This story aired in the November 13, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
Before musicians perform, they rehearse. They play the same notes over and over again until they know exactly what to expect.
But what if the performance is interrupted by the wind in the trees, a child in the park, or the squawk of a bird? For composer Wendy Reid, these interruptions are the point.
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On Sept. 23. Wendy and her co-composer, Lulu, hosted a concert at Live Oak Park in Berkeley under a small redwood grove.
“It's perfect for music, I think,” says Wendy. “The kind of music I do, I should say.”
Wendy and Lulu have been making their kind of music for years, and sometimes performing it live. The people who have come to listen today crouch on the stairs or settle on the grassy bank high above the musicians.
“I do like the fact that it's not a regular performance space,” says Wendy. “And that an odd group of people will end up there as a result.”
At first glance, this event doesn’t look so odd. There are a dozen ensemble members dressed in black, a tuba, a flute.
As the musicians start warming up, I can’t quite discern a tune. One ensemble member blows into a long metal tube. Others scratch their instruments softly.
They all form a semi-circle around the star of the show, Lulu: the one so many people came to see.
But Lulu is still quietly observing, unassuming. She seems only barely aware of all the eyes on her from her perch on a bar in a brightly lit cage.
Lulu is a bird — an African grey parrot.
“The score itself is based on Lulu's and my interactions. We improvise a little bit probably every day,” says Wendy. “I'll try to imitate her either on my violin, sometimes I do it vocally, and then we kind of create these concoctions.”
Wendy transcribes their interactions and then makes some adjustments: “I feel like it as a composer, I'm allowed to do that.”
Wendy and Lulu have been making music together for 18 years. This series is called Ambient Bird.
At Wendy’s home in Berkeley, Lulu’s crate is near the door surrounded by stacks of books and records. She’s gray, with light eyes and a bright red undercoat.
Lulu likes being sprayed with water and imitating human laughter. She even knows some words: cute, pretty girl, beautiful bird. “She has all those down,” says Wendy.
But Lulu has a conniving side, too.
“If you get too close to her, she'll bite you, and she'll know you'll say ouch. So she says ouch before you. And then she'll start laughing because that's what people do.”
Wendy’s been making music with animals for decades including (among others) a parrotlet named Choo Choo and a dog named Twinkie.
“I have a couple of pieces with some dog barks,” says Wendy. “That dog didn't have the vocabulary of a bird. So she wasn't going to be featured in all my pieces. But all the birds that I've had have been featured in my music since 1980.”
Birdsong is embedded in Wendy’s earliest memories of music
when she’d go to her grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming and escape to a nearby forest with a creek to play her violin.
“I actually didn't want people to follow me to hear me play,” says Wendy. “I just wanted to be out there by myself and do my own thing and not be thinking that I have to perform for somebody.”
At home, Wendy and Lulu spend time listening to each other and responding. Wendy records their interactions. Their composing process is spontaneous and unique every time.
“Sometimes it erupts into something really big or not,” says Wendy.
Lulu’s a little shy when I visit, but Wendy says when she’s teaching violin at home, Lulu loves to chime in to help with the lessons.
“She corrects notes. Sometimes somebody's playing a little out of tune and then she'll throw them the right note and I'll say ‘just like a Lulu,’” says Wendy. “When a teacher corrects you, it's much more intimidating, but when a bird is correcting you, it's funny!”
And Wendy is adamant that the bird is not a sound effect. She even credits Lulu as her co-composer.
“I think of her as an equal when I write a piece of music,” says Wendy. “She can't write the notes down but she’s definitely creating the ideas with me.”
In the materials for the Live Oak Park performance, Lulu’s name is listed before Wendy’s.
As the performance begins, with all the eyes on her and so many interesting sounds, Lulu tends to get a little stage fright. But Wendy is prepared for that. She plays recordings of Lulu alongside the live music.
Because this concert is happening in a public park, many people are just here to walk their dogs or lie in the grass. These park sounds intermingle with Ambient Bird.
For Wendy, these sounds are not interruptions, but part of the reason she loves performing in these kinds of spaces and surprising people that come here, like Joe Silber.
“I mean we just stumbled into this with our kids. I think it’s a human/bird collaboration,” said Joe when I asked him what he thought of the music. “Our kids have that confused look and we were thinking this song is like what's always happening in their heads.”
And though they weren’t paying attention to the performance, for a moment, the kids became part of it, yelling to each other over the music, the creek bubbling in the background.
“That's exactly what I want in this piece,” says Wendy. “I want that ambient sound of people just living their lives as this odd little piece goes on.”
Today, at the creek, Wendy doesn't mind the audience.
“At this point now, I'm pretty much as if the audience wasn't there,” she says. “I'm kind of exploring, and not letting the audience inhibit me too much.”
The kids, the dogs, the water, cars whizzing by, wind in the trees, it’s all part of Wendy’s composition. It also feels like a celebration of her relationship with Lulu and of the liminal human/bird world that they’ve created together.
“I always call her half human and I'm half bird,” says Wendy. “When I interact with Lulu, I'm learning her language and then she's learning my language.”
When the performance ends, I walk up to Wendy and Lulu to see how they felt it went. Did we hear Lulu make any sounds live? I couldn’t tell.
“She likes to listen to herself I think, that's the problem,” Wendy says. “She might have done a few peeps.”
Just a few peeps.
Lulu cocks her head to the side. I wonder what she makes of all this — I wish I could tell her story, too.
“I think she gets mesmerized by the whole situation,” says Wendy. “She hears the instruments playing and she hears herself playing and she thinks, ‘Maybe I should just be listening.’”
