LEK (2023)

For String Quartet and Electronics
Duration: 10:00

Commissioned for the Fry Street Quartet by NOVA Chamber Music Series and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music

Program notes:

I’m not much of a birder, but when presented with an animal so beautiful, so elegant, and so outrageous I couldn’t help but find a way to collaborate, even if it meant waking up at four in the morning to record what might be considered a raunchy bird dance! There are few birds as gritty as the Greater Sage-Grouse and Sharp-Tailed Grouse, and they can be found throughout the high elevations of the American West, their mating dances unlike anything else in the world.

Lek means “play” in Swedish, and it refers to both the physical location and collection of male birds who gather to dance and show off for females in mating season. When males are lekking, as it is known, they are exhausting themselves by dancing and displaying for months, morning after morning, hoping to find a mate. The Greater Sage-Grouse uses two inflated sacs as resonators to make swooshing and popping noises with his wings and neck that are almost alien. They sound like bouncing balls, wood blocks, and bubbles all at once. The Sharp-Tailed Grouse, while not as famous, 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, using their bodies as resonators. They are the flamenco dancers of the wild, vibrating across frigid hilltops in choruses of thumping and clucking.

Both types of Grouse dance until a female chooses them (it’s the female’s choice), and the females are incredibly picky, sometimes coming close for a good look and then deciding to leave one of the males standing proud and confused. They risk starvation, injury, and predation for the opportunity to dance and hope to find a mate.

Watching this, one can’t help but laugh and wonder: how did this evolve? There must be a simpler way to pass on genes to the next generation! Why all the performing and strutting and dancing? Yet, there I was, awake before dawn, grinning ear to ear in the cold listening to this incredible soundscape. They are not so unlike us - they spend so much energy dancing, making music, and performing because they value beauty more than efficiency. TikTok has nothing on this. Unlike them, however, we are powerful enough to make decisions that affect whole ecosystems.

The Grouse cannot dance where habitat is not safe. Fracking, development, mining, and other human activities ruin pristine environments that these animals use to mate. Pollution hurts their health, which means they won’t have energy to dance. Buildings create places for predators to hide, which means they do not feel safe enough to dance. We risk losing this beautiful animal, and others, if we cannot learn to coexist. Luckily, we also love a good performance. If only we’d learn to value their dancing as much as we value ours.

- Nicolás Lell Benavides