For String Quartet & Electronics
Duration: 11:30
Commissioned for the Fry Street Quartet by NOVA Chamber Music Series and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
Program Notes for LEK
Lek means “play” in Swedish, and it refers to both the physical location and collection of male birds who gather to dance in the mating season. When males are lekking, they are exhausting themselves by dancing for months. The Greater Sage-Grouse uses two inflated sacs as resonators to make swooshing and popping noises with his wings. The Sharp-Tailed Grouse has an equally impressive display: the males bend over with heads facing down, extend their wings like an airplane, puff up their necks, and stomp as fast as they can. They are the flamenco dancers of the wild, vibrating across frigid hilltops in choruses of thumping and clucking. The grouse dances until a female chooses him, and the females are incredibly picky. She sometimes comes close for a good look before suddenly taking flight, leaving the male to wonder what he did wrong. Over months these birds risk starvation, injury, and predation for the opportunity to dance and hope to find a mate. It’s a dancing marathon.
This piece uses recordings of their incredible dances as an accompaniment and inspiration and asks the string quartet to play the roles of battling males and a picky female. I’ll let you decide who won her over in the end…
They are not so unlike us. Inefficient as it is, they spend incalculable energy dancing, making music, and performing for a chance at companionship. Unlike them, however, we are powerful enough to make decisions that affect whole ecosystems. Fracking, development, mining, and other human activities ruin pristine leks, and we risk losing this beautiful animal if we cannot learn to coexist. If only we’d learn to value their dancing as much as we value ours.
My thanks to Fry Street Quartet, NOVA, and GLFCAM for giving me the opportunity to learn about this beautiful creature.
- Nicolás Lell Benavides
Link for electronics download in score
Published by Buena Vida Music
#BVM1029
ASCAP: 920083843
For String Quartet & Electronics
Duration: 11:30
Commissioned for the Fry Street Quartet by NOVA Chamber Music Series and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
Program Notes for LEK
Lek means “play” in Swedish, and it refers to both the physical location and collection of male birds who gather to dance in the mating season. When males are lekking, they are exhausting themselves by dancing for months. The Greater Sage-Grouse uses two inflated sacs as resonators to make swooshing and popping noises with his wings. The Sharp-Tailed Grouse has an equally impressive display: the males bend over with heads facing down, extend their wings like an airplane, puff up their necks, and stomp as fast as they can. They are the flamenco dancers of the wild, vibrating across frigid hilltops in choruses of thumping and clucking. The grouse dances until a female chooses him, and the females are incredibly picky. She sometimes comes close for a good look before suddenly taking flight, leaving the male to wonder what he did wrong. Over months these birds risk starvation, injury, and predation for the opportunity to dance and hope to find a mate. It’s a dancing marathon.
This piece uses recordings of their incredible dances as an accompaniment and inspiration and asks the string quartet to play the roles of battling males and a picky female. I’ll let you decide who won her over in the end…
They are not so unlike us. Inefficient as it is, they spend incalculable energy dancing, making music, and performing for a chance at companionship. Unlike them, however, we are powerful enough to make decisions that affect whole ecosystems. Fracking, development, mining, and other human activities ruin pristine leks, and we risk losing this beautiful animal if we cannot learn to coexist. If only we’d learn to value their dancing as much as we value ours.
My thanks to Fry Street Quartet, NOVA, and GLFCAM for giving me the opportunity to learn about this beautiful creature.
- Nicolás Lell Benavides
Link for electronics download in score
Published by Buena Vida Music
#BVM1029
ASCAP: 920083843
