On a bright fall day several weeks ago, I decided to go on a run. I laced up my shoes and headed down Professor Street, from my dorm to Finney Chapel to the Conservatory building, until I had left the campus behind. I took a right where the street intersected with the bike path, and followed the bike path another mile to the reservoir. The reservoir is a pond just outside Oberlin city limits, and it’s an ideal place to run, for three important reasons. It’s in the middle of a nature preserve; it’s far enough from the school that you can get a good run in, yet not so far away that you’re going to wake up sore the next day; and it is surrounded by a flat dirt path which is exactly half a mile in length. I did a dutiful lap or two, and then, when I was about to leave, I took a moment to take in the beautiful autumn evening that Oberlin had been blessed with.
Then I noticed a vulture, gliding over the tops of the trees on the shore. Vultures and other birds of prey are a very common sight in Oberlin. They like to fly in circles above campus for no apparent reason, especially during the early fall.
Standing there, gears started turning in my mind. For some reason, all I could think was, Hey, I should write a choir piece about this.
I had been looking for an excuse to write a piece for a choir of bass voices. I’m a member of the Obertones, Oberlin’s a cappella group for men and non-binary people, so I know plenty of bass singers. So the next day, I hunkered down in Slow Train, a coffee shop in downtown Oberlin, to outline the piece I was going to write.
The name I decided on was ‘Kestrel Song.’ Kestrels are birds of prey who have an interesting hunting tactic: they are capable of using wind to hover in place and watch for prey move around on the ground. To be honest, I’m not actually sure if I have ever seen a kestrel in Oberlin, but the concept sufficed for inspiration.
I wrote a short melismatic melody, and I tried singing it in different keys to try to figure out where it would best sit in my singers’ voice. Then I had to address the question: would the basses be singing by themselves, or would there be instruments playing as well? I decided to call up a few musicians I knew in order to see who happened to be interested. In the end, Kestrel Song became a piece for countertenor, bass choir, flute, English horn, French horn, trumpet, violin, and cello. That’s a fairly eclectic ensemble, but I had a concept in mind.
I started writing more material. I went on long brainstorming runs to the reservoir where I had seen the vulture earlier. Soon, I realized I had a problem: I had more material than I knew what to do with. I felt I couldn’t use all of it, because that would have made my piece an incoherent mess. I decided I needed to thematically simplify the piece. In order to do that, I wrote the lyrics that the choir would be singing:
Aloft on currents of the evening western wind
like autumn leaves in woodsmoke from a fire:
a kestrel, motionless in flight.
I stop to watch you glide,
above the bare, colorless earth,
and then dive —
And I am grateful to be here with you.
For most of the piece, the singers actually don’t sing words. They sing versions of that original melismatic melody I wrote, on open ‘ah’ vowels. I broke the basses into two sections, and, together with the countertenor, flute, English horn, and violin, they create a texture of interlocking melodies, while the French horn, trumpet, and cello provide the harmonic backbone for the piece. The countertenor sings some of the text, and the basses get a few lines too, during the quiet moments of the piece.
Sooner or later I had a finished version of the piece to show to my singers. After a few hours of rehearsal we were ready for concert night. We were going to perform Kestrel Song at Oberlin’s secondary composition recital. The secondary composition recital is a place for people who (like me) aren’t composition majors, but who are taking secondary composition lessons, to showcase their work. I was nervous because I wasn’t sure if my conducting was going to be up to par, but I was really happy with how the concert went! Ultimately, my main motivation in writing Kestrel Song was to have a piece of music that I could put together with my friends and perform. I was grateful for the opportunity to premiere the piece — now whenever I see a bird circling above the Oberlin campus for no apparent reason, that melismatic melody gets stuck in my head.
