realize that everything is connected to everything else.” That may as well be Sonoma Valley resident Bernie Krause’s motto – except in his case, it begins “learn how to listen.”
Those connections to everything else, in Krause’s case, are the foundation of the audible “soundscapes” that he’s been recording in nature since 1968, when he went into Muir Woods with a mid-sized reel-to-reel tape recorder, a couple stereo microphones and a pair of headphones. “When I switched on that recorder and heard the stereo soundscape in my headphones, I thought how beautiful this is,” he told the Index-Tribune this week from his Glen Ellen home. “That was as epiphany for me. It changed my life.”
But it wasn’t as if that epiphany turned Krause from a normal guy into someone extraordinary. Rather, there’s always been something pretty incredible about Bernie Krause, and the upcoming San Francisco premiere of a ballet based on his sound recordings of natural environments is only the latest chapter of a fascinating life.
The story stretches out like a secret history to a much different time. When he was barely 20, Krause was a studio engineer and musician in Detroit; a few years later he joined the folk group the Weavers, following Pete Seeger’s departure, and helped arrange the song “Guantanamera” for the group. (“Guantanamera” later became a radio hit for the Sandpipers, who “stole” it lick-for-lick from the Weavers who were blacklisted and could not get airplay.)
Not long afterward he moved to the Bay Area and explored the first use of the Moog synthesizer for pop groups like the Monkees, the Byrds and the Doors. With colleague Paul Beaver, he released a series of electronic albums with ecological themes in the 1970s; later that decade, his influential work in sound for “Apocalypse Now” and other movies still sends chills down viewers’ spines.
Even his 1985 rescue of Humphrey the Whale from the Rio Vista area made headlines. If “Forrest Gump” were about an audio guy, it would be called “Bernie Krause.”
Today, the 76-year-old remains as passionate about the sonic world as ever, sometimes still rising before sunrise to visit Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and listen to the sound of the day awakening. But it’s not the same as it used to be. “Many of those sounds that we are using in the ballet are from habitats that are so badly compromised, that they are now either altogether silent or they can no longer be heard in any of their original form.”
The loss of these sonic worlds – and the complex aural interplay of species he calls “biophonies” – is troubling to Krause, but his 40-plus years of sound recording have managed to create a legacy of considerable scientific (as well as artistic) value. Krause has never sought just to record a specific creature – a catalog of bird calls, say, or the roar of a jaguar, though he has captured those, too, on his tapes.
Krause would be the first to tell you that it takes training to listen, really listen, even with supplementary devices like headphones. “My focus has always been to record whole soundscapes, rather than separate out individual critters and deconstruct the natural worlds.” As a musician, he understands that it’s the whole that makes a piece of music, not a part; similarly, a soundscape is the interplay of species. “That’s where the truth lies,” he says. “You can tell how healthy a habitat is by the relationship between all the vocal organisms.”
The loss of any environment is to be regretted, but sometimes the loss of a soundscape hits closer to home than others. “I’ve been recording every year for the last 20 years in Sugarloaf State Park,” says Krause. “Just until a couple years ago, it was very robust, and there was a lot of interaction between a lot of creatures, particularly at dawn.
“Last year, because of the drought, there was almost nothing there. I mean seriously quiet, and seriously under stress.”
At his own home in Glen Ellen, where he lives with his wife Katharine, he’s noticed the depreciation of the soundscape from more air traffic overhead, more car and truck traffic on Highway 12 and Arnold Drive, and just more people. “When we moved here 20 years ago there were 70,000 less people in this Valley than there are now,” he says. “The habitats have been pretty badly compromised. But people have got to live somewhere.”
A healthy soundscape, like a healthy world, has inherent value for the information it contains and the lessons it teaches. Interestingly, it’s often easier to apprehend those lessons with recorded sound rather than just perking up your ears. “When you’re using microphones and headphones you hear differently,” Krause says. “You can change the levels so that you can bring up certain things. It’s kind of equivalent to using ?binoculars to see closer, to focus on different things.”
For the upcoming ballet, the “music” the Alonzo King LINES Ballet troupe uses is assembled from his archives of recorded environments, from equatorial regions to the poles and in between. The sounds of life and its environments – streams, the wind, birds, insects, falling leaves and roaring cats – “These are what I call proto-orchestrations, and that’s what we’ll hear in the ballet. All of these animal sounds informed humans about melody and harmony and rhythm and dissonance, how to successfully combine sounds. It was all there in the world’s natural soundscapes,” he says, making the case for the primacy of the auditory sense.
The spring season for San Francisco’s Alonzo King LINES Ballet beings Friday night, April 3, and continues through next Sunday April 12, featuring dance performance to the new environmental soundscape by Krause and composer Richard Blackford.
Blackford and Krause collaborated previously to produce a 30-minute symphony, “The Great Animal Orchestra: Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes.” For that piece a 70-piece orchestra was involved, and the natural sounds were played in concert via a sampling keyboard.
For this ballet, however, Krause’s soundscapes are pre-recorded with a four-piece group of flute, reeds, percussion and harp – so the dancers can learn their moves and hit their marks.
Information and ticket links for the ballet can be found online at www.linesballet.org/performances/current-season/. If you can’t make the trip to San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the performances, you can download over 50 CDs of audio from Krause’s website, www.wildsanctuary.com – including “Sonoma Valley Sunrise.”
If ‘Forrest Gump’ were about an audio guy, it would be called ‘Bernie Krause.’
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